Week 5: Visual vs. Symbolic Language

Separation, confinement, jail, blue-collar, working class, disgust, despair, determination, drive, disbelief, impatience, waiting, hot day, long day, many people, men/masculine, want, hope, poor, sweat, life, struggle, disorganized, crowded, and fear.

Four indian men stand behind wrought iron bars waiting in a crowd on a sunny warm day.  They are all men dressed in most in light-blue button up shirts, light enough to fend off the heat.  None of them are looking at the camera and no one is wearing any jewelry. Each man shows a different emotion. Front and center a man in grey grasps a bar with a hand rough and worked.  He carries a look of determination.  Behind him on the left is a man in a pale blue shirt partly unbuttoned with a look of disbelief.  Right of center stands a man also in pale blue, sun light shining on a face that wears disgust and dispair. And lastly in fron far right is a short man in blue showing hope his teeth in almost cracking a smile.

Week 4: Visual Thinking Research

The first puzzel was a 3-D matching game. Bee was very adamant that she was not good at this sort of thing and simply guessed. And she totally guessed correctly!  ...lame...

With the first puzzel I on the other hand painstakingly went through each image rotating the thing in my mind to figure out the angles that each view was coming from, this took very long.  Because it was 3-D the "quick" way of matching by seeing the 2-D pattern as a whole would not work.  Still I missed an important detail with the shading of the boxes in C.  

The second puzzel Bee went through counting each triangle until she hit 30...then she gave up, mainly because she couldn't decipher her chicken scratch anymore.

With the second puzzel I yet again showed little aptitude.   First I counted the smaller triangles and then traced out the larger triangles.  In the end I missed the biggest triangles, which I of course saw as soon as Bee said there are over 30.  

Week 3: Feature Hierarchy and Visual Search

I am interested in game design, so I chose the battle interface to the game Puzzle Quest developed by Infinite Interactive.  Following the Feature Hierarchy the first thing that pops out are all the colors of the various orbs in the center of the screen the, followed by the less vibrantly colored shapes, the  skulls, stars, and coins.  Next are the portraits on eiher side of the game board, mainly the bright orangy glow behind each of their heads.  Then I follow the sort of ladder of words and stats leading down to a list of spells with various colors and shapes matching those on the center board.  The idea being to match the shapes and colors with each other by 3 of a kind or more.  The Motion Hierarchy holds a pointer connected to the mouse and with it you see what you can move around on the game board.  Also as you match colors and shapes, the pieces disappear and new ones fall down and a light blinks by the portrait of the player who earned points and matching skull draws lightning to the foe doing damage.  Lastly the Spatial Hierarchy is apparent with the empty spaces below the spells where more spells could be added as the player character gains levels.  I enjoy the game and found it to be pretty intuitive.

Week 2: Top-Down Exercise

I found a website designed by Lunawebs.com for the commercial interior design firm Inside Out.
The first thing your eye is drawn to the bright green couch.  From there it saccades between the various items that match the green color of the couch.  The eye follows a scan path from the "inside out" logo at the top left, back to the couch, to the chair in the bottom right, and eventually linking to the "Think Green" just below the couch, left of center.  There is some fixation on "Think Green" which sends the eye back through the scan paths in search of green fixating on the chair and the phrase below it "product showcase" for another clue to the site.  The eye then scans back to "Think Green" and the phrase below which explains the company moto and below that a short list of the brands they carry.