Visual Language Exercise

In this lesson we were asked to cut out 10, 10cmx10cm squares of plain paper, and we were given a series of sheets with the letter A printed on in different styles and sizes. Amber, our tutor, gave us a word and in 5 minutes we had to use the letter A’s to represent the word.

Closed: For this word, I cut out 4 strips of 3 A’s and formed a square in the centre of the page with the strips overlapping; this is to give the feeling of something being closed in.



Difference: In this example, I decided the most obvious way to represent this was to have 2 A’s that were different in size, e.g. large and small and different in style, e.g. script and sans serif.

Link: To create the idea of links, I decided to overlap the A’s to show how they cross over to form individual links.




Loop: Here, I created a loop out of the A’s, with a slight overlap at the loop to show it did cross over.



Space: My representation for space, is very obvious, a small A in the corner of the page.

Horizontal: This is probably the most obvious out of the series, it was simply four A’s laid horizontally across the page.

Above: This was quite simply a small A at the bottom middle of the page, with four bolder A’s directly above it, the reason for the difference in size was to show the A at the bottom was a long way below the A.

Form: For this one I decided to do the shape of an A, which I felt would be the most appropriate, although I was unsure if I was communicating the right idea.

Positive: I first thought of a graph and positive correlation, totally forgetting of the symbol for positive, a plus sign, which is what I ended up doing for this one.

Finish: I wasn’t sure what to do for this one initially, the first image that came into my head was a black and white chequered flag, but as the type was black and background was white, I thought this may be tricky to do, so I thought of an actual finish line.

After we had created these representations, we sat in front of other people’s examples to see if we could guess the word that was being presented, for the person’s I looked at, I got 6 out of 10, but the person that sat in front of mine got 10 out of 10, so I think that shows that I successfully represented each of the words. Although, for me personally, I think a few of my examples were a bit weak, although I maybe could have achieved 10 out of 10 through process of elimination.