The Basic Elements - Logo Design

http://colorburned.com/2008/05/grantfriedmancom_logo_concept_1.html
Dots

In this logo for the website GrantFriedman.com, the designers used dots to catch people's attention.  The use of dots has strong visual power as it grabs people's attention.  The designers also used these dots to form something in a larger scale: the letter G, as in Grant Friedman.  It's interesting that the designers of this logo and website used such basic elements so effectively, since website of resources for graphic designers.

http://symbolphotos.blogspot.com/2010/07/fedex-logo-photos.html
Movement

The FedEx logo has an arrow in the negative space between the capital letter 'E' and the lowercase letter 'x'.  The arrow is pointing to the right and in reading the English language, people read from left to right.  With that in mind, the arrow shows forward movement, which represents the company itself moving forward.  This gives people the idea that the company is moving forward, therefore if we choose this company we will be moving forward as well. We should choose FedEx because our packages will get to where they need to be delivered.

http://www.famouslogos.org/mcdonalds-logo
Color

The McDonald's logo uses the basic element of color to it's advantage.  The logo is in red and yellow.  It has been said that colors can provoke certain feelings or affect moods.  When red and yellow are used together it instinctively makes people think of food and become hungry.  McDonald's uses these "hungry colors" to their advantage by putting it on their logo, which most people see almost daily.

Visual Thinking Research

My solution.

 In this puzzle of visual induction, I tried to find a pattern in each square and tried to make some kind of connection between every other block.  I ended up choosing C because it looks simple as the others but did not have any similarity with the other squares, which I somehow made sense of it at the moment, after looking at the puzzle for 10 minutes.

Evelyn's solution.

I asked my friend Evelyn to help me out on this assignment by doing these puzzles as I did mine.  Her answer was D, after thinking over it for about 5 minutes.  She explained her process of figuring it out by putting all of the squares together, merging the shape, which is why she thought the answer was D.

Solution to puzzle number 1.

Both of our answers were wrong.  Though its hard to imagine the lines were based on numbers, after seeing the answer, it seems obvious.  After showing Evelyn the answer, she told me that she has thought of it but it seems too random to be true.

My solution.

In this puzzle of matching, I tried to match these Tetris shaped blocks by rotating them in my mind.  I also carefully looked at where each block connects to figure out which one of them are identical.  Rotating these blocks in our mind is a common strategy but I still got a few of them wrong.

Evelyn's solution.

My friend, Evelyn, used the same strategy of rotation and made sure of where each block connects is the same as the matching one.  It seems to me that she was more careful on where each block connects with each other and because she was, she finished this puzzle correctly.

Solution to puzzle number 2.

Visual Perception Feature Hierarchy

http://www.bart.gov/stations/

The picture above is the BART map.  For those who has ever lived in the Bay Area or lived close to it should know what the BART is.  The bart map uses simple colors and is easy to look at.  Unlike the New York subway route map, the BART map is not confusing at all.  It displays the hierarchy features with different color routes.  To make it pop out, they disregarded streets or highway that are shown on normal maps.  They just made the Bay Area map into a grey silhouette, placed their colorful routes onto the map, and label the stops they have.  To make sure people knows what trains there are and which trains they can take, they enlarge and bolded the text for the last destination.  They placed medium sized white dots on the routes to display transfer points.  I like this map because it is simple and they only show what is necessary.  Their map looks organized and the colors are well used.  It is a good 2 dimensional design for maps.

Top-Down Visual Processing

http://www.findwaldo.com/fankit/graphics/

This image, from one of many Where’s Waldo books, uses the top-down visual process.  Top-down visual processing usually involves some sort of goal we want to achieve.  For those who are familiar with Where’s Waldo, we know that our goal is to find Waldo.  We instantly fix our eye on smaller parts of the image to find a man dressed in a striped shirt and a snow hat with round glasses and blue jeans.  When playing this game our eyes begin to scan all over the image to find Waldo.  They purposely place red and white striped objects in the images to divert our attention from Waldo. There is so much diversity, we sometimes forget which area we have already scanned or we become unsure of ourselves so we would rescan the same area, possibly several times.  After scanning all over the picture and finally finding Waldo, the reward is that we instantly find him for the next couple of times we play until we forget about it.  When that happens, let the hunt begin.