Composing My Frame

This is the photo I took at the holland Building. The rest of the images will serve to show the rule of thirds, the diagonal rule, index vectors, and motion vectors.

Rule of Thirds

Diagonal Rule/Graphic Vectors

Index Vector

Motion Vectors

All the lines

Design Presentation

Let's talk about graphic design. This first poster is an example of bad poster design.

This is a pretty bad one. It kind of looks like they made this design in Word. The fonts they used all have really high x-heights(the lower case letters are almost as tall as the capital letters) which is usually the kind of font you'd use if you were going to have a lot of really small text, unless it was on purpose. Nothing in this poster design looks like it's on purpose though. 

The designer also committed another mortal sin of design. They used two different kinds of drop shadows and outlined text! 

It looks like a graphic designer made an acceptable poster, and then the client said, "I want this part, this part, and this part to all stand out. Oh, and this other part too." And then the designer said, "Oh, you can't make it ALL stand out, because then NOTHING will." And the client responded with, "I'm paying you good money to make posters for me. Do what I say, yuh dummy." 

So the graphic designer had to make this monstrosity. 

THIS is an example of good design:

This is really great. There is lots of negative space, contrast, alignment, and room for discovery. Check out how they did the title. It's kind of like these:

You feel really cool after you read this, right? Because you kind of had to figure that out, but not TOO hard?

Anyway, The second one is obviously better. For some reason it's harder to talk about why this one is great, but it was easy to talk about the one I hated. Weird, huh?

  

Contrast, Balance, Harmony

Let's talk about Some of these gestalt principles. This is an image I found on the internet and I'm going to "discover contrast, balance and harmony by identifying principles discussed in class in [this image]." 

The color is obviously the strongest point of contrast here. The vibrant, red hue of the flower against the lighter, tanner background brings our eye right to the flower. 

This may not immediately seem like a balanced image, but the vastness and depth of the negative space here makes it it's own thing. It balances out the image because the flower brings intensity, and the negative space brings depth.

The harmony in this image comes from the tone and saturation of color. The colors in this image are all warm, and very saturated (even the colors in the background), and that causes this image to have harmonious elements. The texture of both the flower and the background are very similar. Maybe its the soft light that makes the background feel as velvety as the flower petals.

On a completely different note: I think I'm going to try to keep my blog posts within a certain color scheme... you know, for fun. Wish me luck!

Visceral Response

Let's talk about Rothko. Mark Rothko is a Russian abstract painter. This is one of his paintings:

I once saw this painting in REAL LIFE in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I'm choosing to talk about this painting in particular because it is the only painting I have ever seen that held me truly captivated. I remember walking through the museum with my friends and seeing this painting for the first time. I'm not really a "painting person", but this one hit me so right, it's stayed with me for years. It just kind of... feels right, like it's something me and the painter share.

The colors are so saturated and high value, and they transition pretty quickly around the edges into darker and darker shades until they reach black.The contrast between the giant, red-y orange color on top of a smaller dark shade of blue really just kind of makes this painting smack me in the face. Yet the meticulous use of texture here is a unifying factor. 

Some people probably think this is stupid. "It's just two giant patches of color. I could do that in, like, and hour." That just can't be true. You don't evoke feeling that strong from your paintings over and over again by accident. 

You should look him up... but you probably wont. So I'll just show you some of his others here:

You take a look at those and TRY to tell me he didn't do that on purpose.

Well hello there!

Hello! My name is Kayla Coolbear and I am starting this new blog for Visual Communications. I am a graphic design major here at Dixie State University. I am on Student Government as the Vice President of Public Relations, and I feel kinda cool about that. I don't know what else to say here. I don't talk about myself a lot.