Vietnam's poster

This is the poster that I see on Luong Dinh Cua street. It is used to commemorate 62 years since Uncle Ho proclaimed the declaration of independence on September 2,1945. The poster is pretty impressive as it uses red and yellow, the flag's colors of Vietnam, as the main primary colors. The first thing I notice on this board is its wide red part. Thought it's simple, I can see the expectation of a developed country by the images of the pigeon flying to the city, where there are only modern buildings and skyscrapers.

playing with font

First, I chose a text that I wanted to apply font for. Then I tried using many fonts to find the most relevant one for my text "help".Edo

Paint Peel MF Initials
Later On
Weathered BRK

I thought Later On is the most suitable one because of several reasons:

Foremost, I chose the sans serif font since it can express the unbalanced feeling of people who need help.
Second, not similar to those font above which have thick strokes, Later On font has a very thin stroke that can also represent the weakness of the victims.
Finally, if you look at the font carefully, you can see that the stroke are not straight and smooth. It looks rough and corroded, that connotes the difficult and disastrous conditions of the victims.

blending layers

Though this is not the first time I use layers, I always have troubles when using many layers at one time. In this image, I want to make fire around the eye, but it’s hard to do that. First, I used different cloud filter and red color to create a red color around the eye. Then, I chose hard light blending for the eye layer which is above the filter layer. It creates a pretty good effect for my purpose. However, the fire occupies just half of the eye. After that, I also did the same thing with a reverse side to make the fire occupying the rest one. But the result is not as good as I want, no matter what I do with the second filter layer. Finally, I can just do the image like this:

stealing metaphor

When the teacher asked me to find a metaphor stealing, I really had no clue what it is. However, I still looked for some images with several key words which have the same meaning with stealing. Finally, I thought of plagiarism is also a kind of stealing, a stealing of intelligence. I found this drawing at www.history.ucsb.edu/.../classes/plagiarism.htm . I started to look at carefully the picture to found the idea of a powerful sentence. I saw one hand in the top book was taking a piece of paper of the bottom one and vice versa, another hand in the bottom book was also taking a paper of the top one. It looks like if we steal some one else 's idea, one day that person would do the same thing to us. Furthermore, I found that two hands and books here has created a closed circle. So I decided to use the sentence "The circulation of cause and effect" to warn people not to stealing some body 's things. It is not good for other people, and also not good for you either. Moreover, the radial blur effect behind the text represents for the constant movement of causality. "It you do harm to ones, soon you will get a worse result back".

causality

This is assignment I made for DIM1 course. The teacher asked me to choose one picture, make a little change and then put it on a T-shirt. The original image that I chose doesn't have a shadow on the foundation of the house. First, I looked at the picture carefully and I thought of its possible meaning. After that, based on that meaning, I added several elements to strengthen the meaning.

In life, people usually want to satisfy themselves and try to reach their ambition by any methods. Those who are sunk in ambition will be also punished and wretched by their dreams. This is the reason why I name the picture CAUSALITY which means the principle of cause and effect. The girl is imprisoned at the corner of the wall is the effect of her action which is painting the floor. She is absorbed in painting without saving a place to out. It connotes the ambition of people isolating themselves in a black area where they lose their humanity. In the picture, the girl wants to call somebody for help, but it is impossible. No one can rescue her, except herself. If she wants to go out, there is only way which is she has to step down the red floor which she has just painted. This thing will destroy all the accomplishment that she has tried to do because the floor is still wet. Similarly, it signifies that if people want to escape from all the painfulness, they must give up their aspiration. In this picture, only one place which can give the girl a hope to go out is the little blank where she is sitting. This is only place which has not been painted. At this place, she has time to think about her self. The shadow of the girl is a reflection of all the actions in her mind.

I choose the bright green color for the T-shirt to represent a hope. At the time people think about themselves, they will also have chance to create a way to escape.

The text “CAUSALITY” is in a simple font which is very suitable for the meaning of this picture. The stroke is bright red which connotes the cause, which is shown in the picture through the red floor. The text is filled with dark red which is fairly similar to the shadow of the girl in the picture.

gestalt practice

In the title of this article, I use both continuance and proximity for the text "Sex" and "Life".

logo design

Recently, I had just finished the logo for my mother's flower shop. Its name is Minh Thu. As the word "Minh" in Chinese characters is the combination of two words "Sun" and "Moon", I want to use their symbols to design the logo. In the concept of yin-yang, the Sun belongs to yang due to its hotness; and the Moon is yin. So I created the images of the sun and the moon look like yin and yang.

This was the first version that I made so it looks very simple. The word "Thu" in English means autumn. After a long time being far away of summer, autumn is the season of gathering. Thus, the moon and the sun become attached to each other. I made them to weave together in order to create a leaf, which is the representation of the fall season. I chose red and yellow cause they are the colors of sun and moon, and also the primary color of autumn, the season of leaves falling.
However, I felt the logo was too simple that would make the viewers bored. Moreover, it has not expressed the slogan that I made for my mom's shop, "We carry your feelings". So I tried many other ways to fix the logo so that it not only shew the name of the flower shop but also expressed the quality that we served customers.
I tried rotating the images with differences angles.
Finally, I decided to stick the tails of two images together, like this:

Can you see the image of the letters "M" and "T", which are the acronym of the text "Minh Thu"? I felt pretty satisfied with the way I arranged the images. When I asked my brother for advice, he said that he also liked the new one, and he also realized it looked like a blossom flower. I also changed the color of the moon to a brighter yellow to make the logo fresher.
Nevertheless, there is something missing in this design. I had not still expressed the slogan in the design. I repeated many times the sentence "we carry your feelings" in my mind. I always thought how I could symbolize this slogan and put it in the logo. Lastly, I chose the image of the wheel to represent the word "carry".


Putting two circles under the flower not only represents the slogan "we carry your feelings", but also expresses the property of yin-yang, which is yin always has yang and yang also has yin. Furthermore, there is also other meaning in this logo. Yin and yang are always in constant movement and alteration. Our service to customers is like this characteristic of yin and yang. We always change flexibly so as to serve consumers with our best quality. In this final design, I altered the colors of moon and sun. The reason was when I asked my father for advice, he said that red and yellow were even warm colors, it would be not very nice if we put these two colors together. I thought he was right. So we tried to use other cool colors such as green, blue and violet. Finally, we chose violet. And when I chose purple, I also switched the color of sun and moon together. Since the moon has cold characteristic, it is more suitable with purple; and the sun has hot characteristic, so it should be yellow. Actually, purple is not definitely a cold color. It is a neuter one. Nonetheless, if it is placed besides with yellow, it will become cold. On the other hand, violet is also the color of romance, which is the property of autumn.

moon

My idea is based on Vietnamese culture and fairy-tale.

By the first time looking at the moon, you can see (but of course not clearly) the shape of a man sitting under a tree, and his gesture looks very sadly. The reason relates to a very famous fairy-tale of Vietnamese people. I want to tell you briefly this before explaining the picture.

Once upon a time, there was a woodcutter named Cuoi. One day, he went to the forest and accidentally found out a strangle tree. An old man told him that it was a precious tree which could bring the dying back to life. Then, that one also advised him not to water this plant by dirty liquid, or it would fly to the sky. With his sweet heart, he used the tree's leaves to rescue dead people in the village. However, at a day, due to the oblivion of his wife, she watered the tree by unclean water. By the time that the plant had just left the ground, Cuoi returned to his house. Seeing the precious tree was flying, he tried to grab it and hoped he could drag it down. Nevertheless, it continued to move up. Finally, the young man flied with his tree to the moon.
Since that time, he stayed there and could not never return to the earth.

I want to use the image of the moon to represent the remembrance of the young man of his native land. The pictures of the waxing moon to the waning moon in the background of the circle symbolize a very long time that he lives at the moon, and his wish to return to the earth elapses day by day, month by month.

Also, in this picture, you can see the images of the man and the tree are made from hundreds of small pieces. They are the pictures and photographs of the activities on the mid-autumn day, a traditional festival of Vietnam. The moon on that day is perfectly round, and people from the earth can see the image of Cuoi and his tree the most clearly.

You may ask me why this tree has no any leaf. This is because at the time it flied to the moon, it has just released only one leaf in a year. The leaf falls to the ocean and becomes a precious medicinal herb for dolphins (this is also the reason why dolphins are long-lived).