1. The Group

Our “Grandma’s Blanket” storybook is done by these wonderful group mates:
• Ann Soon
• Kan
• Mun
• Melissa
• Val

2. Storyboarding

We gathered and shared our own stories before we adopted Ann Soon’s story for our story book. His story was then refined to fit the requirements of the story book, that are:
• At least 10 pages/scenes.
• At most contains 900 words.
• Tailored for 6-9 years old kids.

Summary of the final story:

Kan is full of mischief and does not like the blanket that his grandma made for him. Worse, he cuts the blanket to pieces and runs away, making Grandma Mel very sad and worried. After a cold and sleepless night however, Kan realises that he was in the wrong. He runs back to his house once it is dawn and hugs Grandma Mel immediately when he sees her. In fact, she had mended the torn blanket with colourful patches while Kan was away. From that day onwards, Kan treasures the blanket and uses it every night when he goes to sleep.

3. Sketching

Here’s our first sketch after we discussed and decided our story:

4. Draw, Color, Document.

With complete thumbnail sketch of every scene, everyone has the same idea of the story in mind and proceed with character drawing (Mun), background drawing (Mel and Val), coloring (Ann Soon and Chris), and documentation (Kan).

I did various samples of color scheme for the blanket to bring out certain mood/feeling:

And also the wall surface of bedroom and living room of Kan (the main character) and Chris (Kan’s friend) in the story book:

5. Finale

After weeks of sleepless nights, the story book is finally printed and submitted :D
Ann Soon and I did coloring of scenes as well as characters and objects in each scene. The overall process was long and tedious, but at the end of it, I feel I’ve learnt so much from this activity.

Here’s the thumbnails of final scenes:

1. Brainstorming

The main aim of this assignment is to learn various color combination and the effect that each combination brings. Therefore, I designed a very general layout so I can try many different combination of colors without having too much restriction. The given theme was “Music Festival”, and I designed a postcard for “Music Festival 2009″.

2. Postcard Design

Here’s the original design of Music Festival 2009. For aesthetic reason, I put the “2009″ before “Music Festival”.

3. Color Scheme

I decided to try different color schemes to reflect various festive seasons like Christmas, Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali, Halloween, and so on. Here’s the seven color schemes:

4. More Colors…

The seven color schemes were good enough, but Dr Julian liked it a lot more. So I played with the color wheel and went beyond festive seasons to music genres and beyond…

5. Final Postcard

The final chosen postcard color scheme is “Spring”. Some reasons behind this choice:
• Cool color: blue and green.
• Natural and pleasing color to most culture.

Front view of the postcard:

Back view of the postcard:

1. Brainstorming

I started by picking a single message that set the theme and layout of the poster. I chose “mentally active” as the main message of the poster and sketched some thumbnails to convey the message of “mentally active”.

2. Getting Images

Finding a subject in a proper environment setting is crucial to bring the message across. Therefore, I went to Chinatown to take some photographs of the elderly playing chinese chess. The images were then sorted and digitally manipulated to convey the message.

3. The Original Poster

The subject of this poster is an uncle in Chinatown, playing chinese chess. I took a dozen photos of him playing chess from different angles. One out of the dozen was finally chosen and manipulated in Photoshop to guide viewers’ eyes to the uncle and his chess game. Here’s the original poster that I designed, printed, and brought to critique session:

4. Final Poster

Following the feedback to reduce the amount of text in the poster, I modified the poster to this final version:

1. Brainstorming

Visual narrative, usually known as photo story, has its own challenge when the main subjects are inanimate objects. I took this challenge and used chopsticks as the main subjects. Iconic facial expressions, which are usually used in emoticons, are added to the chopstick to make the inanimate object lively expressing various emotions.

2. The Original Story

I took more than a hundred photos for the original photo story and filtered them out to 9 for the story. I selected 8 out of these and presented in critique session for feedback. Here’s the original 9 photos: (click image for larger view)

Based on the feedback gathered during critique session and consultation, this original photo story:

• was too complex
• had ambiguous climax

3. The Final Story

Based on those feedback, I changed most scenes by having the photos retaken and modified to:
• show flow of an event: split frame
• show emotion: loneliness (semi B/W)
• show expression: surprised (callout “!”)
• show clearer climax or turning point: bigger photo size for turning point and happy ending.

1: Nobody wants to use Mr Chopstick

2: Mr Chopstick feels sad and begin the search. Waiting for bus…

3: In the bus…

4: And keep searching until…

5: He found Ms Chopstick!

6: Mr and Ms Chopstick now stay together

7: And someone finally picks Mr and Ms Chopstick

8: Mr Chopstick feels happy

Dr Julian assessed our work and gave positive remarks on our sketches. According to him, the nested rectangle sketch wasn’t clear enough to represent the word; The other three are fine.

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.

The theme of this assignment revolves around Me Myself and I, manipulating objects that I like or hate to form my name: Chris.

1. Brainstorming

The design process starts by listing words that describe my character, personality, and things that I like or dislike.

Bossanova
Caramel
Childhood
Cinnamon
Coffee
Jazz
Music
Nature
Vanilla

Some photos from my photo library that gave me inspiration for this assignment:

2. Thumbnails

Next, I picked some of the words from the list and set it as the theme for my thumbnail sketches, 8 thumbnails in total, to form my name.

The first four thumbnails are about the nature.

And the next four are about my childhood.

3. Roughs

Out of these eight, two themes were further developed to full roughs with each theme being developed to two roughs, making the total number of roughs to four.

The ‘nature’ theme:

The ‘childhood’ theme:

4. Prototypes

Two out of four roughs were selected to be developed to prototype using Adobe Illustrator.

5. Final

Feedback gathered during critique session:

• Font types used in both images can be changed to something that reflects theme.
• The ‘h’ and ‘i’ in childhood theme can be made thicker.

Following the feedback, I applied changes to the prototypes with careful selection of colours and typography to communicate the theme.