Week 12: Visual Techniques

Toy Design


Techniques: Instability, Color, Spontinuety, Intricacy,distortion, variation.

Techniques: accuracy, flatness, repetition, balance, symmetry, predictability,simplicity.

I am inspired by both of these toys because they were two of my favorites when I was a child.  They inspired me to want to become a toy designer.  Although both of these toys are successful in the market and ingenious designs, they are both very different.  Top: The transformer is a very intricate toy is involves many moving parts.  The toy allows a variety of distortions and variations.  The transformer is also very colorful and attractive.  Bottom: The etcha-sketch is much more simple.  It has a simple square shape to it.  The transformer, on the other, hand has bumps and curves all over it. While it has two knobs on the Etcha-sketch allows variability like the transformer, the knobs are very predictable.  They turn left and right.  The Etcha-sketch is also alot less colorful.  It is mostly shades of white, grey, and black with a red border.  The Etcha-sketch also has a 2D quality to it.  It is very flat where the transformer almost forces people to see it in a 3D perspective if they want to solve it.  It requires depth.  Both of these toys do allow people to be creative with them because the user is allowed to choose how the toy should look.  These are good examples of how much contrasts toys can have while still being successful.

Week 11 Contrast

FASHION DESIGN

This is a good example of bad contrast in fashion design.  The reason that this is bad design is because it creates confusion for people.  The lady is wearing black baggy pants with a tight corset top.  This causes contrasting confusion.  Is the outfit supposed to excentuate her body or hide it?  Also the pattern on the pants stops right at the waiste contrasting with her top.  It would have been easier on the eyes if she would have had a little pattern on the shirt as well.  Then contrasting with the black outfit is her pink purse, pink shoes, and red hair.  This begs the question if her outfit is the most important thing, why are the extravagant accessories bringing in more attention than the outfit.  The culmination of this contrasting outfit is not only confusing for people, it is a bit scary also.

In this picture of Anne Hathaway's outfit there is an example of good fashion contrast.  The contrast works in a possitive way because it helps excentuate parts of the dress while bringing attention to it.  For instance, the silver background helps excentuate the black tassles that are hanging off of the dress.  These are important because the tassles not only help show off her shapely body, but they also excentuate the way her body moves. The shiny silver background also helps bring attention to people's eye when the glimmer hit them.  It also gives a nice contrast to the matte black tassles which doubles as triangular patterns on the dress giveing it depth.  The culmination of these contrasts brings an elegant and pleasing vision to those who are looking at it.