Week 1 - Exercise 1 - Tangrams!

Tangrams are a lot of fun... and I haven't done one for a very long time until we were given it as an exercise to complete in class. Our task was to complete 6 Tangrams 1 for each category we were given. The categories were: Flower/plant, Action figure, Vehicle, Appliance, Animal and a Face!

What I gathered from this task, was that when creating a symbol, it has to be universally recognisable and not complex so it clearly shows the viewer what it is and its purpose without having to study the symbol for too long. So this was a perfect task as you were constricted to using only a certain amount of fixed shapes.

I found this task very enjoyable and a fun way at looking at symbol construction.

Here are my 6 Tangram creations:

Flower/plant


Face



Animal



Appliance



Vehicle



Action Figure

Week 1 - Symbol Style - Direction

My task this week was to find and collect symbols showing "direction" that can be found out and about while people go about their daily lives.

The symbols had to show direction of some form without literally pointing the way with an arrow. These symbols are often looked over by the majority of the population as it is built into our way of life and we wouldn't think twice about it as we glanced at one to show us the way.

What I found a little ambiguous about this task, was that which type of direction did the symbol need to be showing you? Somewhere to go? or directions to do something?

So with that in mind a went out and collected 5 examples of symbols that I believed showed direction without and arrow. Here is what I found: