1. Brainstorming

The first step was to select a location or place of interest in Singapore and search for enough photographs to understand visual features of the building. Among Singapore Flyer, Mariott Hotel, Reverse Bungy, Vivo City, and St. Andrew Cathedral, I selected The Old Supreme Court.

In this phase, I relied on pencil sketches on paper to visualize how the outline of the building would look like in black and white shapes and lines. The sketches were useful resources to decide which elements of the building were reducible and which were the outstanding visual features.

2. Abstraction

After deciding a good combination of visual features, the photo of the building was then imported to Adobe Illustrator for pen tracing. From there on, reducible visual features started to be taken off in five steps of abstraction to create a representative image of the object. Here’s the original abstraction iterations that I printed and brought to my weekly critique session class: (click image to view full image)

3. Refining the Abstraction

Based on feedback gathered during critique session and consultation with the tutor, I made some changes to the abstraction. Here’s the updated abstraction iterations: (click image to view full image)

4. Select the Final

The final result is an effective pictogram representing The Old Supreme Court that is easily recognizable, well remembered, and highly reproducible for road signs and directional panels.

5. Implementation

And finally, here are some examples of how the final pictogram can be used in various directional road signs.