Text Con
Using a projector, graphic overlays take the same setting and alter our interpretation of the content. These images are intended to be compared and should be thought of as a series. All visual content was captured through the camera and composed in photoshop in order to gain a full range of tonal exposure from light to dark. The comments beneath are an interpretation of how the context can change meaning.
Connotative: Art can be anything if the artistic license encourages irresponsibility. There is freedom to choose how things are presented.
Denotative: The painting is placed on the wall as someone thought it was a good object to show off or share. Living room environment.
Prototypical: Need a degree to create art.
Constructionist: The spotlight focuses on the painting and the text suggests the artist is free to express what they want.
Categorical: Art on a wall in a home. Fine art is difficult to understand.
Connotative: Art is for consumption and created for purchase. Losers do not get paid.
Denotative: Winners get paid but only when the customer is happy.
Prototypical: Artists will work for cheep… What is the value of art?
Constructionist: Instructions on how to consume the imagery
Categorical: Machine like. Artists are kept down through low pay with high sacrifice.
Connotative: Art in a room adds to the experience. Art is a healing element
Denotative: Calm feel to the environment.
Prototypical: Ease of viewing when in the home. Like the art enough to see it every day.
Constructionist: The calm feeling of being comfortable in your own house.
Categorical: room for sitting in should have art. Art belongs on the wall.
How these images came to be:
Meredith Davis discusses in Graphic Design Theory how design is responsible for connecting meanings between content and context and some of the environments that occurs in. For this post I will focus on these three subtopics of chapter three.
Fit Between Form and Context
The Scale of Context
The Cognitive Context of Design: How We Are Alike and Different
Nobel Prizewinner in economics, Herbert Simpson, described design as “action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Designing for a specific environment produces a design that may not be suitable for all environments. It is important to keep perspective when designing though the financial backing of design tends to affect the product or message. The more specific a target is for a design determines the design in several ways, such as the medium and where it is placed or intended for interaction. It is important to keep coming back to the preciously established points a design needs to encompass.
The scale of context refers to both the audience or intended receiver and the scope to which it is displayed or engaged. At the top there are communities, the larger whole that is comprised of systems, which are made up of products, that are derived from components. It is the responsibility of the graphic designer to realize they design on multiple levels. It may just be a book but they must understand the use of that book and the environments it will exist in. The example of Amazon as a company is a system and their existence affects how other systems such as researchers at universities and bookstores conduct operations. This interconnectedness of design is present from basic components all the way up to communities.
The cognitive context of design refers to how we we engage subject matter and what methods of understanding are best suited for various individuals. “Much of our cognitive perception and processing of visual stimuli has its origins in the biological world and survival responses” (P. 62). The idea behind this connects all of humanity but it is the cultures within humanity that deny the ability for a universal design. This forces designers to take the approach of creating something for specific cultural subjects and relies on Gestalt principles. German psychologists in the early 20th century investigated the perceptual organization of stimuli…”to establish an objective science for making sense of the relationships of human perceptions and the physical world. (p 62).
Gestalt means configuration in German and lends to the idea of perceiving patterns over singular elements. Principle of proximity, similarity, continuation, and closure are the basic structures the human mind observes and can be used to create stronger and more impactful design. Fixations and saccades make up the navigation of a picture plane or environment, where the fixations are places your eye stops, the saccades are comprised by the rapid scanning between fixations. This can be observed in how we scan text and the various structures of letters combined in certain orders produces a shape–one that can quickly be processed with meaning. How we navigate a picture plane affects how we digest or interpret the content.
The idea of emotion in design is another way the context of the message can be delivered to specific groups of people. Visceral emotion, or the tugging at the instinctive nature of the situation, is just one type of emotion we experience with design. There is also behavioral emotion and reflective emotion.
