010: Week 11 Blog Exercise – Contrast

Despite the stark contrast of the child-like cartoon depiction of a young man to the far right of this Yaris ad, this is an effective use of contrast. There is a contrast is tone, color, and shape yet harmony has also been successfully achieved. With the car, there is a clear amount of light source that gives it different tones and shades and thus, depth. A quite amount of tone was given to the young man as well so as to blend in a little better with the car but not quite contrast completely with his simple shape.

The left of the ad would have usually dominated the entire image but with the vastly contrasting shape and tone of the young man in a cartoon fashion, the weight is distributed evenly. There is more visual reinforcement with the "mp3 player balloons" that the young man is holding in addition to the color of his attire which isn't that all vibrant. The young man himself acts as a compositional counterforce to the regular shape of the car to his irregular, unpredictable, albeit simple shape.

Here is an example of a poor use of contrast. The intended use of this image, which was to use scale to contrast the green blocks (opened cases of X-Box games) to give off a feeling of massiveness or "tall" as with the King Kong and the green blocked shaped Empire State Building. No doubt this was an attempt to display how the producers/advertiser wants the audience to feel, with the XBox giving off a large scale, immersive feeling into their movies.

However, the gray bar on the bottom for me is seen as "the ground" thus I cannot imagine King Kong being any higher up than two feet. This is further supported with the XBOX 360 console itself "standing" on the gray bar as well. The design has succeeded in terms of contrast in the sense of color, where the bright green pops out and draws the viewer's eye to it but it doesn't achieve much harmony because of the stark differences in tone.

It has done a decent job in some design elements individually, such as scale with the texture of the green blocks more apparent from the bottom and color from dark to bright. But overall, contrast has not been successfully achieved as all I'm seeing is what feels more like King Kong in the background with green legos.