Two Posts in One Day? What is Going On?!

Very brief post, mainly to show off my first completed design project. The project is known as the 'Black Square Problem' and apparently is a project all design majors will encounter. We were given 6 adjectives and required to create a picture that would convey that adjective or emotion by using only 4 black squares. I actually posted the initial designs on Facebook to gauge how accurate I was and only ended up changing one at the advice of my instructor.

I'll go ahead an post the image first if you would like to take a guess, but don't scroll to far because the adjectives and reasoning are listed below.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I reworked one design, tweaked another and ended up having to completely redo three of them because they had glue spots on them. The adjective are shown left to right, top to bottom as follows:

Ordered
This one is relatively easy to convey. The first design was just four equal boxes forming a larger box shape. Then, I moved on to something that looked like the Purina logo. However, after reading a few of the synonyms for this word, I went with the design you see because it shows motion. It's almost as if they are coming off of an assembly line, all the same and orderly.

Increase
This one was the one the instructor suggested changing, mainly due to the other mostly black design that was the odd man out. The first design started with a small square in the bottom left hand corner. The other three became larger and larger as they moved up to the top right in an arc resembling a parabola. His words were that we were going to see a lot of similar designs and that I should try to use the negative space to show the word. I kind of cheated because I had no idea what to do. By cheating I mean that I googled the word 'increase' and looked at the image results. I saw a whole bunch of arrows and that is when the design you see now came to me.

Bold
This one gave me the most trouble. At first I wanted to use a large square next to a small one, but that didn't quite do it for me. This design was initially an idea for Increase, but when Josh said it made him think of 'adventure' I started thinking about it in a different way. Some people see it as tumbling or falling down a hill, but the bouncing motion created is supposed to convey boldly charging forward  and up the hill. The split responses I got on this one actually told me a bit about the person depending on which direction the squares were traveling to them... A lot more people on my Facebook are pessimists than I thought.

Congestion
Meh, I'm still not really pleased with this one. The synonyms made me think of crowding and tried to cram them into a small space. The angle was meant to make it feel more off kilter than if I had just put the square edges parallel to the frame edges. I don't know, could have been better.

Tension
This one gave me trouble at first, but as soon as I sketched this idea down, I knew it was the one. Tension can be seen a couple different ways. While many of my classmates were viewing it as the physical tension like you would see in a rope, I immediately went to the emotion behind the word. Tension is very negative and I associate many synonymous feelings with it like stress, anxiety, pressure, depression, etc. So, it's meant to be seen as the serene calm of the dark being cracked harshly causing a sort of sting that could be perceived as large or small..

Playful
I got a lot of really good synonyms on this one. Words like bouncy, floating, fun, and others were used by my friends on Facebook. These are all positive and upbeat feelings I wanted associated when looking at this design.

There you have it, finished design project numero uno. It gave me small fits of grief throughout the process, but over all it was pretty fun. Our next project is going to be about balance, but for now, I must study for our design quiz tomorrow. Thanks for checking in!