Color 1

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. Since color is an important element in graphic design. I'll introduce some good examples of color use around us to you this week and next few week. Hope you can enjoy it. 

Color is everywhere in our daily life. As you open your eyes, you’ll absolutely see at least one color at anywhere. I'm not going to talk about how light works in our eyes or where the color comes from. I'll introduce how color works to affect our emotion, vision, perception even our decision to you.

- Classify with color -

Color coding, which is to use color systematically to choose classification, can let us quickly scan through the information connected to a specific color. With the Taipei metro map demonstrating by different colors representing different routes of  metro, it's easy for anyone to find the way from one station to another if you can read Chinese and English. Next, let's take a look at a monochrome(黑白) version of the map.

I had played some tricks on the metro map and I think it's hard for you to recognize and connect all the route you've known at the first glance. You can try to find all the relationship between routes without looking at the route number, then you'll also find the power of the color. Let's take a look at a little different example.

Besides using color to represent the routes of metro at the previous example, we can also use color to represent other things. The color in the above gif  means the quantity of  rainfall, and with the change of color, it's easy to know where the rain might fall heavily and even the movement of cloud and hurricane.

That's all for today. Next week, we'll see how each color generally means to human, and how it affects our daily life since more and more colors are printed out by human rather than produced by nature.

Typography 2

Hello, welcome back to my blog. Today I'll directly home in to typography and talk about something I think it's important and interesting.


- Serif v.s. Sanserif -

Let's see some examples of serif font and sans-serif font first.

    Serif(襯線體) means the width or the shape of a stroke will change as you write. Also, there may be a small line attached to the end of a stroke. Generally, serif font is easy to read through, more formal and we often choose this style to write an article.

This is the content of calculus textbook.

Sanserif(非襯線體)  means the width or the shape of a stroke will NOT change as you write, and it is seldom attached by a small line. Contrary to serif font, sanserif font is hard to read but it can draw people's attention. So it is widely used for shop signs, topics and advertisements.

This is a poster about music contest.

- Space around texts -

‘Leading’ means the space between row and row. A proper leading can make us read through the whole article easily. However, if the leading is too short , you'll find it difficult to move your eyes from one row to another.

‘Tracking’, means the length of a word. A proper tracking can help you identify the word quickly and correctly. If the tracking is too short or too long, it may take you more time to recognize the word.

If we try to change the tracking of a word, the space between letters will increase equally.

‘Kerning’ is to modify the space between one letter and another to make one word looks more comfortable. For more information please check → #Wikipedia

The above one is the original one, and the lower one has kerned. We can see that the space between A and V is to big, so we change the space between A and V to make it looks better.

This is all for today. Thank you for reading this long article. By the way, because I'm running out of time so I don't have enough time to share my dinner with everyone xdd.

Typography 1

Hello everyone. Before we start today, I would like to show you two pictures.

When I first saw that  shop sign, I found it hard to read it, even a 'mousewritting' one is much easier to read than the shop sign with different colors and all capital words. As we see the shop sign on top, we can find the words are all capital, the respective size of alphabet in a word has different size and color. Hence, it's very hard to verify the word at the first look since we actually recognize the word by memorizing it's 'shape'. Because we still generally convey some information by using texts, the importance of how the words looks like is crucial. That's why we need typography(字體排印學).

It's not difficult to see that the purpose of typography is to make written language(書面語) readable and appealing by arranging the type. There are some tips to let you know how and when to do some arrangement in order to make your layout look more comfortable. I'll mention one today and leave the rest to the next week.


-Size of fonts & space between letters-

Size of fonts often decides which one would be notice first or be emphasized. Just like the topic of the picture above. It's easy to see "The 10 commandments of typography" with the first look. Notice that because the words are all capital so the space between every letter is wider than usual. This can make us easier to read through the topic. So next time when you have a sentence with all capital letter. Remember to modify the space between letter to let it more readable.

As an example, it's much easier to know what my dinner was tonight with the second picture above.


Next time, we'll talk about serif and sans-serif fonts. If you're interest with my silly sentence or my stupid sentence, welcome to my blog next week!

Introduction of visual communication and graphic design.

Welcome back, everyone.

Last week, We've known what's the purpose of design and shown a simple example. This week I'll introduce visual communication (視覺傳達) and graphic design(平面設計) to you. Since I have more information and experience about this two area, I'll talk about it in an easy way and provide some basic concept for you to apply to anything else.

Most of the time, we combine this two together, since we use visual information to communicate with others through the designed graphic such as infographics(圖表),and this two area have lots of overlapped skill and method. As visual communication, we use lots of 2D elements such as color, typography, sometimes combined shapes and lines to convey ideas, feelings, information that we want to represent. As for graphic design, we also use lots of elements and methods to create a cool poster or layout a wonderful magazine cover. It's obvious that visual communication and graphic design work with similar things and have a close purpose.

Next week, we'll start to talk about the elements in graphic design and visual communication, and give you some useful example that you can use in your powerpoint or your art work immediately.

Thanks for reading. See you.