Week 15 Visual Techniques

Active Techniques: symmetry, complexity, intricacy, flatness, activeness, 

Active Techniques: simplicity, flatness, asymmetry, boldness, unity, economy, stasis

While both of these are indie film posters, they share many visual techniques to convey their messages as well as some distinctly opposite techniques. Together the posters both use flatness to make the key images or shapes pop in the overall poster. With "Beautiful Losers" the flatness is used to draw attention to the outline of the butterfly. The flatness in the "Juno" poster is used to give the image a more "quirky" feel, with the patterned orange and white stripes. The first poster makes use of a few techniques that are very opposite of the other poster. While the first is intricate in design with a large butterfly filled with characters and scenes from the movie, emphasizing the complexity of the story and character while the other poster makes use of simplicity to show the more simplistic nature of both the story and the characters Juno. Similarly the use of symmetry in the Beautiful Losers poster gives the image a sense of grandness and depth that can be associated with the movie. For the Juno poster the use of asymmetry as well as the use of unity in the characters shows a wacky film about put-upon characters. Overall the design of the first poster is to emphasize many people dealing with a large story and conveys a feeling of chaos and grandness, this is done through complexity and activeness and intricacy. On the contrary, the Juno poster's simpler design shows the story of a quirky look at one small story about a handful of people and their lives through simplicity and asymmetry and stasis. 

Week 14 Contrast

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKbQrEQ3FCS8XFUS7pEhYZFDe5vtAZQ1JvGcprBYKp_KlYrUO6xzNXmiOS_vJIAoMCwzpbJDqq-BKTYsJ3BVJ6GaGLV3RwnykJWxf-_hjbg2WE3S63xj6v5StquVErqkDzC5orKNgiQI0/s1600/HAWKEYE2012008_COV.jpg

This is a cover for the new Hawkeye comics (a series I've recognized a few times for good design this year) The most startling interesting thing about the reboot of the title is the artist's decision to take a more minimal approach to his design in both color and line detail. This minimalist style creates very effective high-contrast images. Here the stark contrast of the woman's white skin against the red background makes her shape pop out and is contrasted again by a set of choice black items. Because the issue focuses on a femme fatale character the choice to highlight the gun and the woman's heels is especially effective in emphasizing what this woman is about. Additionally the black gun pointing down draws the eye downwards to the woman's high heels which also point downwards continuing to draw the eyes down to the title of the comic. Overall the use of minimal color creates a lot of contrast which makes for a very striking and effective design.

http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345158e369e20115708ce2cd970b-pi

In general, a lot of early 2000's cover designs were not great. This particular issue of Captain America suffers from a few flaws but here we're focusing on low contrast. The main issue with the lack of contrast is that the colors are so similar in tone and saturation, it is hard to recognize who or what is going on in the image. Captain America's hair and head are too similar in color and the lines sepearting them are too thin to create a proper distinction between them. This is further muddled by the second character's bust behind Cap's head, blending the flesh tones in even further. The low contrast problems are also present on the upper right where the red and white stripe motif of the shield blends unfortunately with the red and white flag background.