Doodles from Daily Drabbles

Gestalt Principles. 

LINES

• Baseline: The one you might be most familiar with is the baseline. This is the line that the text sits on.
• Cap height (or cap line): This marks the top of capital letters.
• Ascender height (or topline): This line shows where the top of letters such as kand h touch. Strangely, in a lot of cases, this line is slightly higher than the capital line.
• X-height (or midline): This shows the height of lowercase letters (excluding ascenders and descenders). It is typically measured using the height of the letterx.
• Descender height (or beardline): Descenders are the parts of characters that go below the baseline (such as the letters p and y). This line shows where the bottoms of the descenders are.

TECHNIQUES

• Leading describes the amount of space between lines of text. You can measure leading by obtaining the distance between two baselines.

• Tracking (or letter-spacing) is the space between groups of characters

• Kerning describes the amount of space between two characters.There is often confusion between tracking and kerning. While tracking is a global setting that affects how close all the characters are, kerning is more the microscopic view of the space between two letters. Some character combinations might require more kerning than others to avoid collisions (e.g., compare KX versus ll).

• Weight is the relative darkness of the characters of a type font resulting from the relative thickness of the strokes, expressed as light, bold, extrabold, etc.

Choosing a font

Week 9: Corporate Identity, Image and Brand

Maki-San マキさん 

Agency: Kinetic SingaporeCreative director: Pann Lim
Art director: Esther Goh, Astri Nursalim, Gian Jonathan, Jack Tan, Pann Lim
Copywriter: Eugene Tan, Joseph Davies
Illustrator: Esther Goh
Account Director: Dennis Lim
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A fresh take on sushiThe client wanted to launch Singapore’s first ever fully customizable sushi store. Being offered a wide selection of fresh ingredients, diners could pick and choose precisely what went into their hand-rolls.

"Maki-San"We proposed naming the store “Maki-San” for one simple reason: the word “-San” roughly translates as “mister” or “missus” in Japanese, and by using this suffix, each Maki could be uniquely personified. This idea also extends to operations: customers can name their own rolls however they choose to. The logo is made up of emoticons commonly used in Japanese pop culture. 

Endless possibilitiesUsing hand-drawn illustrations of mushrooms, avocados, cucumbers, and other ingredients, we designed a myriad of patterns which became Maki-San’s main visual identity. These motifs were applied throughout the consumer experience - right down to the packaging - to play up the endless, fun options available for diners.

Good Corporate Image

While searching for a corporate image, I found this table which seems to be a nice summary for the lecture's corporate image. In Prof Nancy's lecture, she quoted CEO Dutch KLM, De Soct, “A positive corporate image is a condition for a continuity and strategic success. It is no longer solely the field of attention of marketing, but a strategic instrument of top management". I find this highly relevant to the table I have found. 

Week 8: Harmony, Contrast, Repetition, Unity

Harmony + Contrast = Unity

Week 7: Colour Theory

Week 6: Negative and Positive Space

Negative space is, quite simply, the space that surrounds an object in a image. Just as important as that object itself,negative space helps to define the boundaries of positive space and brings balance to a composition.

Week 5: Composition

Week 4: Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of works of art signs and symbols, either individually or grouped in sign systems that can give us more insight from the work source and meaning. All painters work in a pictorial language by following a set of standards, basics and rules of picture-making. There is a big resemblance between pictorial image making and the creation of written language, the study of this nature of what consists and the individual components of pictorial and written language is known as Semiotics. 

‘What one must paint is the image of resemblance—if thought is to become visible in the world. ‘        —Rene Magritte

This brings me to another love for Magritte as he uses semiotics in his artworks as well. 

Magritte had a special talent to make objects look mysterious and magical, and his objects are carefully chosen and depicted in a school textbook way. The ‘Pipe’ painting is a good example of how conventional imagery often betrays us all by making everyone realize that it is just a convention and not a real object. 

The use of cloth in his works are very common. It is interpreted as a way where he mourns the death of his mother.

The Lovers II, 1928

René Magritte

Oil Painting

Another artist that I know that uses semiotics in his artworks (and that I admire) would be Picasso. In Picasso's Guernica, there were many symbols that was used that described and laments the Spanish war. 

Guernica, 1937

Pablo Picasso

Oil on Canvas

Week 2: Journals