Survey of Design Project 1: Communicative Shapes: fall at springer road
9/5/2020
My attention was first captured by the presence of gasoline, weed whacker fumes, and our very own California smoke– most crosswalks aren’t known for their air quality. But somehow, at this one, plants prevail, lichen grows, and moss creeps on trees/pavement everywhere against the intuitions of my environmental science teacher. I hear the noisy roar of lawnmowers and gasoline trimmers.
Far more cars pass through this area than people here. Delivery trucks stop by with a deliveryman stepping out occasionally, bikes zoom through, middle-aged men walking multiple dogs pass by, and maintenance crew whittle mow grass. This intersection isn’t particularly scenic: people pass through this transitional space with the intention to stop, yield, and turn somewhere else.
During this photo session, I aimed to capture the interactions between humans and this intersection. As people engage in their daily activities throughout the intersection, I tried to zoom in and capture them along with some interesting features of the intersection itself. However, the focus on photographing people and other features from a distance as a major characteristic caused me to lose sight of capturing the many parts that communicate that something is an intersection itself.
9/6/2020
On a chilly Friday morning, I walked outside at 5 AM into the same intersection before the sunrise. Without any cars in the intersection, I was able to walk into the middle of the road to take pictures from another perspective. Taking pictures in the darkness of night allowed me to view the intersection outside of its usual context.
The most immediate change of my understanding of the intersection was that a once busy and rushed area had turned into a dead space. When I stood in the middle of the road, thousands of barren square feet with nothing but road demarcations stretched as far as I could see into the dark.
However, as a space for a pedestrian, it became much more inviting and friendly– the space itself felt almost reclaimed to me. During the daytime, I am constantly at the scrutiny of the drivers. But at night, the ground becomes a massive open area where rectangles, lines, and stripes dot the road and rhythmically disappear into the distance. Further down the road, the darkness of nighttime fog combined with forest fire smoke swallowed the end of the road.
During the night, the road itself felt much bigger than before. My immediate thought was that I could fit hundreds of houses down this two-lane road, or even an entire farmers market. To an average person passing through this area during the day, one might not consider the road as “lost space”, but to a nighttime pedestrian it definitely would be perceived to be as such.
To capture this best, I tried out some points of view that could best convey this scale. One visual aspect that I used was the emphasis on size and distance through perspective, which would be complemented by the converging lane dividers and the green biker squares. By standing directly in the road, I could also capture the lateral width of the road. I also aimed to capture some of the landmarks and features of the road in some other photos. For example, in one photo I tried to capture the glowing stop sign as well as the triangular divider in the road– two things that were the most remarkable features of this intersection specifically. (You could describe this intersection to local residents with only these two features).
9/9/2020
I chose this particular composition to emphasize perspective through depth as shown through the relief. I aimed emphasize various elements on the road: for example, a significant reason I cropped my relief was to get rid of a distracting interrupt in a repeating line pattern. (which was something that I consider to be the centerpiece of my composition)
I also regret not overshooting- I think that I may have been able to view more information and crop from there on out. I know that there was a stop sign to the right that I shot away from that may have made this crop more interesting.
I learned while crafting the relief composition to carefully consider what forms went on which layers of the paper, especially because certain parts of my paper were 5 layers deep.
Because of the only presence of the lines that are created by layering shapes, I had to be very careful on what was in front of what. For example, I redid the bottom half because there was a conflict in the advancement of the raised platform and the competing patterned bike lanes. As a result, I formed a consistent visual language- I designated the road markings as receding layers, while I conveyed three-dimensionality with advancing layers.
9/14/2020
Being in grayscale gave me an opportunity to demonstrate the information in a nighttime photograph of the street. Because of the combination of point lighting from street lights and diffuse lighting from the sky, I had to balance between communicating depth and lighting. My eventual approach to this was that there would be a large-scale trend of darkness increasing with depth, while there would be high contrast lighting shown with white shapes. Meanwhile, on the left side of the trees, I chose to divide the trees by color in order to create a greater sense of depth. I also chose for the flat road markings to all be the lightest gray because this was the most ‘neutral/default’ gray- it reflected the sky, to create the intention this marking does not intend to communicate shade or depth but rather a two-dimensional block on the street.
One thing I learnt from crafting the grayscale composition was how to create meaningful depictions of an important form- namely the white highlights towards the center of the composition. Originally, the white highlights were cut from a single piece of paper. I attempted to connect the vertical forms with a white highlight from the bench, but eventually this merged together the white form and made it less communicative of what happened. When I cut out the horizontal highlight, the forms of what was happening appeared much better. I found that these off-putting features usually have to be caught with a fresh eye, either from sharing with another person or coming back from a break. In addition to tweaking the highlights, I added simple highlights on the far left to indicate the power lines in the photo and to reinforce a pattern to visually correlate circles around a lightbulb with highlights on objects near it.
9/16/2020
I chose yellow as my color- I felt it best represented the area as how I observed it when I took the photo. I had the tough choice between using yellow highlights and purple sky. Although the camera captured an interesting purple in the sky, it didn’t really have as much as an effect as yellow street lighting did on the rest of the area. I tested out the purple background on a black tree-line and the color itself overwhelmed the forms of the composition as well as the contour of the trees. In addition to that, I found that there was little else to do with a purple background that would help communicate the features and qualities of the intersection.
However, I found that when implemented properly the yellow street lighting could better communicate the three-dimensional shape of it’s illuminated environment. By communicating a design language where only thin lines are made yellow, there is a universal expectation that they become highlights. As a result, being able to discern thin highlights can help the view understand where the light is coming from with minimal shading needed. I also added a single white dot to any point light sources, which helped communicate their brightness with an abstract circular bloom around the street light. When crafting the color composition, I realized that creating repeating patterns with certain visual elements and correlating them with context can reinforce the overall recognizability of said patterns.
As for the rest of the composition, there were some tweaks that I made from my grayscale composition. For example, I simplified the right side to better communicate the presence of the tree trunks that were lost in the last composition. I also worked with continuous borders attached to the shapes in the composition to make a more durable and clean cut. Additionally, there was a minor flattening of the values of the hedges and house on the left side of the street- I chose to do this in order to bring more contrast to the yellow highlights.
9/22/2020
When conducting this project, I learned about rationalizing and communicating decisions that seemed “intuitive” when taking photos and creating my compositions. With a clear end goal of communicating the characteristics of my area, I learned the process and importance of doing this. This was especially reflected in my Medium posts- initially, I lacked a concise explanation of my photographic choices, which were mostly made by intuition. However, as we discussed more about these compositions and selections, I became more intentional about my design choices in both writing and crafting my compositions. To communicate the important characteristics of my intersection, I had to make a lot of tweaks concerning depth, figure-ground relationships, shape, perspective, emphasis, and value. I even had to go back into my old medium posts to clarify my old design decisions. In hindsight, it’s interesting to see my change in the approach to how I took this project.
9/24/2020
After our review, I saw a lot of how people adjusted their projects dramatically. This was interesting to me to see what they changed based on the feedback beforehand from Steve and Stacie. Something interesting that I noticed was the amazing continuity between a lot of projects- some of them looked as if they were done within hours of each other while simultaneously showing exploration and growth. When our group discussed translating the intersection elements into shapes and cropping, we got to see the various design choices with shape that our classmates did using commonly recognizable objects, shading, directional indicators, and perspective-inducing shapes.
