Abstract Cities

I started with my personal reactions to the cities and looked at their flags for inspiration I've also noted my "gut feeling" colours

Madrid: Grand buildings paella colourful dance reds, yellows

Malmo: Clean bright, water, bridge, twisted tower white, wood, sky blue

Managua: Palm trees, modern/colonial, Volcano Momotombo green, blue, stone

Manchester: rain, redbrick, football grey, red green

Manhattan: money, skyscrapers, river blues, greys

Marrakech: Market colourful souk tiles white blue

Marseilles: Sophisticated blues, black, yellow

Melbourne: Sun, grass, sky, green, yellow, blue

Montreal: Snow, red/white flag, grey buildings

Mumbai: hot, slumdog millionaire, water, red, green, purple, blue

Is a guidebook attractive if it reflects back prejudices to the potential buyer?

Luxe City Guides are doing a similar thing http://www.luxecityguides.com/?m=guide_landing Desirable and collectible

Also http://www.europeandesign.org/submissions/senseable-city-guides/ have some great designs which look like they're based on street maps

Shame, I had a similar idea in my early sketches

I wanted the covers to have a consistent theme

I tried a variety of typefaces and settled on times New Roman which has the sort of M I'm looking for and works with all the city names

I used Paint shop pro to create the following designs

Of which Manhattan is my favourite and Melbourne the one I like least. I felt that the addition of a complementary colour made both colours duller where I had expected this to make the design "sing"
I don't think I've made this project work somehow. I think I'm not good at abstracts and although I've tried, this is too literal an interpretation.

My tutor suggested that the skylines could represent the actual cities which I like but had previously thought wouldn't be abstract enough. Whilst researching I found this lovely watercolour by Simone Ridyard.

I Googled the cities to look for representative architecture which wasn't just the most famous buildings and made some sketches '

For colour schemes I looked again at the national colours which worked for some countries but didn't really give the right feel for somewhere as exotic as India whose national colours are orange and green. In my first attempt I was using the colour combinations to differentiate the guides but having different skylines freed me up to use more similar colours if the character of the city called for it.

Madrid was a combination of the red and yellow of the flag and orange to represent the heat and the sun.

Malmo used the blue and yellow of the Swedish flag which seemed to me to represent the cool sophistication of the country

Nicaragua's flag is blue and white but the country seems rural so I used the greens to reflect this and the skyscrapers to make a contrast. I think I may have used too many skyscrapers here?

Manchester had to be primarily red because of the football team, I used the yellow and green for contrast. I got a bit more literal here with the wheel.

 Manhattan is blues and greys and brown for stripped wooden floors. Cool and sophisticated, I like the top image best but the bottom one is probably more representative.

Marrakech is golden yellow for the heat the sun and the buildings, and blue for the beautiful tiles.

I'm back with blue for the water and the sky and creamy sand for the buildings but the shapes of the rooftops are quite distinctive.

Melbourne is hot and sunny but looked quite green in the photos I saw. I'm not as sure of this colour scheme.

 I found Montreal difficult. The red and white of the flag wasn't eyecatching enough (apologies to my Canadian friends) I experimented with a symbol in the picture but it doesn't work

 I dropped the red line and tried yellow which I quite like but I'm not sure its very Canadian so I went back to red and white and added green since it looks such a green country

It's a bit dull compared to the others.

Finally Mumbai. Pictures I Googled had a lot of blues and dark pinky reds. I like the shapes of the temple roofs but I wonder if Mumbai would prefer to be seen more as a modern city with skyscrapers and shops?

On a similar theme I've just found artist Yoni Alter who does coloured paper cut shapes of cities. It's not related to this project but I particularly liked his running dalmation too

Understanding colour

The trouble with colour is that I like or dislike it depending on how and where it's used so I don't think there are any colours I truly dislike but I have tried to be fairly general here

Colours I don't like

Colours I like

Rather worryingly the grids do not reproduce faithfully here. The colours I like were brighter in my computer generated original. What I feel about a colour depends so much on how the colours are laid out and what is next to them. To be fair I've tried to set both grids to be as flattering as possible. I still don't like the top grid as much because the colours are a bit garish so I think I've failed on this exercise.

I did some research and found this lovely colour emotion layout by Naomi Finn
http://naomifinngraphicdesign.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/first-image-is-colour-wheel-of-emotions.html
Lots of the supposed mood characteristics of colours don't feel right to me but Abbie Stabby is closer to the way I feel
http://abbiestabby.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/colour-wheel-psychology-emotions/

At first I thought I would use coloured pencils as they gave a restricted but broad range of colours

But I quickly decided that there were an enormous number of possibilities and I would need to select colours to represent the mood.
I did play with an alternative layout just for fun

Then I went back to the computer and made myself a chart

I found that my perception of the characteristics of the colours was changed by the contrast of two colours alongside each other and that the colours I see on my computer don't look quite as different when they are lifted from the colour chart. I have swapped and changed these and there are some moods I'm still not sure of but at the moment I think this is as close as I can get.

Seeing the light

The instructions don't say which font to use. Found this on Google which I really like but I think it may distract from the purpose of the exercise http://www.fontriver.com/font/table_air_lamp/ so I went for Arial in black and blocks of yellow which seemed appropriate for a light.

The problem with the yellow block of colour is that the lettering won't show up unless it's in black so I tried alternative colour schemes.

I'm not sure that they add to my designs but they do very much change the feel of them and I do prefer some of the lettering in white.

Movement

This photo proves that representing movement is more than getting blur....   
But used creatively as in Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash is can be stunning

These images caught my eye when I Googled movement

I like the one on the right which looks like the girl is running towards us. They are part of the graphic response to the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. This link http://www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/posters-stories-va-collection/occupygezi-gezi-protests-turkey is from the VandA and has loads of innovative graphic responses to the conflict.

Movement is often successfully represented with swirling shapes and sweeping lines which get wider or narrower. There are some nice abstract images at this site http://www.123rf.com/photo_8592899_conceptual-interplay-of-hi-res-shapes-on-the-subject-of-light-space-technology-energy-and-movement.html

Many people have been here before me and not all of them were OCA students. Here http://skyje.com/logos-depicting-movement/ there are a collection of logos designed to express movement which for businesses is synonymous with growth and innovation.

Going back to the 1920's Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath developed a series of pictograms to represent an enormous variety of activities and situations including movement

The feeling of movement in many of these symbols is created by leaning the figures forward and using a side view so that the legs can be in a walking position.  This has been developed over the years by successive countries hosting the Olympics. Surprisingly each country creates their own set of distinctive pictograms for each Olympics, to represent the various events

 The top set is from Bejing in 2008, the bottom 2 are from London 2012, Olympics and Paralympics I think the 2 colour symbols work particularly well.

Movement can be suggested by drawing or photographing the definitive moment of an action

This stencil by Banksie is at the point when the flowers are about to be thrown. There is tension in the image and no doubt that it is a snapshot in a sequence of movement.
Cartoonists use lines to suggest movement such as the wagging of this dogs tail

Taken from the website http://understandinggraphics.com/design/21-ways-lines-communicate/
Also there is the marvellous Tom and Jerry

For me arrows are generally directive rather than dynamic moving symbols, unless they employ other graphic conventions to suggest movement.

Some sketchbook ideas

I did a mind map and looked at different meanings for the word movement

then tried some random sketchbook ideas

 

Then I re-read the instructions and realised the brief was to design a symbol. I did some more research and found the work of JL Design and KORB for CCTV http://vimeo.com/69948148 also animation using growing crystals which is more abstract http://vimeo.com/65294211

 

Brigit Reilly made black and white squares move http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Riley  (movement in squares 1961) Her abstract geometric patterns in black and white seem to shimmer on the page.

 

I also found a blog from a student preparing for her honours degree (probably in animation?) who has collated a large number of images representing movement http://gemzhonoursproject.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-max=2010-10-07T14:02:00-07:00&max-results=50&reverse-paginate=true&start=33&by-date=false

 

For a symbol I like the dynamism of the squiggles at the bottom of the last sketchbook page which are lively and build on the letter M for movement

 

Generated by computer you get

 

of which I prefer this one as it's simpler but still dynamic. The others are too busy for my taste.

 

I tried some experiments to see if I could make this more dynamic

The idea was that the softer squiggle in the background would provide some tension with the bolder squiggle but I think the background squiggle is too soft therefore my preferred design is