Dangerous Design

       When I think what is dangerous design, it is not something that designer has failed. It is the design that we already existed and people have using it for a long time, the high heel shoes designed for women.

       Why women like to wear high heel shoes? There are couple reasons: wear high heel shoes can heighten the height and make legs look slim; wear high heel shoes is important for women enter some party or meet; in addition, high heel shoes means fashion and beauty. And the higher heel is better looking in most people’s mind. But is it really beautiful? When you see a pain expression show on a girl’s face because she wear a pair of high heel shoes more than 5 hours, or a twisted feet in the shoe, I do not think that is the symbol of beauty.

And the most important reason not to wear high heel shoes is danger. I know one of my friend went to hospital to healing her strain on her tarsal because she tripe her feet on her 6-inch high heel shoe. Add, more and more models refused to wear over 10-inch high heel shoes walk on the stage; they do not want to fall.

       Actually, any shoe with more than a two-inch heel can be dangerous. I will recommend people wear some shoes with wide heel shoes, it can reduce the pain and safer because the weight is distributed across a larger surface area.

       Overall, I will say wear a pair of comfortable and safety shoes also can be beautiful.

Future city

       MVRDV is architecture and also a design office. They have been helping nature and climate become better for the last 15 years. I was fascinated by one exhibition, which is Green Project- China Hills. Because it would truly improves our environment, and benefits our society.

       It is a scale model of a future Chinese city which offers alternatives to the current urbanization in China. In recent years, the growth of Chinese economy is increasing very fast, and a huge number of population moves to cities. This economic change results in enormous urbanizations, air pollution, and thickly populated. Most of the urban developments are not able to solve the problems.

In the exhibition MVRDV represents the possibilities on this project. The design of the building shape is inspired by terrace. Therefore, it huge increases the space needs in the city, it can let a limited city space become unlimited. And also can planting trees and plants between each level to decrease the air pollution, and people can breathe fresh air in the building.

      The vision of future city can be a symbol for a new generation landscape city. It is industry and human technology balanced with nature. The three dimensional city is poised to envision an ideal living environment and future urban ecology. The project concerns the depletion of land and energy resources. As a utopia project, from which future urban planning programs can draw inspiration and as an exhilarating of social reformation. I would like to see the future city design idea becomes real in the future.

picture site: http://dornob.com/eco-friendly-urban-center-sustainable-city-of-the-future/

An analogous color cup

   I don’t think designs have to be big, because I like every little piece of creation around us. Just like this Christmas decoration cup, a Starbucks coffee cup, it is covered with many drawings of Christmas trees. There are only four colors on this cup, but when I look at it for the first time, I think there are many colors painted on it. This four colors scheme based on analogous colors, green, green-blue, light blue, and dark blue are colors which are side by side on a color wheel. In this cool color emotion, people more likely have harmony and calming feeling.

       According to Josef Albers’s book, Interaction of Color, he mentioned the each person see color or think a color in different ways. Even two people look at a same color on a paper in the same time, the color in their mind may be different. If we have a group of color composition, the same color in different base will be different in our eyes. Such us the cup, there is a tree with two type of circles. One is a dark-blue in the middle and light-blue around it, another one is light-blue in the middle and a bright green around it. Therefore, only three colors, but most people think it has four colors. Because the light-blue next to the dark-blue tends to be lighter, and when the light-blue next the green, it becomes lifeless. Therefore, we think there are 4 different colors, but actually there are only three.

   Epically, when I draw this cup, I kept changing the color, and I always got wrong. However, after I read Albers’s book, I understand more about the color theory, and interacting of color. Isn’t it amazing about the different affections of colors?

Beats by dr.dre earphone

    Ergonomic is designed with human body in mind. And human life getting a lot easier relies on ergonomic products. Dr. Dre does not just work on how to sound better on the music, but also add fashion elements in it. I would like to talk about this product in 5 areas: safety, comfort, ease of use, performance, and aesthetics
    The first of all is the safety design of the Dr. Dre. This earphone is designed over-head-earphone style. The headband part of the earphone is made of one piece of bend mental which is very hard and strong. Also inside of the over-head-earphone part is a kind of colloid material that can decrease the impact of damage to head, it can protect our head when we wear it. The cable wire is covered with plastic tube and smooth to the touch, so it is leakage protection. Therefore, the earphone is designed very safe.
    The second is the comfort about this headphone. When people ask which headphone is comfortable, the first come to the mind is always the ear cups. In this design, it has both positive and negative affection on comfort. The good thing is the ear cups and headband part equips with comfort, venting of cushioning can remained dry. However, when I wear this headphone for an hour, my ear would feel hurt and turn to red. In my point of view, I think this design is a little tight for me. The headphone is like pushing really hard on my ears so I can listen to my music closely.  Maybe it is not the same situation for other people, but I will prefer loose it a little bit.
    In addition, this type of earphone is very easy to use. Even people who don’t have many electronic products should know how to use an earphone. Just unfold the earphone first and put on your head. When you put it on, you can change the size by pull down or push up both side of earphone until it fits on your head. A black clipper is on the cable line to change the music volume, and then you do not need to change the volume through the player or computer, just click the clipper next to your ear. If you don’t care about the comfort, most likely you just put it on, connect with the machines, then you could listen to the music.
    For performance, this is a high quality headphone. It has the noise cancelling can reduce 4-5 dB from outside noise.  People can enjoy their music even when they are traveling and in some loud place. The first time I try with this headphone, I can only feel the great bass beat with my heartbeat. However, the con about this headphone is it tends to overpower the weak mid-tones. I think this headphone is perfect for pop music or rap.
    Dr. Dre earphone is designed very success on the aesthetic. Many of my friends want to buy this headphone just because it looks great. I think the headphone is very different from others because its materials and the shape. The shape is very simple and fashionable. Basically the color is white, red and black, mine is white color headphone with red cable line, and color is not too bright but looks very clean. The size is neither too big nor small, and it fits perfect on anyone.
    Overall, Beats by dr.dre earphone is a very well designed product. It is very safe and comfortable, and when you use it, it is very simple. It has new fashion looking and also high quality of the sound. Those designs on the Dr. Dre draw many people’s attention, and it has become one of the most popular earphones.

The Chinese character poster

In our last class, we had a special guest came in. He is Professor Shen, come from Wuhan Textile University, China. He showed us survival posters designed by his students in our class, and it impressed me.

His entire posters are Chinese characters, each word has its meaning, also has the meaning behind it when people design it. One of those posters is “dance”, which is very colorful. It is designed for dance competition. All the colorful boxes line along and the composition of this poster is the Chinese character: dance. The different color boxes mean different dancers on the stage. Each one has his/her own dancing talent.

The last one is “technique” in Chinese. Just one word on this poster, it is written by brush pen and the meaning is a design project needs techniques to achieve the designer’s goal. But the word is very blurry and fuzzy. That means a good design needs to have an idea or creativity. Sometimes people use too much technique that makes the idea is less important. But idea is the most important process of design, not technique. If designer just stick on how to use technique but have no idea of the design, it will never be a good design. Therefore, the poster has double meaning in it; technique is necessary in design process but not important as idea.

I want to thank for Professor Shen, he gives us a great experience to understand design in a different view. The posters are very intriguing and meaningful to me. And I hope he had a great time in UCD.



"dance",Prof. Shen's student's poster

"technique" designed by Prf. Shen's student

Word & Image: Mom’s Cancer

The great comic book called Mom’s Cancer is drawn by Brian Fies. This comic is his true tale of his mom and his families fight together with metastatic lung cancer.

I really like a page in his comic, which is his mom during chemo in a chair and fall asleep. In this moment, there is no conversation or action, and it will keep couple hours. So there is nothing can describe in words or just drawing. But when he combined the words and drawing, most of people can get the idea what is chemotherapy.

His mom is in the center of the drawing, and we can read the “zzz…” from the dialog box upper his mom’s head to understand his mom is in a deep sleep. All the stuff around her, and we cannot pay attention in each one if there is no words. Therefore, each thing has a description pointed to it to help the readers know about how a cancer patient during chemotherapy treatment.

The words and image are very connected to each other. If there only has words, it will be a boring article to read, or just the image, people do not get what she is doing there. But when words and image both appear on this page, people can easily to get her feelings, and how the family’s feeling is.

page from Mom's Cancer

Words & image: my design 113 work

    We can find numbers of things related with words and images. Such as book covers, CD covers, posters, flyers, comics, Ads. In my DES 113 class, we are learning how to combine texts and images, and there is one exercise we did was an image that there was an old couple sitting on a bench in front a seascape. They were facing to the sea, and the weather was sunny and the sea was in beautiful tint blue. Because the image is so lovely and romantic, that is why I chose the Cooper STD, bold font and make the text more vertically scale. After that, I changed the color for the texts. The first letter of each line, I chose four very high saturation and bright colors. For other texts are 100% white but for the “love”, I want to put the pink “love” between the couple and arrange texts left align. It gives the old couple a harmoney atmosphere between them. The texts are parallel with the ground, so it makes the image very balance. The text and image’s percentage is about 50 to 50. Overall, I like what I did in my work. The font was match with the image and also the different color of the text gets more interesting on the image.

Brian Fies’s lecture

In our Nov. 2^nd DES 1 class, we had an unusual lecture. Our professor invented a guest; Brian Fies talks in to our class. He is the writer and illustrator of his two comic books, Mom’s Cancer and Whatever Happened to the World Tomorrow? I am really glad to be his audience at that time, because I can get in to the real comic world. I always wonder how to make a comic book. I like to read comic books since I was in middle school. And now, we had a real comic writer talk about his experience. He uses rock music to explain comic, rock music is combination of music and lyrics. If people just listen the music, it is kind of boring. Or just read the lyrics, it is terrible poetry. But put those together can make people laugh or cry. Therefore, comics are the same way as rock music, combination of words and pictures.

When he talked about the book cover of mom’s cancer, which is interesting and also hard to do. They made many kinds of book cover, different pictures from the book, different combination of colors, type fonts. After they chose from many pictures, they decide to use the picture of his mom’s side face in the hospital. I think this is a very successful book cover and it worth their effort.

Brian Fies talked lots useful things about comic design in this class. Also I had more interest in comic after his lecture.



Mom's Cancer's book cover by Brian Fies



Resource Furniture: Italian-Designed Space Saving Furniture

Because the connection of the world. The idea of designing something for a different community or a different part of the world, it is becoming less problem.
In America, you will never image a family people can live in a tiny apartment. It is a very common sense that people live in a tight space in China or Japan. So there is one Italy Furniture Company can solve this kind of problem and support people with a better life.
Resource Furniture is basically a furniture company, but it is also a design company. They specializing the space saving furniture. People not believe they can live in a 200 square foot studio with bed room, living room, and study room in it, until they see their products. Resource Furniture can make it come true. Each Resource furniture can create at least double space in the limited size room. People do not have to worry about they need to buy a larger apartment or house for their family, because all those furniture can fit in a tiny apartment. Resource furniture is very functional also it is easy to learn how to use it. Such as the desk & bed composition, you just need to use fingers to pull on the side and the bed to slide down, and the things can remain on the desk and goes to the floor. Then it transferred from a desk to bed.
Resource Furniture’s idea is taking vertical space to give people more comfortable in a small living space, and saving space in the future, and it also can save the energy of heat or AC in apartments.
Resource Furniture is a good design. Because it is innovative, useful, make people to understand the product, and design consistent in every detail. It changes the way to live, and getting better.