Signs and Symbols

This is the first design based exercise in Unit 3, the idea was that you would research existing signs and symbols and images and then use these concepts to create your own symbol for a particular 'thing'

What I did to start off with was research existing signs and sketch basic shapes from them in my sketchbook, feedback from my last Assignment made me realize how important sketching was and I will explain how easier it made this whole task.

This first page was gathering ideas about the 4 different concepts presented in the brief, the ideas was to research each one, even though I was only asked to pick one, this part of the exercise helped a lot as it made me aware of the different techniques used in symbol design and how basic shapes can represent things such as 'disabled access' and 'explosions'. Because the symbol represents the thing in its simplest form it allows the symbol to become more recognizable and easily replicated which makes it 'stick in the mind'. I made a lot of notes surrounding the sketches and gathered ideas such as colours used and thought about what I could use in my final design.

This was an off thought of my sketching process where basically I took the iconic stick figure used in almost every sign and symbol and comically elongated the features such as the limbs and clothing. Now this concept couldn't be used on more serious signs such as danger signs or road signs because it can be distracting or seen to be bringing humor and light to a serious issue. However, it could spice up and bring something different to less serious signs such as toilet signs and throw rubbish in the bin. 

On this page, I also thought of the idea to have a symbol as the head of the person, for example, the running man with the arrow as his head to represent motion and the person with the heart as his head to represent love. As much as I liked this concept it lacked the creativity I wanted to express in this exercise as it just combined two existing symbols into one.

 This was my sketch page for 'love' what I did was try and get down as many different ideas as possible onto the page and what ended up happening was that 9 times out of 10 concepts linked together quite well and I was able to combine certain elements of one design to better another. For example one of my ideas was a person holding a heart and also a hand holding a bunch of flowers. This then led to the idea of instead of the person holding the heart they hold a bunch of flowers but their arms are hunched to resemble a love heart.

These were the two I decided to go with, I feel the one on the right is a stronger design as I think it depicts the idea of two people in love and the idea of love as a whole better than the bouquet design, purely because the other design may be misconstrued as symbolising love as buying gifts for someone. I also asked the opinion of others and everyone I asked went for the same one.

This gets me onto another reason why sketching is so important, what it allowed me to do is come up with and conceptualize a ton of different approaches to the same symbol and finalize on one instead of spending hours in Photoshop coming up with one design that I could've drawn out in seconds on the page. It also forced me to stop deciding too quickly and experiment with different approaches which are exactly how these ideas were born.