Visual vs Symbolic Language

- look of discontent

- hard times

- financially unstable

- financial problems

- consequences

- facial expressions

- reality

- long line

- struggle

- no jobs

- exhausted

- hopeless

- rainy weather

                  The image reflects the problems of the economy. Up front you see a gentlemen with a nice suit on but with a face that resembles the hard times of the period. His facial expression is a look of struggle and discontent with the position he is in. There's a very long line of people that exemplify the reality of the unemployment problem. The guy closest to the viewer in the picture also looks like he is taking a deep breath, a deep breath in response to his situation and the exhaustion that it has caused him. 

Visual Thinking Research

This first puzzle I chose looked simple but was actually very hard. It took me a while to find all 21 squares. For mostly all the squares I used the technique of pattern completion. In a sense this wasn't a pattern but I looked at it as if it was and connected 4 dots to complete a square. I was essentially filling in an incomplete pattern. Another interesting way I came to the correct answer was by the technique of inverse drawing. As I started to draw/find larger squares I realized that these could be duplicated by just drawing the reverse of the one I just found. 

The goal in this puzzle was to identify which illustration consists of a single piece of rope that has its ends joined just by using your eyes. One of them consists of 2 separate pieces as you can see while the other is just one single piece. To be completely honest this puzzle took me a while. You would think any person could do it in a second but even after I figured it out I used a pencil to make sure that I was right. Every time I would visually follow the rope my eyes would be somewhere else by the time I got to the center. I did eventually get it. Like the pulley example McKim used, I visually followed the rope for a reasonable amount of time till I came to my conclusion. I even felt some kinesthetic energy and caught myself moving my finger to the lines of the rope in which my eyes were following.

This was the attempt my roommate had at the first puzzle. He obviously could only find 9 of the 21 squares. I don't think puzzle solving is his forte but after I showed him mine he thought that you couldn't form a square of a different size then those he did in the image above. He informed me that he simply just took his pencil and essentially just connected the dots similar to pattern completion.

My roommate actually wrote his explanation on the paper. He attempted to do it visually but failed to solve it and then took the easy way out by just tracing the rope with his pencil.

Feature Hierarchy and Visual Search

          This is a screen shot of "Supremes" online shop. Supreme is a huge street wear clothing company that has now been around for over sixteen years. Supreme is my favorite clothing company for many reasons and has never let me down every year as they introduce there new lines. Supreme is well known as being the top street wear clothing company in the industry and has came to be very influential in my design work and in my desire to create a clothing company. There whole website is based off of simplicity similar to the clothes they manufacture. The use of color in this screen shot highlights the Supreme logo and makes it the first thing I acknowledged on the page, known as a color feature channel. This feature led my visual search then towards the assortment of skinny glimpses of the products they are selling. What I found to be very smart was the use of these small glimpses at the clothes because it makes you click on more of the items. When you click on one of the images it will take you to a new page where you can see the product in a larger scale. Basically the small pictures on this beginning page makes the customer view more products because of curiosity which will ultimately lead to more products being sold. The feature hierarchies in this image basically only apply to the red logo at the top which stands out so much because of the sites white background and then the assortment of small skinny pictures of the clothes. I say this because the rest of the page is so simple, even the text they use below the scroll bar. This ultimately was a great decision in design because it allows the viewer to focus on just the clothes. Overall this page uses one of the most or most powerful feature channel of color to attract the viewer to certain aspects of the page such as the clothes and logo in this example, ultimately setting up a visual pathway to the main focus of the page, the clothes.

Screen shot from: http://www.supremenewyork.com/

Top-Down Visual Processing

            When in need for an image to describe top-down visual processing, I thought it would be very helpful to use an image that demands completion. Ware describes the top-down process as being "driven by the need to accomplish some goal"(P.12, Visual Queries) and with this image my eyes move around in the order of my action plans that need to be achieved. Every look I take, if I was in the process of making the actual burger, is goal oriented. For example, if the ground beef was cooked I would immediately grab the cheese but also look for the buns ahead of time in order to be ready to place them into the toaster. When we talk about eye movement, mine would consist of focusing on the products that need to be attended to first. Some may have different eye movements because of different goals. Ware describes this as being, "goal-directed eye movements"(P.32, Week 2 lecture, Ware,Visual Queries).

Works Cited

1.Ware, Colin. "Top-Down." Visual Queries. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. Print.