Singin in the Rain

I watched the whole movie of "Singin in the Rain" on this fine Sunday morning and couldn't wait to write something about it. The music and the dancing in it are much better than I am expected. The plot of the movie is also attractive with the conflicts of the two female actresses and the excellent performance of the two male actors.

Here's the most well-known part, the melody of "Singin in the Rain". It can bring good moods to the audiences. Though it is raining heavily in the scene, we can feel it is also raining happily. And the actor is enjoying the rain.

The part which I love most is the one below, the melody of "Beautiful Girl". It is somewhat like the old Shanghai music style. I enjoy that kind of special feeling a lot.

And at this moment, I'm really in a perfect mood. What a lovely Sunday !

Amazing animation and typeface

The film we watched in class was really quite amazing . I was shocked by the former designers , they had to use their hands to draw about 4000 pieces pictures in one month to form a short animation . What they done are really great ! And here is a cartoon film I found on youtube . It shows how a movie is made and it is quite interesting .

And since we learnt typefaces last few weeks , I have been paying attention to the transformation of the typefaces and try to find some new ideas about that. I just pick out some because I think they mean something to me .

Wrong or Right ?

The letter " I " and " O " compose together and look like the pendulum of the clock .

I'm looking forward to find more and enjoy more .

BAUHAUS＝BAU＋HAUS

The first time I saw the word " bauhaus " was when I was walking through a street . It was the name of a shop which caught my eyes in my first sight . I really love the clothes there , they are designed in a concise and unique way and the details of the clothes are picturesque .

After that , I realized " bauhaus " was not only a name for a brand , but also the name of a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught from 1919 to 1933 . And nowadays , it is a style of art . The name " bauhaus " is formed by " bau " and " haus " which means " construct " and " house " in German .

I get a link from the wikipedia to " the bauhaus collection " which is a German official website for " bauhaus " . Though I can't understand German , I am still amazed by the design there .

Comic Sans - Love it ? Or hate it ?

It was the first time for me to think about the typography . I haven't think about one would misused the typography because I even don't know there's a rule . So I searched the internet for more information about it after class .

I find something interesting on one particular typeface --- Comic Sans . It is a casual script typeface designed by Vincent Connare and released in 1994 by the Microsoft Corporation and it was full of contention . Because they're the majority of people who love it crazily and some designers who hate it extremely .

I am belonging to the majority of people who love it , because I think it is lovely and appropriate for using in comic books and informal documents . It brings us more fun when we reading it , likes a kid's handwriting .

But the other designers who treat it as a bad design is because the misused of it everywhere , even in a formal signature . And there was a ban comic sans movement which was conceived by two designers in fall of 1999 .

In my usual opinion , the misused of something is the designer's fault , not the users mistake . But this time , I think the misused is because we people love it too much so that we used it everywhere . Thus , we make it a great design and a bad design simultaneously .

DESIGN + CULTURAL .

Different people have their specific cultural backgrounds . They understand things differently from each other , so do they understand designs . A good designer targets his or her audiences directly through understanding the culture of them before he or she design something.

I browsed a website of a design company Steiner&Co. several days ago . It shows some logos designed by them which specifically for some branch companies of the international corporations in Hong kong and China .

One of them is the logo of Unilever . As we known the logo of Unilever is composed by 25 different meaningful elements .

They are Sun , DNA , Bee , Hand , Flower , Hair , Palm tree , Sauces , Spoon , Bowl , Spice and flavors , Fish , Sparkle , Bird , Recycle , Lips , Ice cream , Tea , Particles , Frozen , Wave , Liquid , Container , Clothes and Heart .

But Unilever decided to reinvigorate its corporate brand in China and chose Steiner&Co. to help . Thus , we have the logo which we see all over China now .Unilever products share domesticity, so a mark sheltered by the informal brushstrokes of a Chinese roof to emphases the slogan, “Where there’s home, there’s Unilever".

As a result, a powerful international company enjoys greater synergy with its component brands by extending to them its authority and reassuring presence. And I think that's the power of understanding the culture.