Kamal's Design Diary

2/5/17 - 23/5/17, Week 5 - Week 8 Kamal Afiq [0330643] Typography and Hypertextuality Project 1 A Story Book Lecture Notes Lecture 5: The personality of type This week we delved deeper into the small details type designers put into their work. Small differences in the appearance of curves, ligatures, serifs and other parts of letters gives each typeface its own distinct character and personality. Type designers take great care to create letterforms that are both harmonious and expressive. The shape of the counter-form (the negative space of the letterforms) can also distinctly highlight the differences in the shapes of letterforms. He concluded by saying that all the principles of graphic design also apply to that of typography; be it symmetry, contrast, domination, etc. Lecture 6: Basic introduction to inDesign Mr. Vinod and Mr. Shamsul thought us through the basics of using Adobe Indesign today instead of the standard lecture. They taught us how to format th...

26/4/17 - Week 5 DST60103, Yip Jinchi Design Studies I: Communication Theory Brickfields Trip We went to Nu Sentral, Brickfields and took pictures of all the types of typography used by the shops there.

19/4/17 - Week 4 DST60103, Yip Jinchi Design Studies I: Communication Theory Packaging design presentation Lecture 4 Today I presented my personal packaging design to the class. No lecture. Figure 1. My finished personal packaging design. Feedback My presentation was too long.  I prepared a proper 15-minute presentation while I was suppose to do a quick one for 3 minutes. Despite that Ms. Jinchi said she liked the look of the final product and said it was very professional. I think that while the final product itself was quite good, the presentation was a bit of a let down.

17/4/17 - Week 4 GCD60204, Hafiz Zamri Illustration and Visual Narrative Character review and feedback Lecture 3/Tutorial 3 I was absent this day, but I was able to get a general idea of what we did from my classmates: We reviewed the characters we designed and their backgrounds We used clipping masks and images to give our characters textures We used an online Pokemon card maker to convert our characters into cards We were told that for our first assignment ( Nando's ), we would soon be given a line from a song ( Concrete Jungle ), whose message we would then communicate into a visual art piece There was a talk on Intellectual Property in Malaysia; the general message to take away was that we should copyright all our artwork

12/4/17 - Week 3 DST60103, Yip Jinchi Design Studies I: Communication Theory Packaging design Lecture & Exercise Brief In this exercise, we are tasked with creating a packaging design for the favorite food of our partner. The design would have to include elements that reflected the personality of the partner, as well as look attractive enough to actually be used for commercial purposes. Initial conception Because my partner's favorite food was mutton flavored biryani, my packaging design would be centered around biryani. I decided to go for a microwaveable pot packaging design, since I thought that would be the most obvious way to sell processed biryani as a commercial product. I had an interview with my partner before I began drawing up concepts to get a general feel of her personality and character, which I can then communicate in the packaging design.  My partner is a cheerful person, she's also a gamer and plays mainly League of Legends , her fav...

11/4/17 - Week 3 DST60103, Yip Jinchi Design Studies I: Communication Theory Topic 1, 2 and 3 Notes Topic 1 Communication Communication is the sharing of ideas, messages and information through media, allowing individuals and groups to gain, seek or express emotion. Body language plays a major role in communication, allowing us to send ideas, opinions and express emotion through non-verbal cues and actions. The study of body movements is known as kinesis . Body language in communication consists of 6 features: Posture - slouched or stiff Head position - nods and shakes Facial expression - grimaces and grins Eye Contact - eye-to-eye contact or avoidance Gestures - t humbs up or fists Different cultures might perceive different body gestures differently. Certain unconscious gestures like scratching, excessive blinking and fidgeting may reveal the mental state of the speaker. Paralanguage in the forms of "ha", "uh-huh" or "hmm" can he...

10/4/17 - Week 3 GCD60204, Hafiz Zamri Illustration and Visual Narrative Character digitization Lecture 3/Tutorial 3 In today's class, we weren't given a lecture but instead a task: to digitize the character we  created using the cutouts in the previous practical class. Figure 1. Original sketch of the character. An upside-down pentagon was the dominant shape of the character. Because the dominant shape of my character was a pentagon, I began by creating the pentagon first then the rest of the basic shapes to get the general silhouette of the character. I then added color and smaller details using mainly the Pen tool. Figure 2. Three separate drafts of the character's design. I then began adding smaller details such as the exhaust pipes, rucksack straps and the eye to the character. I tried to use as few colors as possible to keep the character simple and easy to understand. The final stage of the character's design was to add in the shadows to ...

6/4/17 - Week 2 DST60103, Yip Jinchi Design Studies I: Communication Theory Assignment 1 Conception Concept work, research and development During Week 1 and Week 2, me and my group proceeded to develop our idea for Assignment 1. Having interpreted the song as a linear story, and drawing from its heavy emphasis on visual narrative and imagery we decided it would be best to frame the message of the song into an interactive graphic novel. The visual novel is different from traditional novels, because it requires the user's interaction to proceed along the story. Each panel is showed one after the other, and is only triggered when the user advances the scene. Our inspiration was the comics of Team Fortress 2. We delved deeper into the undertones of the song, and concluded that it was primarily a socio-political commentary. Thus we decided to communicate Bob Dylan's message through the use of visual narrative in the form of a graphic novel. The environment would play...

3/4/17 - Week 2 MMD60104, Jeffrey Patrick Digital Imaging and Visualisation Surrealism composition Practical 2 In today's class, we were tasked with creating a surreal composition on Photoshop using a background and a subject. There wasn't much instruction and any tutorials, so we were pretty much left to ourselves to create whatever we wanted. I decided to do something wacky, a dog in a biplane trying to escape from a giant cat over a sunny lagoon. The entire composition consisted of 4 images; the biplane, the dog, the cat and the background. Figure 1. The doggo looks so happy. I initially used a layer mask to remove parts of the images, applied them, then did some edge-tightening using Select --> Refine Edge. A bit of color touch-up using Match Color and the Dodge/Burn tool got the images to look like the belonged together. I then used Radial Blur to give the whole image a sense of motion, added a vignette using the Brush tool and used a postcard as a cli...

3/4/17 - Week 2 GCD60204, Hafiz Zamri Illustration and Visual Narrative Tracing and character design Lecture 2/Tutorial 2 The first part of the lecture was a review of the Vormator creatures we had previously designed in Week 1. Mr. Hafiz talked quite a bit about proportion, use of color and dominant shapes which made certain Vormator designs more visually appealing than others. He then proceeded to give us a lecture on the topic of character design. We spoke about basic primitive shapes, and how they can be used to give characters "personality". For example, a character whose dominant shape is a circle tends to be fun-loving and jovial in nature, whilst a character that's based off a triangle tends to be mysterious in nature, and tends to be either good or bad. We looked at a variety of examples in which dominant shapes were used, such as the monsters from Monster Inc. , cartoon characters from shows like Adventure Time and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Man...