Dondis Basic Elements - Web Design

SCALE: http://www.sparklingmilk.com/

Sparkling Milk does a really good job emulating scale in their web design. The way the cups and the words are arranged, it looks as if "want" and the smaller cup are in the distance because of the use of scale. They also add a blur over the word and the pictures to create a depth of field. They utilize that blur to imitate shallow depth of field similar to photography. The size of the larger cup relative to the smaller cup differs in scale that the illusion it leaves us with is depth.

COLOR: http://thisispopa.com/

Red is a primary color and having this website mainly in such a candy red calls out for attention. The contrast they use by choosing black and white as their secondary colors for the sight keep the site readable and simple enough that the colors do not clash with each other, but instead, complement the bright red. Red is a very attention grabbing color that serves a good purpose for this website because they are advertising a product that I'm sure the company wants a great deal of attention for.

MOVEMENT: http://themeforest.net/item/studio8-a-creative-minimalist-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/691657

This is a theme that can be applied to a wordpress site. The gives the implication of movement because the photo they use stretches throughout the entire page and the photo itself implies movement. The shot of the man throwing his head back implies some sort of spinning or body movement as if it was a still shot from a film. Not only does this site imply movement, but it contains 5 different full bleed photos that act as a slideshow that slides in from the right. The slideshow action buttons have arrows that imply movement will happen when those buttons are clicked which does its job because its implied movement actually shows the next slide coming in from the right.

Visual Thinking Research

The two puzzles I chose were "Block Twins" and "Next Square."

My Attempts:

I thought it would be 'D' because I thought that the pattern involved squares 1 and 3 to be combined to make the 4th square, so I combined 2 and 4 to make the 5th square.

These were the only pairs I could find. I was counting the blocks and rotating the paper to see if they matched. After looking at the answers, I was surprised to find out that I only chose one correct pair.

My Brother's Attempts:

My brother said he was using the process of elimination and ruling out the possible answers and none of them seemed to match so he chose 'D' because it was the only one that made any kind of sense to him.

My brother only found these two pairs. He said he didn't really have a strategy and that he just tried matching the ones that looked the most similar.

Feature Hierarchy

I chose a publication cover, in this case, a magazine. Without understanding the language that this cover has been translated to, in terms of hierarchy, GQ is the obvious title of the publication because of its boldness and size as opposed to the rest of the text. Next to the title would probably have something to do with a feature story while the other noticeable object, the text in the circle, is probably the special feature because they've made it stand out by creating that shape around it. All the other text are called teasers because they are sneak previews to the other articles inside the publication. They are all in different sizes according to which articles would be more eye-catching. All in all, I think that GQ has a great balance of the scale of their cover photo to the way they highlight the text around it without making it chaotic. They emphasize the publication name as well as the special featured article correlating to their photo.

Top-Down Processing

This is a Typogram of a bicycle by Aaron Kuehn. Typograms are a form of visual communication that uses creative executions of typography to communicate a translate a message or meaning. In this case, in regards to top-down processing, from the first glance, it is clearly a bicycle. From then on you notice that the bike is composed of letters and the details start to show more. For example, at a second glance, I saw the letters. At the third glance, I saw that the words represented the part of the bike that the words are in place of. At fourth glance, I start to notice that with items such as the wheels of the bike, the font stays consistent with both wheels to indicate the thickness of tires and the spokes of the wheel. This is a great example of top-down processing because it is viewed from the big picture, but forces you to look further at the details of it and even then, you can still find new small details that the designer added to make this visually appealing and mentally stimulating.

http://www.doobybrain.com/2011/01/10/bicycle-typogram-by-aaron-kuehn/