Design Challenge 1: I Link, Therefore I Am

Imagery creates meaning

What does imagery mean to me? Imagery is a creative and expressive medium that intrinsically delivers a message. This message may have a symbolic meaning that can be used to persuade a viewer towards a desired belief or lead them to a certain interpretation. It can also be used to tell a story through its arrangement, lighting, colors, or maybe sounds that accompany it. It can especially evoke certain emotions based on its appearance and layout in its presentation.

Imagery can be found anywhere: on television, web pages, walls, magazines, museums, buildings, books, packages; and in subtler ways, such as the fashion in which furniture is organized in a room that can make the entire atmosphere feel more or less welcoming to visitors. How these images are presented affects the message that people take away from it. For example, a poster for a horror movie colored with lighter, more jubilant colors such as pink, light blue, and yellow, with no signs of the darker colors that may reflect the actual content, diffuses the feeling of tension that people would normally suspect about its content in the horror genre, and can even be used to deceive people into believing it contains no aspects of a horror movie at all.

Images can be used to draw meaningful attention towards a subject or actual attention to promote oneself. With the internet today, images can be easily shared all over the world, and creators can get immediate feedback on the message they wanted to deliver. I want to aim to create meaningful images that are received in the way I originally intended. Naturally, every person will have a slightly different interpretation of an image from my own depending on their background and current affairs, so the goal is to pay close attention to all the details featured in the image, perceive it from multiple points of view, and optimize it as much as possible to resemble the intended message accurately.

Currently, I am aiming for a more colorful, simpler, cartoonish art style in the hopes that one day I can expand my skills towards animation, so ideally if I were to showcase my work in a gallery, I would want to make sure the room is brightly lit and painted/furnished with many colors, and displayed alongside with similar styles of art. Darker colors, to me, evoke a sense of mourning that I would rather not have surface while viewing my art. Rather, I would want my visitors to have fun. The message I would want to convey to visitors is enthusiasm and happiness, so that people will walk out in a better mood than when they entered.

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Site creation process

Before creating this site, I mapped out my thoughts on paper in order to document, organize, and make comments on my own thinking process. Each color represents a different type of process.

Website mind-map

I tried to implement as much of this thought process as I could. Some ideas I changed based on the capabilities of this site and my own differing opinion. For example, I thought I needed to use darker colors as a background, but I found that this gave my site a more somber look, so I decided to use lighter colors instead.