An innovative solution to overcrowded bikes

I was browsing through the internet among the various blogs that I watch and happened upon the video at the bottom of this post that showcased an innovative high tech solution to overcrowding caused by bikes in Japan.

The video:


The video basically showcases a problem that we addressed in our design class regarding the bike issue at UC Davis (mainly overcrowding and storage issues). Only in the video, the Japanese have created an innovate solution of a fully animated storage facility that secures the persons bike and keeps it safe, as well as save a lot of room and public space. I felt this was a high tech solution that we didn't come up with in class. The architect for this design kept the peoples need for a safe way to store their bikes as well as keep in mind what the public wanted- no more eyesores of bikes piled upon one another, bikes in "no bike" zones, etc. The designer and the city kept the public interest at heart and created something that addressed this in an innovative way. Although in the end I think cost would be the determining constraint to prevent something like this to ever exist on the campus...

Unique design @ UC Davis

I first noticed this in freshman year, but I didn't get a chance to blog about it until now.

When I first saw this railing I thought it was a DNA form, until I looked at it from the side


it's actually a quite plain railing, just the unique curvature makes it appear as that DNA-form in the first picture from the front point of view. I thought that this example of design was a good example of how our perception of the world is subjective and can vary depending on everyone's own point of view and though processes. I would like to know if anyone else thought the same thing I did when I first saw this railing...

The railing shown is visible if you look out to the parking building from the Memorial Union bus stop area at UC Davis in Davis, California.

Stardust Gijinka Costume Design

I have a friend who wants to make this a real costume, so she asked me to design it for her:


Stardust Dragon Gijinka design by =slifertheskydragon on deviantART

the costume is based off of the Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's monster "Stardust Dragon"


I remember when I visited the Academy of Arts in San Francisco one time when I was checking out colleges that students in the fashion design major had a project to take a pop culture reference or basically take inspiration from something to create a whole outfit from it. One of the students had chosen a "Digimon" monster to base her outfit off of, and I thought it was very cool and needless to say, brave of her to do so.

For this costume design I kept the main aspects of the dragon in mind- the chest and shoulder orbs, the perforations on the skin, and most importantly the color scheme. I also had to keep in mind what was physically possible to create in real life, because as we all know, animation physics and physics in reality don't always match up. I feel that this costume captured the "essence" of the "Stardust Dragon" at a level that is possible to create with my friends' craftsmanship and costume-making skill, and I feel honored that she would create something based off of something I drew.

I feel it is always easier to create based off another work, especially with characters because you already have a developed base with which to work off of instead of having to come up with everything from scratch. But by working from scratch, the finished product is ALL YOU- from beginning to finish, you've poured your own ideas into the creation of something original. But then I feel it's more fun to create things based on stuff that you like and enjoy, because you enjoy making it for fun.

Clothos logo

I was recently commissioned to design the "mascot" logo for a program project at UC Berkeley for their IGem wiki entry website. The Clothos name itself is based upon one of the Greek fates, the one who spun the thread of human life. The name was chosen because the program itself deals with DNA fabrication, in a sense- the very thread of life itself in actuality. Her design was originally based upon the images I found of the Greek fate, but then incorporated was that her hair is strands of DNA and that base bacteria serve as ornamentation on her long flowing dress. Her colors were determined during a live video recording session in which I was drawing and coloring live, and the Berkeley team watched and gave feedback (if you're curious, it's "livestream" www.livestream.com/osirisred I occasionally hold live drawing sessions so people can watch how i draw). The royal red I thought was a strong primary color to base off of, and the gold itself is a standard compliment to dark red dresses. Her golden hair I think was partially based off of Rapunzel's fairytale. The off-color skin was chosen because human skin didn't really give her a "Goddess" feel and when I played with the hues, this light green served as a good compliment, being the opposite color of red on the color wheel. She is adorned with natural items such as flowers and also small bacteria and phage-charms to accentuate her "natural" aspects.

Her original sketch was more so based on the clothos muse herself:


You can see the rest of the mascots and the software's functionality at the completed wiki page here: http://2009.igem.org/Team:Berkeley_Software

Use of Secondary Colors

I had quite the difficult time to choose the color scheme for this drawing:


Darkstar Dragon by =slifertheskydragon on deviantART

The monster itself is "evil" in nature, so to illustrate that I chose a dark background, but had difficulty in choosing its color scheme. In the end i decided upon a dark blue skin accentuated by slightly saturated violet parts of the skin and in contrast, a somewhat bright green. These two colors are part of the secondary colors (purple, green, orange) and because purple and green are more on the "cool" side of the color wheel (being that they share blue as one of the primary colors used to create) I felt that worked better than using say purple with orange because I wanted a "cool" tone to the work. (Purple and orange share red as a primary used to create them, and gave a "warm" feeling to the drawing).

So in addition to the use of secondary colors to create a rather off-beat feeling a designer must consider the "side" of the color wheel that the colors originate/share in their design to create and convey the correct message/emotion.

The banner's image origin - Red

In case anyone is curious about the illustration in my banner- it's from this variant fanart of the yugioh monster "slifer the sky dragon"

+slifer the sky dragon by =slifertheskydragon on deviantART

I felt like i need to talk about it because of how I chose a predominant red theme. My favorite color is red, i'm not too sure why but I think it's the aesthetics of the color- red's association with romance, love, anger, rage, etc. Red is I think, the only color able to achieve such a broad range of emotions. This journal has a red-black theme because I felt it matched better than the dark red-black banner with a white background. Plus, i'm not one for bright screens...

the original design of the dragon can be seen (also drawn by me):

- Slifer the Sky Dragon - by =slifertheskydragon on deviantART

notice how the dragon itself has primary colors (blue: orb,tongue Yellow: eyes (it uses thunder-based attacks, so those are yellow) Red: skin, etc) and coincidentally if you take what i've talked about in the superman-action heroes and colors post, the monster is the main character's key card. In fact, aside from the first time it was introduced, only the main character has used this monster. It seems the strength in the use of the primary triad lies with the overall unity that the colors create, but also accenting a predominant primary (i.e. red in this case) with the other primaries achieves a similar effect.

The use of black/white (sharp contrast) also compliments the contrast given by the primary colors to create more accentuation and brings attention to the "belly" of the dragon with the black/white. The primary colors help to bring attention to the dragon's face.

This dragon shows the use of color to bring attention to key areas- a good idea to keep in mind when thinking about what colors to make your newest creation.

Nathan Shedroff's "Experience Design" - sustainability

"While everything, technically, is an experience of some sort, there is something important and special to many experiences that make them worth discussing. In particular, the elements that contribute to superior experiences are knowable and reproducible, which make them designable." - Nathan Sherdoff

From the guest lecture at UC Davis' design dept. on Wednesday, I was able to take some key ideas and thoughts. I copied down two of his illustrated points- that of what makes up "experience design" and what three keys lie in good design for the future:


The first Venn diagram shows just what experience design is made up of- the combination of design/engineering with sustainability in mind and coupled with business leads to a successful product with these three aspects in mind for the consumer.

"Don't design things today that make tomorrow worse." - Nathan Shedroff

Consumerism is such a huge aspect in society today that the very foundation of our economy is based upon it. Our landfills are piling up with products that while pretty well designed for its use was, in the end, unable to be sustainable and recycled properly. The fact is there is no such thing as "sustainable design" simply because the products we make today do not last forever in the eye of the consumer. Products break down and new versions are made. This is what drives consumers to buy the new and the trendy, but in hindsight they fail to see that they're just creating more garbage with their older products. Thus to create "sustainable" products, you must place a sentimental value within them. The best example is a child's "blankey"- an object that the child will keep for as long as possible (much to the parent's dismay when the child is "too old" for such a thing) because of the emotional and sentimental value of the object. The child feels "safe" with the object, and thus keeps it for as long as possible.

By placing a sentimental value on an object, that object gains a somewhat sustainable factor in being used and kept for a long time, and doesn't end up in the landfill quite so quickly.

for more about Nathan and his books, visit http://nathan.com/ed/index.html

Objectified

Huswit's film, "Objectified" shows the relation between form and content by showing us the world of industrial design. The goal of industrial design was to create forms that were able to become mass-produced, and widely available to the public. Made most famous by Ford and his assembly line, Ford tells us that "every object tells a story if you know how to read it."

In the beginning, we think of "form" as directly related to "function". This is best illustrated as if you were an alien to our planet Earth. When you pick up a spoon, the design tells us a general idea of what to and what not to do with it. But as design evolved, the form no longer had such a bold and direct relation with function/content. The best example shown in the film is the iPod/iPhone devices where you wouldn't be able to associate all the applications to the simple rectangular shape/form.

As designers we must look to the future- one where since form and function no longer have a distinct relation to one another we have to look at the form applying to human interaction with the object. Only in this way does form and the content reintegrate together and work off one another as it did when function was a part of the very idea of looking at a spoon.

for more information on the film, please visit http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/

Primary vs Secondary colors in comics

In general, primary colors are reserved for heroes, because they are colors that are basis of all other colors aside from the primaries in the color wheel. They are gestalt within themselves, the "perfect form" of a color. When we see all three together, we also get a sense of unity and our minds are at ease. In the comic book world, the best example?


Superman by ~DocShaner on deviantART

Superman. His costume is nothing but the primary colors. Such bright primary colors that aren't off tone give you the sense that "this guy is the hero and seems like a nice person" especially when combined with his facial expression, he has a "boy scout appearance" There is a sense of unity and harmony in the use of the primary colors, and our eye likes it.

Contrast this to a character whose wardrobe is based on secondary colors (and his face clashes)-

Joker by ~luli44 on deviantART
The Joker. His wardrobe is an off-green and purple, two secondary colors, and purple, if placed on a monochromatic scale, is a "dark" color, green is "neutral" but because of its contrast with the Joker's red smile, such contrast, like Christmas colors create discord for our eyes. His manic sickly yellow (note how i associated "sickly" with yellow) and pale white face show us this person isn't healthy, and the fact that he carries a gun makes him an immediate "villain" archetype.

The use of predominant primary colors in comics is generally reserved for heroes, a short list-
DC: Superman, Old school Batman (he was blue/yellow), wonder woman (primary), the Flash (red/yellow), Static Shock (blue/yellow)
Marvel: Spiderman (red/blue), Wolverine (yellow/blue), Cyclops (yellow/blue)
Japanese comics: Yugioh (red/yellow hair, blue clothes), Ash Ketchum + Pikachu (red hat, blue clothes, yellow pet)

The use of predominant secondary colors in comics is generally reserved for villains, though these colors are usually off-color, resulting in a pale or "washed out" color scheme-
DC: the Joker, Lex Luthor (purple/green)
Marvel: Magneto (magenta/purple)

From the above list we can see that such use of the primary and secondary colors helps divide the "good and evil" characters apart, and makes it a "standard" so that we can almost immediately categorize characters by color alone.

Your color, choose a side

When you see the color red, what do you think of?
Love? Roses? Blood?
What about blue?
Sadness? Blue? Water?

Why do we associate colors with emotions or objects immediately?

Our minds try to find reason, truth, and when it does it feels good, content.

We use such associations for colors in design to convey emotions, or perhaps trigger memories of a place, person, or thing. This is a psychological compensation called "color constancy" where we think that grass must be green and the sky must be blue.

In the comic book world, colors are used to help "determine your side"- Hero or Villain.

An excellent use of the color spectrum, combined with facial expressions can be seen in DC's "Green Lantern" series:

BlackestNight: Tales by `Bakanekonei on deviantART

In this case, the colors of the person (and subsequent corps) reflect an emotion:
"In DC Comics, the emotional spectrum is divided into the seven colors of the rainbow, with each color corresponding to a different emotion:
rage (red),
avarice (orange),
fear (yellow),
willpower (green),
hope (blue),
compassion (indigo),
and love (violet)." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_spectrum)

The "warm" colors are considered the villains and the "cool" colors are "heroes". Green is the "middle ground" though in general is a "hero" group.

Why is this?

I think it is because warm colors have a kind of "life" in them, they excite our eye, give off a kind of "energy", where as "cool" colors try to calm us, they "bring us down" instead of "excite" us. In this sense, the colors tied with their respective emotion is based on this, and our already conceived view of that color. Though yellow if we think about it, usually represents happiness, or the sun, but in WWI, it represented fear and death (the mustard "yellow" gas) and also represents sickness (decay, like in rotting teeth). It is in this context that we must be careful to choose our colors wisely, and use them alongside the context from where they are placed to communicate through design properly.

You know when you've watched too much anime when...

You actually recognize what this

is.

If you've never watched a single anime (short for Japanese Animation) you probably wouldn't understand or know what the heck the above picture is supposed to represent or be nonetheless.

You are supposed to recognize the colors above as the main robot from the anime series "Evangelion" :
(c) Gainax

That was actually the first one I had recognized off the bat, there's a great deal of others that took me a while to distinguish because of the colors. Much like how we recognize characters like Mickey Mouse () by the distinctive "H2O" molecule silhouette, anime fans on a Japanese message board came to together to create over 50 of these "color mind tricks" to test your obsession with certain popular anime series. It's not only the colors but the very spacing of the colors that made anime fans associate the first image with Evangelion, because purple is the primary predominant color, while there is only hints of green.

This ties down to the basis of color theory, in which by use of certain colors the audience will immediate associate an idea or in this case, anime series/character with the use of colors. A western equivalent would be red and blue (with hints of yellow) as representative of DC comic's Superman or black (blue) and yellow representative of DC comic's Batman. In the western case, they used primary colors to distinguish their "hero" character from villains who have off-primary colors, such as DC comic's Joker, who is distinguished by purple and green.

Creators do this so we associate color schemes and patterns with characters and also to in a way show their "sides" of either villain or hero. Such a strong presence of color scheme creating such an imprint is representative of the gestalt, in which our minds find unity in being able to successfully associate the picture with the idea.

You can find more of these "mind tricks of obsession" over at http://en.gigazine.net/index.php?/news/comments/20091102_otaku_proof

Alternative Press Expo

Myself with Joanne Matte (http://rufftoon.deviantart.com/)

I meant to post this earlier to when the event ended, but due to other scholastic-related commitments have been unable to do so... until now.

The Alternative Press Expo (APE) is a comics convention for self-publishers, independent publishers and alternative cartoonists to showcase their art and works. The recent event, held in the Concourse in San Francisco showcased about 100+ independent comic artists and publishers to showcase alternative comic and artwork. In today's art and design world, getting your name and work out there is key. Venues such as APE allow for artists to put themselves out on the market, without having to compete against the big corporate faces such as DC comics or big-time established names to show their work and hopefully get their work out to generate interest to become "viral". Viral networking isn't limited to just the computer, it is a tool to help us get out there in real life, and with the help of events such as APE, artists are allowed to "viral" their works, free pamphlets, selling printed material, etc, these are the venues to spreading your work outside of the internet.

I was fortunate to meet Mrs. Matte, whom outside of her professional job as an animator/storyboard artist enjoys her time creating fan comics as well as self-publish her own original stories and ideas to share with fans and enthusiasts alike. When I asked her what it took to become successful in such a field, she said it was to "never give up, and if one company doesn't like the idea, refine it and take it to another" and to keep going, but if it all fails, then take time and rework it, or come up with something even better. It's this "trial and error" process that I mentioned in the "designerific method" idea in my last entry that I think is the key to success in any field.

APE is an excellent venue to go to check out alternative comics and get opinions and critique from other artists, many of which are veterans/seniors in the field and can provide excellent feedback.

for more information, visit their website at http://www.comic-con.org/ape/