004: WK 5 Blog Exercise: Visual vs Symbolic Language

image taken from http://www.life123.com/career-money/find-a-job/unemployment/apply-for-unemployment.shtml

woman

box

quitting

fired

laid off

recession

stylish (jewelry)

office

expressionless (face not shown)

unhappy

single woman (ring not visible)

professional

person of color

In this photograph, a woman, presumably African American or Hindu is shown wearing a grayish brown pinstripe suit. The suit notes that this woman is in a setting that has a dress code. She is wearing two pieces of jewelry, a necklace with a small, white oval-shaped jewelry in the middle and a thin, golden bracelet on her left hand. These accessories add on to her professional appearance. A ring is not in view as her ring finger is not in full view, due to her holding an item, so it is hard to determine whether if she is single, engaged, or married. Only from the neck below down to her upper thigh is shown because the focus of the image is to be placed on what she carries.

She is holding a large cardboard box with its blue lid underneath, leaving the top open to make room for her things that she needed to pack. What is shown sticking out of the left of the box are large thick books, facing upright, possibly the best way she can squeeze them in along with whatever else is in the box. On the very right a black, metal netted pen holder is in view stuffed with various thin and cylindrical items such as a makeup brush, No. 2 pencils, ballpoint pens, and a large pair of scissors with the outer part of the handle navy blue with the inverted side a baby blue. The items in her box indicate that this was a type of office job.

This is a typical scenario as seen in TV shows and movies of one leaving their job permanently, whether they were laid off, fired, or quit themselves. However, in the nature that was intended of the photograph, this woman was most likely laid off. The absence of her face leaves her expression up to interpretation by the viewer but with all things considered, it would be a safe guess to say she is crestfallen.

003: Week 4 Blog Exercise - Visual Thinking Research

Here is my sad attempt at trying to solve the "Name the Month" puzzle from Visual section at puzzles.com. From the brief that stated to "break down this code" and to "decipher what month it could be", I thought the shape and color was forming a familiar symbol that would help me figure out what month it was representing. I attempted a form of pattern completion by adding the rest of the letters that would name a month, such as the blue shape looking like a J, thus adding 'anuary' then the 'O' for 'October' but then got stuck at what looked like a 'C'. On top of that, there was the much more perplexing "o" with arms at the end. I was hoping to seek a pattern within the months 'January' and 'October' and found none.

I then thought then maybe the colors would be some kind of hint and thus, thought the blue indicated winter, the red fall, the green spring, but caught myself in another rut with the orange, which also could've been fall. In retrospect, I'm not sure why summer didn't come to mind.

Finally I tried taking another viewpoint by rotating. As shown, I rotated the image 20 degrees to the right in hopes of finding some form of clue and still remained confused. Thankfully, my friend figured it out first.

This is my friend's successful completion of the 'Name the Month' puzzle. She immediately distinguished a commonality, and with the use of spatial analogy, she deduced that it had to be a four-letter month as there were only four shapes and months were usually abbreviated with three letters. This, in her mind led her to believe it had to be "June" or "July".

She then attempted to take another viewpoint by turning her head left and right. She employed finding by placing her hand around and on the letters to try to make something out of it. Eventually her pointer finger came in between and with the use of orthographic imagination, she discovered it as a mirrored image of 'July'.

Here is my take on "Puzzling Journey 2" from the Pencil 'n' Paper Puzzles section of puzzles.com. The rules state to get through all 64 cells, beginning at the red gate, passing through the green in the center, and leaving through the blue one. You can only visit each cell once and without the use of diagonal lines. Immediately I was reminded of very similar Super Mario Galaxy puzzles that have similar rules (at least, in the sense of being only able to visit on block at a time), so visual memory came into play as I attempted to solve this puzzle. I mentally formed a line to go through this journey and managed to solve it on the first try!

Here is my friend's take on "Puzzling Journey 2". With the rules in mind as well, knowing she couldn't go diagonally, she explained that she simply just went up and down. This way she was mentally forming in a pattern that would able her to fulfill the journey by its rules.

002: Week 3 Blog Exercise - Feature Hierarchy and Visual Search

image taken from: http://www.imyouare.com/

This image here features the second single album of the Scottish alternative rock band, Franz Ferdinand entitled: "No You Girls". In addition to any kind of video game related design, I am also very interested in packaging designs, such as cover album art. This piece makes use of the feature channel of color and brightness. Particularly, in a way that makes us detect color preattentively as quick glances has me immediately drawn to the words, "No More Girls" and the shoes on the bottom right of the image worn by one of the members. However, the words "No More Girls" are immediately processed.

What makes these three words easily digestible is because of the choice of sans serif typeface, making it an effortless read. The rest of image would require a bit of scanning, involving a bit of bottom up processing. This is when we scan for recognizable features, patterns, and objects to determine what it is we're looking at. Thus, color coupled with shape is what makes "No More Girls" first in the feature hierarchy of this image. What I'm immediately drawn to next are the "Franz Ferdinand" words in orange as it is the only color outside of greyscale. This makes use of a "pop-out effect" where it is isolated by hue. Finally, the rest of the image would be processed next after the text.

If I were to visually search for any works by this particular artist in a store for example, I would as Ware would put it, seek out ways to find the artist's name and so the "brain will tune my low-level feature receptors" so that letters that form "Franz Ferdinand" send out stronger signals. Another way would be to simply look for feature channels of shape, seeking out the band members themselves within the image. With that in mind, it is clear that this cover album art was designed in a way so the orange text would be seen first in terms of this picture's feature hierarchy to aid those seeking this artist.

001: Week 2 Blog Exercise - Top-Down Visual Processing

This snapshot from the classic 1985 Nintendo entertainment system game: Super Mario Bros. which is a good example of an image involving Top-Down Visual Processing. This is a design example related to my intended and existing are of study: Visual Communication that would include strategies that can be applied to videogames, a passion of mine that I hope to pursue in one form or another.

This image alone triggers the mind (especially to those familiar with the game) that there are more than more than seven actions that can be done, creating many saccades. There are many goals to achieve and so one can find themself fixated all over. You would need to look ahead (staring to the right edge of the screen in this case) to enable future actions and there is the matter of the question blocks, with one of them containing a mushroom power up. The power up would require a "just-in-time" query because as soon as it 'leaves', it can no longer be retrieved. There is constant re-thinking involved, from wondering if you should hit all the bricks or not, or to ignore them, and so forth. This one area featured in this image is "driven by the demands of attention, which in turn are determined by the needs of the tasks" (Ware, Visual Queries, p.10). Specifically, for this design, one would need to consider the timing of jumps and when to go proceed or not, especially as backtracking cannot be done.