Poster 1, Progress 1: Fears, Haiku, and Ideation
Starting off this project I had a Haiku to analyse and pull inspiration from:
The Darkness descends
nocturnal beast come to feast
craving for lost souls.
Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-night-descends by Kay, November 2014
From this haiku I pulled 3 key phrases, some of which where more parts of each other than I'd like, but hey, it had a pretty clear theme:
- Fear of the Dark
The fear of the dark is a primal fear which most people have, or rather, people have fears of things, and the dark amplifies them.
I listen to horror podcasts quite a bit, and one of the things that I remember them speaking about that really resonated with me is that we are not really afraid of the dark. We are afraid of what might be lurking just out of sight. Which leads me onto my second idea for a theme. - Fear of Things that You Don't Know
There's always that fear, on a late night, or in a particularly lonely forest, that something is there. Just out of sight. You hear the echos of their footsteps behind you, you feel their eyes on your back, but when you turn, there's no-one there. It's the fear that someone, something, is stalking you, watching you, and you have no idea where it is. Darkness is a good amplifier for this, as it hides things. Is that someone standing at the end of your bed, or just your mind making patterns out of your laundry?
Now this is slightly different from the fear of the dark, as it doesn't always involve things that we can't see. Just things we don't know. So this could appear in the middle of the day. - Isolation
This idea of "lost souls" resonates with the idea of darkness to me in a sense of Isolation. The darkness is isolating, there could be someone out there, but there could just as well be no-one. And, what is a "lost soul" but someone who feels adrift, isolated even amongst people?
After this analysis I drew a bunch of ideas for posters. I was really fascinated by the Gestalt Principles of Grouping, specifically the idea of closure. As that is literally the idea of getting people to create something that isn't there with their mind. Which is what the fear of the dark, and the fear of things that you don't know is all about!
So I started to play around with that, and other, ideas.
My first idea is one of my favorites, a person stands in the middle, with a monster shrouded in darkness looming over them. While the monster isn't actually there, your mind fills in the blanks to create it. It also places the person in-front of the monster, as your mind's eye monster is larger than the person, then gestalt principle of area tells us that most people will see the smaller person in-front of the monster. I also want to play with hierarchy as I go forward with this one.
Now this one played with the idea of closure, and symmetry, as a lot of mine will going forward. I tried to make something vaguely unsettling, a city of people and lights in the bottom corner surrounded by a sea of darkness and 4 lone beacons. Sorry, 3 lone beacons. One has vanished, leaving the pattern of beacons irregular and unfinished.
Here's the one which I went a little farther with, and another of my favorites, drawing it with proper coloring in to get feedback (Not shown here). It uses the idea of closure as well, making these disparate shapes turn into something inhuman standing just behind that door. Yourself shrinking down staring at the flimsy doors standing between you and what is certainly your doom.
I think I might try to revisit this later, when we add different techniques.
This one I'm not so happy with. The real obvious nature of the missing town pulls me out of the vague feeling that there's something missing. My mind agrees with how the page is presented, and doesn't try to enclose the 5 towns into a pattern. Might also have something to do with their differing building layouts.
Going back to basics, I tried just drawing the closure image from lecture 2, but with something missing, isolated.
And here I tried to expand on that. Adding a before and after, which didn't really work for me.
And for the final experiment I tried making a radial pattern with one line missing. I think it might be better if I could accurately draw it, but such are my limitations.
References:
1. Chapman, C. (2018). Exploring the Gestalt Principles of Design. Toptal Design Blog. https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/gestalt-principles-of-design