Design System
Design System
The system was created to analyze four aspects of the piece:
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Genre
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Number of Melodic Lines (Instruments and Vocals)
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Chord Quality
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Volume
Inspiration for Elements
The shapes referenced graphic elements that were most commonly used in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. A style board was created to find shapes that were distinguishable, yet unique to the era.
The colour palette derived from mood boards that were created at the beginning of the project. These mood boards consisted of propaganda posters and realistic images from each country, in order to gain a sense of the sentiment and design styles used during the wartime. From these mood boards, four colours were swatched out of each, eventually narrowing down to five main colours to be used in the system.
The melodic line patterns were Adobe Illustrator brushes created to emulate different types of voice recordings in accordance with the aspect it symbolizes. The "instrumental only" pattern is larger to represent the amount of instruments utilized in a full orchestra, and the "vocal only" is a wavy, thinner pattern to emulate the changing dexterity of the different voices in each piece. Finally, the "instrumental and vocals" pattern is a straight, thin pattern to represent the two melodic lines moving in unison.
Inside the Design
The entire area of the circle symbolizes the total length of the piece. As every piece has a unique duration, each design has a different number of spokes inside the circle to symbolize the total number of seconds. Each piece was analyzed three separate times, in order to track the chord quality, volume and number of melodies per second in accordance to the circle spokes. Below is an enlarged sample of the poster for a more detailed viewing.
Check out the full process here!
©2024 by kristenchan.