MA Communication Design and Creative Strategies @ HMKW Berlin
Design and Research with Prof. Dr. Jan-Henning Raff • Winter semester 2021/2022
Pre-attentive perception is a preconscious perception of our surroundings. In other words it refers to a kind of phenomenon in which our brain is stimulated by different aspects around us. It triggers an effect but it does not fully enter our consciousness. Nonetheless, our brain might remember some things like something being there, a shape, a shade, maybe some colour? This shows that even if we are not fully aware of our surroundings, our brain still registers everything. We will never fully realise what it is under the phenomenon of pre-attentive perception. As we get attracted by shape, color and even movement, using pre-attentive perception in design is crucial.
A realistic scenario where we would meet our poster is:
The picture I took of the poster was right in front of the Gropius Bau, where the exhibition takes place. The poster itself shows a painting is displayed during the exhibition and should give an insight of what the exhibition is about. The location of where the poster is displayed is making sense in terms of showing the visitors what kind of exhibitions are taking place so that they can decide whether or not to visit the Gropius Bau.
The human brain is lazy. So we tend to "look" for the simple things in a layout or for the simplest design as our brain tends to look for shortcuts or things it recognizes from somewhere else. Another fact that plays a big role is if we have some sort of emotional connection with what we see, which explains why we tend to look at things that makes us remind of something we already know or we have an emotional connection with. But more on that in the emotions chapter.
The first thing that catches the attention is that there is "something". The bright and dark colours, as well as the dark mass in the center of the poster, play a role in catching the eye of the individual.
The gestalt principles, or also called gestalt theory, are based on the principles that the brain subconsciously forms complex compositions of elements in a design into an organic unit so that the brain can register them more easily. This is due to the fact that our brain works in such a way that it can easily recognize and process structures in our environment.
As already mentioned, our brain tries to see the simplest elements. In this case the two rectangles seem to overlap with the middle of the poster in which the brain can already detect that something else is there but is not sure what. So the rectangles are almost seen as one element even.
The figure-ground principle focuses on how our brain distinguishes between a background, and the different shapes that find themselves that find themselves on that background. But how does our mind differentiate between the background and the displayed figures? Very simple: our brain can not detect a focal point in the background due to its easy and unanimous colour scheme. In contrast, the dark figures, in this case circular shapes, emerge into the foreground.
The proximity principle refers to how close the different elements are to each other. In other words: our brain regroups the shapes that are closest to each other. In this case there are two groups of similar black shapes.
For the similarity principle, our brain groups things together that look similar to each other, regardless of how they were regrouped in proximity. In the poster we can see a similarity by colour and shape with the black circular shaped elements and also by the rectangle orange shapes.
By observing a poster for just a few milliseconds, our brain is not able to retract all the information, but only what seems necessary to put together what is happening in the poster.
The tachistoscope is a device that shows an object or an image for a specific amount of time. We used this device to show our poster to a group of participants, that have not seen the poster prior to the experiment. The poster was shown for only 25ms. The participants were then asked to write down what they saw.
P1: The first person wrote down, that they saw a cottage, a dark orange colour or background, prominent on the upper and lower part of the poster. They also felt like you could see white letters written across the poster.
P2: The second person could detect vertical images with an orange colour at the border. They also wrote down that they could see a figure in the middle of the poster that resembled a train surrounded by green colour.
P3: The third person saw a blue background with two vertical orange shapes, that frames the blue background at the top and bottom. The participant also mentioned, that it reminded them of a movie poster, hence why they thought there was a car of person depicted. They could also see writing at the top and bottom of the poster.
We then put the results into a diagram to discuss about what elements were most and least visible for the participants.
After looking at the results of the eye tracking, it was very clear that the first thing the participants looked at, was the camper located at the center of the poster. Seeing the camper by itself is quite confusing, so that the majority of the participants started looking for additional information in relation to the poster. They then look at the writing in the following order: place (letters in white), date (letters in white) , and name of the exhibition (letters in blue).
In connection to the Gestalt principles the poster and the way the participants read it, works. On the other hand, we learned that the time span, in which we see a poster plays a big role in our perception. If we just pass a poster in the subway, for example, we are not able to retract a lot of information, we can see some sort of shade, brightness, but it´s still very blurry and doesn´t give us the possibility to really see what is going on.
We will study emotions in graphic design in this order:
Being affected by a certain visual element or moment means that, we feel something emotionally for a short period of time. With our poster, we want to focus on how it influences or affects the viewer and whether it does this in a positive or even negative sense.
As for the Gropius Bau poster, we can already tell from the results of the pre-attentive perception chapter that the participants noticed some lettering, the bright colours and something going on at the center of the poster. In this chapter we will put our focus on the emotions, what we feel when we see a poster and to which extend it can affect us, or not.
In graphic design, the viewer is mostly affected by the dynamic, contrast as in brightness or shades, and the colour. But how is this connection or feeling we have towards a design deepened, so that we would even be able to feel it with our body? In my case, the poster gives off a feeling of warmth and comfortability, but maybe it gives another person a different feeling?
The affect grid is a tool that helps us to find out what the affection our poster has on the participants. We compare it with two different grids in which one of them displays the participant's mood before seeing the design, and the mood they had afterwards.
With the results of the affect grid, I found out that my poster doesn't seem to have a major affect on the participants.
Is there any emotional reaction mentally or physically triggered while looking at our poster? The focal point lies on the fact that humans are always looking for elements, motives, expressions that they can relate to, in order to react a certain way. So what do we feel when looking at this poster?
With the eye alone we can see the brightness, darkness and foremost the colour of the poster. In my poster, the viewers mostly commented on the colour of the poster having a pleasant impact on them.
In the center of the poster we can see a shiny camper, with a metallic surface standing, what seems to be the middle of nowhere. The camper is so prominent in the poster that you could almost feel the cold metallic and in contrast the grittiness of the sand on the floor.
As the poster mostly consists of warm colours, it might have a warm, peaceful affect on the body. On the other hand for some people that, looked at the poster it had a very harsh and cold feeling to it, which I found very interesting.
To find an answer to this question, we created a mood board in order to find out what mood our poster gives off to the viewers in comparison with other posters that derive from the same genre. For my poster, I would say that it definitely portrays an open, monotone and relaxing mood, and it could either be seen as a cold or warm poster, based on what I found out in prior results.
We now try to assess all the aspects of emotions in graphic design. The following categories seem appropriate to describe the graphic design:
A semantic differential is a survey mechanism with which we are given the opportunity to find out how the participants react to the poster in terms of different emotions. These are the results of this survey.
The semantic differential is constructed by covering these three key questions:
"Are we affected?"
"Do we feel with it?" (Empathy)
"Which mood is conveyed?"
As I already found out by the previous survey with the affection grid, that the participants were not strongly or directly affected by my poster, but it evoked a certain feeling of warmth and peace in them. So the empathy and mood generated something in them in combination with what they saw on the poster. I also found the extremes between some participants feeling like the poster gives off a warm and welcoming feeling, in contrary to those that found the poster to be boring and dull, quite intriguing.
For this graphic design we can say that it does mainly consist of bright colours. Usually we would suggest, that the usage of bright colours in any kind of graphic design would convey a welcoming, warm feeling. For instance in my poster, a lot of viewers were drawn to the warm, bright, orange colour that kind of frames the center of the poster. With the results of the semantic differential survey, the statement, that people felt a warm, welcoming and rather soft feeling while looking at it, is underlined. On the other hand I must also mention that for some other participants the poster gave them a completely different feeling, a colder, duller and boring one.
For the constructions chapter, we want to find out how our poster is put together.
Questions are:
Which arrangement is suggested by the format?
How are elements arranged?
Is there balance?
Is there a guiding principle (e.g. a grid)?
The arrangement that is suggested by the format would be vertically stacked.
The elements in my poster are vertically stacked with a centered placement.
When we "cut" the poster vertically and horizontally we can tell that there is balance by typography, colour and the elements in the center.
The way we try to see the poster is from top to bottom, therefore we can say that we read it line by line. In this case this is our guiding principle.
Yes, the arrangement suggests meaning, because we get the concept of the poster right away. As already mentioned, we read the poster from top to bottom, so from the name of the museum to the exhibition content down to the detailed info and date. The eye easily follows the arrangement of the elements in a well constructed way which shows that the placement and the hierarchy of the elements are placed well.
To showcase the construction and how the design works in my poster, I wanted to incorporate three different designs that work in a similar way than mine. These three examples are also from the Berliner Festspiele, like my Gropius Bau poster. The arrangement of the elements such as typography, and pictures are similar as well as the layout. The way we read the poster, from top to bottom, and extract information is also similar to the poster.
Semiosis generally describes the usage of signs or the process that involves signs. Throughout this chapter we will take a closer look into what different signs in relation to our design mean and how they change the way we look at them.
How do the signs try to express meaning?
Signs give us the opportunity to think more creatively on a design solution instead of using a more direct way to convey the same idea. Signs are the equivalent of visual rhetorics, so using an element in a different context to make it less clear or obvious to the viewer. Some characteristics in terms of design could be showing personifications, metaphors, synecdoche, metonymy, and so on. When we look for these kind of characteristics we can talk about a rhetoric trope. In my poster, I found that the rhetorical trope was based on synecdoche. This means that in the design it shows something specific instead of the whole thing. So in this case the designer of the poster chose to use one painting from the exhibition to make you want to see more or ask yourself: where is the rest? Where is the whole exhibition?
How do different “semiotic modes” play together?
For my poster, the orange background and the blue writing create a contradiction which works really well and "balance" each other out. The orange colour at the top and bottom of the poster kind of seem to "warm up" the cold parts in the poster. The cold could represent hope in hard times, during the cold war era, the time span of the images presented in the exhibition, which is represented once again by the orange colour. Furthermore the orange colour is giving us a feeling of warmth and might become a sign or contribute to the actual meaning but it can also stay in the emotions chapter and not contribute to meaning.
Generally, we can say that signs, rhetoric tropes and semiotic modes are some of the largest key factors in graphic design when it comes to finding out the deeper meaning of a design.
To show some of the rhetorical tropes, I designed posters for a window company that I called "Windowpals".
Modernism has relegated the idea of beauty to function, so “form follows function”. A commitment to “beauty” is seen as problematic. That design should not be about “beautifying” is a common statement. However, this very discourse of modernism has concealed that modernism is an aesthetic in itself!
Meanwhile, we as designers deal with aesthetic judgements all the time. Therefore, the first and most important task is to become more aware of our own aesthetic biases.
Following Kant’s aesthetic (Critique of Judgment, 1790), the aesthetic judgement is not concerned with questions like: Is this working, is this good design? To get closer to our aesthetic judgement, we try to separate the “good” and the “bad” from the “beautiful” and “ugly”.
Now we can more elaborately talk about what we love here.
Also don’t shy away from “beauty as a symbol of morality” (Kant, Critique of Judgment: §59) – “We call buildings or trees majestic and splendid, or fields laughing and cheerful; even colors are called innocent, modest, tender, because they arouse sensations analogous to the consciousness of a state of mind effected by moral judgment.” (§59) This is the transition to life style: where your aesthetic preferences reflect a way of living, a practice. A will to conform, a will to distinguish.
The viewers found the most pleasure in the colour combination and the dynamic play between the serif and sans serif fonts. They also liked that a painting from the exhibition was used as the center element of the poster and caught their attention right away and made them curious what the context could be.
The reason why I chose this poster was because the colour combination caught my eye and the kind of all-over but organized placement of the typography really intrigued me. I must also mention that I have always been a great fan of the Gropius Bau posters, which also played a big role in why I chose this poster for my report. As you can tell from my aesthetics starter pack, I love bold or bright colour combinations that work well with the other elements, which also explains why this poster was essentially perfect for my report.
We are now finally and surely in society with our poster! How does society shape it and how does the poster “actively” take part in society?
This poster was designed for an arts exhibition in Berlin. It takes place in the Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany. 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, the Gropius Bau presents The Cool and the Cold. Painting from the USA and the USSR 1960-1990, an extensive group exhibition of the Ludwig Collection's holdings from six international museums.
The actual designer for this poster is not known. It was designed for the Gropius Bau and presented by the Berliner Festspiele. They are a cultural program that make new things visible and are responsible for the organization and realization of numerous exhibitions.
The poster was produced digitally and it is a matte color printing on affiche paper printed onto a Din A1 format.
What is necessary for the poster to be in existence? Is this for the city only? Why?
As the poster was specifically designed for a museum located in Berlin, it will only be displayed there. Furthermore it could be considered as an event that is quite exclusive, as only the people that are interested in art would look at the poster. Being able to understand what the context of the poster is, would require some sort of educational background and knowledge about this topic, so you could almost say it´s a high-elite poster.
The discourse for my poster would be that it is meant for people that have a certain level of cultural knowledge. The viewer should be able to understand right away what the context of the poster is without thinking too much about it. So in this case it is difficult for people that don´t necessarily have that knowledge, because if you pass this poster in the subway or public spaces it takes too much time to process and to really understand the content. So as a conclusion we could say that it´s for a high-cultural audience.
Here is another example for the contrast of my poster. This is an advertisement poster that was created for the company Klarna. Whereas my poster is quite unclear about the context at first sight, this makes the message with bold lettering and catch phrases easy to reach the audience. In this example the viewer doesn´t need any background knowledge about something cultural like in my poster.
D, Am, C, G --- A poster like me.
Today is a big day for a poster like me Cause it’s my first day in the subway you see, and I’m quite a bit nervous but suddenly a woman with a funny hat, looked at me.
The woman said hey it’s been a while, and I was happy and I started to smile She looked at the painters and scrunched her face, and said oh god what a disgrace!
I started feeling sad and disappointed too was my font or colour not enough for you? And when I looked around and I felt alone I only saw busy people on their phone. A man looking at me with a big brown beard this must be exactly what I had feared, am I too crazy or even a bit too weird
but he threw his hands into the air and started cheering when and where? He wrote down the date and said: best day ever I swear!!
So this is the end but only for this song, if you wanna see the paintings then tag along. I would mean the world you see, as you went there because of a poster like me.