word pair

During my Graphic Design classes in the past couple of years we have been working on isolation (I guess you could call it that). Pretty much making your design live alone whether it is totally relying on typography and that needs to explain everything you are trying to convey, or whether its just an image and that needs to hold its own. Another thing we have been getting beat into our brains is that things don’t have to be obvious. The more someone has to think about what it is you are trying to say the more time they will spend with something you have created. (don’t go crazy abstract because sometimes you need them to get the message in a timely fashion but some mystery is always a good thing). For this particular project we were all assigned 2 words, pretty basic ones like wet and dry, nervous and calm, grief and joy, old and new etc. sounds easy enough. Wrong! Actually it was hard for most of us to get past say wet being a picture of water or dry being a towel. But after a few (dozen to hundred) word lists we all got to where we needed to be. For example the wet and dry became a washer and dryer but the inside parts of them and they color scheme when manipulating them was blue and yellow. But if you just looked at them as pictures you almost couldn’t tell what they were. My two words were fast and slow. I felt like finding a way to depict adjectives was hard and I made it harder on myself than it needed to be but I came up with two things that felt like fast and slow to me; my running shoe and a high heel shoe. Those are two things to me are something that obviously you cant go fast in a high heel, or you wouldn’t want to go slow in a running shoe. You are always going faster in athletics. At the top is an example of the finished project.