My Sound Visualization
Yuri on Ice, ミルク
Made by Rachel Duan
I Concept and Design
Since this music is written for ice skating sports, in the very first, I had planned to do a reflection part by separating the page into black and white areas. I didn’t cut the paper in the perfect half part, but made the line more upside, for I considered it would be stupid cutting the paper into two same areas for my own plan. It would make the page into two different pictures, but not the same one.
In the white part, I used the combination of the same characters (picked from “YURI/yuri”) to create a kind of flower or snowflakes, showing the sense of flourishing behind this music. This was inspired by the principle of creating good figures, that is arranging the same figure to create a new one. For the black part, I create the circles, whose positions were the reflections of those snowflakes’ position. I used the “Yuri” to fill the circle, for I want to use the dark side to show how Yuri worked hard for the ice skating career.
In both areas, I added some lines to link the flowers or circles, so that the whole picture could be more balanced in black and white. The sense of balance was also be developed in the One Black Square assignment. To add to the continuity of the picture, I add one line which crossed through the whole page, not only highlighting the theme “Yuri”, but also using this kind of upward setting to show the non-stop piano arpeggio track of this music. The whole pages only use the characters Y U R I, showing it is sticking to the original topic- it is “Yuri” on Ice.
II Process
There are basically three parts to my design.
The first step is thinking about what words can describe this music, and in what arrangement I can show the sense of those words. This is also thanks to my misunderstanding of the exercise, for I create 6 small squares in arranging the words to show the music.
You can see that the ideas of reflection and showing the piano arpeggio in a growing way, also get the blooming feeling are all be inspired in this assignment.
The second part is draft creating. At first, I designed my page into this kind of thing:
Basically, it only used the characters of O and Y, also was a simple re-arrange to my previous works. But then I found that it’s hard to handle both the reflection and blooming part, also there wasn’t a proper way to show the transition. Also, inspired by the assignment asks – feel free to use the different font designs, I changed the draft into:
The draft Compare with the final one
The third step is asking for advice from Professor and improving it. For improvement, I changed the lines that filled the circles into the characters, also added more dark space for the white part, adding the balance while improving the continuity of that upward character line.
III Conclusion
If there could have more time, for the next step of improvement, I think I would create more characteristics for both sides, but not only use the same structures, for it made the pages very boring. I would also try some way to add on the link for both sides, to make it seem like whole artwork.
But I’m still satisfied with my temporary improvement. With this assignment, I not only improved my sense of arranging the pages, but also improved my skills in using one realistic thing to create my own art. It is very hard for people to create things only using two colors, but we are improving this kind of skill. The meaning of it is just like the sketch to painting — it is training the basic skill. I’m more confident in future design work now.
At last, thanks to Professor Ian and Inmi, for pointing out my weakness and improving my skills. Thanks to the music “Yuri on Ice” and composer ミルク, you create one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the world!