Andy Warhol

I always enjoy Pop Art and especially Andy Warhol and his art works.

But what I’m thinking now is that, if Warhol himself actually lives in current time, he will definitely be sued for copyrighted law. After all, the photographs he uses for his montages ain’t free, and they ain’t taken by himself either ^^.

Andy Warhol’s famous Marilyn

Never mind what I’m saying, this is just a random thought blablabla…

***I’m in holiday now, enjoying my semester break and lunar new year festival.  All the best for you guys :*

Linh 2009

Content in Design

“When it comes to design, the issue of content is that, you have to make content the issue.”

Inspired by feedback of from Magdalena Long
A result of Assignment 1 – Design & Communication

My writing paper

A discussion about

Major factors influencing the role of the designer in advertising communication

Prepared for:
Ms. Magdalena Long
Lecturer
RMIT University
Prepared by:
Do Thuy Linh
Group 1
Content Design Project

Advertising has existed long enough for its role in society to be clearly perceived. Nowadays, from watching TV, reading a newspaper, surfing the internet, seeing posters hanging along walking streets… we are naturally finding ourselves becoming the audience of advertising. Companies know how to use advertising effectively to promote their products  become incredibly successful, bringing along tons of cash and profits; As a result, the role of designers in advertising industry has never been considered as much important. Thanks to the mass-influence characteristic of advertising, an advertising designer holds a binary position of both the creator and the audience of what he/she is making. In this research paper, under the view of a student studying design, I want to discuss about the factors that may influence the role of designers in advertising communication.

Generally speaking, all the factors that affect the role of a designer can only be either internal or external issues. Firstly, inside factors are lying internally in the designers, coming from their head, mind and soul. For example, the designer’s responses for questions  such as what type of designer they choose to be, what kind of project they want or don’t want to do… When facing a new project, a designer has to consider and decide if he/she would involve in the work or not. The explanation for this is the fact that not all adverts were made with good purpose; their actual and final destination is to bring back benefit to the clients who have paid for the process of making adverts. For examples, products like cigarettes, alcohol, drugs or violent toys for children should be seriously considered before taking part in. Many designers claim that if they do not take the work then somebody else will and using it as excuse for taking all the offers they receive. By doing this, they may do not realize or just ignore the truth that their works may cause bad effects to the consumer society where they designers themselves being part of.

In an article by Michael Bierut named “The world in two footnotes”, the author has inherited an idea from Nick Bell and discussing about two popular types of designers: “agents of neutrality” and “aesthetes of style”. By choosing the type they want to pursue, designers have chosen their roles in the process of advertising communication. Becoming agents of neutrality, designers pass the authorship of the message to their clients where they only act as a tool to transfer message to the audience. Doing this, the designer put themselves in the passive position where they actually have no voice in their works, their role become smaller and can be influenced by any other elements in the communication process. Besides, designers want to become “aesthetes of style” considering themselves as the authors of the adverts, clients are just one who gave them the topics for their works. The designers in these cases have bigger roles in the process, however, subjective roles, where they take responsible for everything related to the outlook of the adverts they are doing.

However, both types of above designer’s roles can not be seen as model one because their passive or subjective characteristics. The reason is that, author of the message in both of the cases is either client or designer, which means, designers are following an old communication process inherited from Shannon and Weaver’s communication model, where a process of advertising communication be seen as the technical model illustrated in below image:

Applying this model to advertising communication, a client can be seen as the information source. Their aim is to make the audience become interested in their product (the message). In order to do that, a transmitter, which is advertising designers will create adverts to persuade the audience to adopt the product of the company. By following this old model, the role of designers, which has been discussed above, can either be passive or subjective. Advertising communication is a special type of communication, where we will never know if a project is working without feedback from the audience. Actually, the success of an advert is measured not by its outlook, but the practical sales of the product after the adverts are out of the market. By using the model of Shannon and Weaver, the audience, who should be the most important element in the process, is now considered as light as the destination in the linear process, as a result, they are have little influence to the designer than they should.

The role of the designer can only become objective when they know that they are creators of their adverts, but the audience is the author of the message their adverts transfer. In order for this to happened, instead of simply following the Shannon and Weaver’s model, designers should also consider semiotic aspect in communication. By knowing that different types of audience can have different behavior and understandings toward a message, by taking care of aspects and issues such as the audience demographic, political, cultural influences… designers can make sure the audience knows what they are trying to say and persuade them in a right way to get the best impact.

In conclusion, major factors that can influence the role of designer in advertising communication can come from either inside or outside of the designers. The most important inner factor seems to be the designer’s choice of how they want to work as a designer, and the most important outer factor is everything related to the audience and their understanding of the message. The role of a designer in advertising communication can range from passive, subjective to objective depending on their own choices when involving in an advertising project.

Reference:
Baldwin, J. & L. Roberts (2006) Visual Communication: From Theory to Practice, AVA Academia
Publishing, Switzerland.
Beirut, Michael (2004) The World in Two Footnotes: Are you an Agent of Neutrality? Or are you an Aesthete of Style?, viewed on 11th November 2008.
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000216.html
Chandler, Daniel (1999) Semiotics for Beginners, viewed at 13th November 2008
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html
Chandler, D (2000) The Transmission Model of Communication, viewed at 13th November 2008
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html
Bennett, A (2006) Design studies: theory and research in graphic design a reader, Princeton
architecture press, New York.

** Afterall, have to admit that, content design project is one of the most interesting classes I have ever taken ^^

Quotation

“..The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”
ROLAND BARTHES, The Death of the Author (from Image, Music, Text, 1977)

[photos] Cheese cakes

Omg~~ Who don’t love these huh XD

Totally in love :X I want these cakesssss!

New York cheese cakes :”>:”>

One of the reasons why I always wanna go to NYC

Talking about the photos, I think it’s never been easy to take such delicious looking shots like this.

And ’bout me, I am sinking in Content design project final assignment, and tomorrow is the deadline anyway..

Good luck to me.

Yum Yum~

Collection of lovely Japanese/Korean emoticons

Expressing emotions:
(^_^) = smile

(^o^) = laughing out loud

d(^_^)b = thumbs up (not ears)

(T_T) = sad (it’s a crying face)

(-.-)Zzz = sleeping

(Z.Z) = sleepy person

\(^_^)/ = cheers, hurrah

(*^^*) = shyness

(-_-); = sweating (as in ashamed)

(^_^);; = sorry! my mistake

(?_?) = nonsense, i don’t know

(^_~) = wink

(o.O) = surprise

v(^_^)v = victory

(>^_^)> = hugging

(>^_^)> <(^_^<) = hugging each other (^o^)

Animals:
>))))’> = a fish

>))))’><’((((< = kissing fish (^o^)

<’)++++< = a fish bone

Vm~ = a fox

() () = a rabbit
(^.^)

(^(oo)^) = a pig

(‘v’)
(( )) = a bird
-”-”-

()()() ()()()
(-(-(-.-)-)-) = rabbit gang

= = = = :} = a snake

Things:
@}-;–`– = a rose

>(/////)< = a candy

=]::::::> = a sword

—E = a fork

Basic examples
^_^ or ^.^ smiley
~_~ or ~.~ content
`_^ or `.^ or ¡¢_^ wink
>_< or >.< angry
^o^ excited
\\^o^/ very excited (raising hands into the air)
*_* or *.* starry eyed (amazed)
-_- or -.- annoyed (trying to hide annoyance)
;_; or ;.; crying
T_T or T.T flowing tears
o_O or O_o or O.o or o.O surprise
O_O or O.O big surprise
@_@ or @.@ confused

Complex examples
=^.^= blushing, or a cat face (mischevious)
<<@_@>> drunk with vertigo
…~*.*~… girl with braids
~~~~>_<~~~~ weeping horribly
^_^; or ^.^; small sweatdrop (embarrassed)
^_^U or ^.^U huge sweat drop (anime-like)
^_^a scratching head=^.^= blushing, or a cat face (mischievous)
~~~~>_<~~~~ weeping horribly
^_^; small sweatdrop (embarrassed)
/*^_^*\ or /¡Æ^_^¡Æ\ Sailor Moon
<(^_^)>,(>^_^)>, often repeated to indicate dancing.
\(^o^)/ translated as “Wa–i!” or “Wow!” (very excited) – historically was “banzai!” The ‘\’ & ‘/’ are arms in this case.

Credit:

this link

and this link

High dynamic range imaging

Long, my friend, has just introduced me to this “new” ( to me ) type of images – HDR – High Dynamic range photo.

He had made some examples which look so good I have to put them here for inspiration ^^

The noise in images is because of 1. his point and shoot cam 2. his no previous experience in using Photoshop editing this kind of photo ( this is also his first attempt trying to make HDR images ^^;;)

Basically, as he tells me, to make these images, you have to take photos of the same view plenty times (in these cases, 13 times for each final photo^^ ) in different levels of brightness. After collecting all the raw photos you open Photoshop software and merge all of them together in one and here come the results. ^^ I think the process is quite complicated and take time but really interesting, I will try to do this myself sometimes ^^

Congrat Long ^o^!

View from Nhat Anh Apartment in Sky Garden

School canteen

School

Breadou Emoticon

I has just bought this cutie bun:

It’s just so cute and smells so good I can’t resist. I should have ordered more :”> Next time I wanna have complete collection ^^

The thing is that: this is not a real bun, but you just can not tell the difference :X And plus it’s Eco-friendly, lovely looking and smelling good :”> I just can’t can’t can’t help myself holding it the whole day after purchase XD ..

The brand named Breadou, they produce Eco-friendly-bread-looking-alike-toys with difference flavor and appearance :”> I heard that the technology producing them is developed under NASA ( National Aeronautics and Space Administration ) Memory Foam but I’m not sure is it true ^^;;

There are many type of breads in Breadou collection.

My bun is put under the breadou emoticon type.

There are totally 6 type of breadou emoticons :

• Happy Coffee Cream
• Honey Bit
• Nottie Nutti
• Vanilla Dream
• Hot n Spicy
• Berry Sweetie

Ain’t them so cute??? XD XD XD XD

Some more photos of different types of bread by breadou

Examples of how to use the “breads” ^^

More information can be found at

http://www.breadou.com/

http://www.theactioncity.com/

facebook group

wordpress blog

[New teamwork project] Solar system research

This is part of my new teamwork project.

Diagrams that I’ve traced recently ) There are plenty more but they are kind of the same so I just upload here two samples

Well.. not really an interesting work (^^..) but thanks to this opportunity I’ve got my Adobe Illustrator using skill level up .

Our topic is “Solar art – the art for a sustainable Future” , I traced the diagrams based on the style and color of the general template below (which has been developed by the team and traced by Nguyen)

Web Link

Viet had cut and coded the web.

Quynh is the one who wrote the content.

Our working schedule ^^

Well I guess we segmented the work well :”> So everything is finished on time ^^

This is also the last assignment in the class Design for Interactive 3 – the last fundamental design course :”>

2 more assignment and 2 final tests I can break free from my 4th semester XD

Good luck Linh!!!

[poster] I have AIDS, please hug me (1987)

This poster almost made me cry today..

An inspiration.

I have AIDS, please hug me (1987)

Description:

One of the most recognized HIV/AIDS posters ever produced, this image of a child with outstretched arms accompanied by the message, “I have AIDS, please hug me, I can’t make you sick,” has become a worldwide icon in the fight against HIV/AIDS discrimination. Inspired by the experience of Ryan White, a 13-year old hemophiliac with AIDS who was barred from school in 1985 and became a symbol of the intolerance that is inflicted on AIDS victims, this reproduction of a child’s drawing has a disarming quality that works closely with the textual message. This poster reflected the changed tone of the media coverage of AIDS following Ryan White’s courageous battle, which helped shift focus from ignorance and discrimination to acceptance and newfound knowledge of the fatal disease. Designed to evoke compassion, the simple yet powerful message in the poster has subsequently inspired a variety of spin-offs used by international AIDS awareness and education programs.

Creator:

Center for Attitudinal Healing

Source:

Original Repository: The History of Medicine Division. Prints and Photographs Collection.

This image may also be accessed from the Images from the History of Medicine (IHM).

URL: http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/

IHM Order Number: A028344

Publisher:

Center for Attitudinal Healing

Rights:

Reproduced with permission of the Center for Attitudinal Healing.

Credit: this link

MTV Station ID/ Ident

This is a group project.

We need to develop a concept based on the theme we understand about MTV Asia and create a station ID for them.

Our final concept is ” MTV lives everything up”

Well these are the screenshots of the final ident and the movie itself:”> Me and my friend Nguyen did this video in 1 day so please don’t get mad with the stupid stuff and animation. Be positive about the concept please  ) And I think the music is a plus :”> us made good choice lol.

The video is actually very short, only 20s, so … enjoy ~