Images are very important in todays digital world. They communicate an idea in a way that is understandable to everyone, as they do not require a specific language. Especially in the younger generation, people prefer to look at an image rather than look at text. This is why social media is so popular among young people as it is mostly dominated by images with little text. There are 2 different types of images that are used to communicate information.
Illustrative - This includes pictures, photos, drawings and other forms of art.
Diagrammatic - This includes charts, diagrams, graphs and other information based images.
We will be doing a project for each, for illustrative I will be creating icons and designing a music app UI. For diagrammatic I will be creating a dashboard for my day-to-day life.
Using imaging to communicate information allows designers to really push the limits when it comes to getting their message across to people. In class we looked at some designers who use images to communicate their ideas/products to people. Images bring out emotions that sometimes words can’t describe, and this is why so many people love art simply because of the emotions that it brings out.
Even thousands of years ago, people found ways to image what they were thinking or what they saw. These drawings are from Africa and southeast Asia thousands of years ago, before macs, computers, and even pencils and pens. Inside of humans are an earnest desire for creativity, so it is not surprising that people in ancient times used scratching or carving to create these drawings. I think it is cool how we can look at these basic drawings and know exactly what they are. It is also interesting to see where imaging came from and how far it has come.
Paddy Donnelly is a local illustrator from the north coast, and his designs are very cool. He is most well-known for his children's book illustrations. His illustrations are very colourful and bright, and they represent the fun and playful aspect that children’s book should have. I love the way that although that the final designs are done digitally, they still look natural and he still gives them a hand drawn effect. He definitely makes the characters seem interesting and I’m sure if you read the books then his illustrations would help you emphasise with the characters better.
Quentin Blake is another children’s book illustrator, and is one that I personally love as he was the illustrator for Roald Dahl, who’s books I read a lot as a kid. His illustrations are a bit different to Paddy Donnelly’s as his are a bit more robust looking which is very iconic and recoginsable to so many people who have read Roald Dahl books. Quentin’s illustrations made reading the books more enjoyable and definitely brought life to the books. His illustrations have a very unique style and the fact that he is able to keep to this style consistently shows how much of a great artist he was.
Jon Hicks is an English designer who has his own design studio named HICKS.design. He has designed pieces for lots of global companies such as Apple, Disney, Skype, and Spotify. One of his designs that really stands out and intrigues me is his motorsport iconography that he made for a major broadcaster. As a Formula One fan, I can really appreciate this work, as I understand all of the icons and what they correlate to in a race. His design is super simple and he covers different aspects of a race such as the different types of tires, weather warnings, and also the corners for each track. This is a very cool piece of his work. He also designed the icons for Spotify which is an app that I use on a daily basis so it is interesting to see where these designs came from and who created them
Todays class was very interesting as I learnt a lot about the importance of being able to communicate data using images, and not just text. It is cool how a picture can bring out certain emotions and this is especially true when designing for that purpose, whereas some other images are designed to simply communicate information and that is it, such as the Formula One or Spotify icons.