DAI 323 Meaning 1 - Blog Exercise

DAI 323 Visual Design Literacy
Blog Exercise
MEANING 1 - Blog Exercise

This image is representational because of its amount of detail, and it’s that level of detail that allows viewers to know what it is without question. Even if you have never seen this particular type before you know what it is immediately, it could be blue or purple or polka dotted but the viewer still knows what it is. You know that this is an image of a pine tree for any number of reasons: you live in an area with pine trees, you use them at Christmas time, you’ve seen them in movies, you learnt about it in school, etc. And even if you don’t know that it’s specifically a pine tree, you still know that it’s a tree, and you most likely relate it to a Christmas tree. The viewer is able to do all this from the shape of the tree, the detail of the branches and needles, and the height of it. All those details come together in our brain and cause it to tell us “this is a Pine tree”.

This is an example of abstraction because it takes the original objects of the image, 4 different smart phones, and distills them into their most basic shape and color. This communicates to the viewer the basic shape and form of smart phones now. If this was done five years ago the phones would vary more than now, with flip phones and slide phones and blackberries instead of the modern sleek rectangle shapes most phones have adopted. However, because they are abstracted they may not even be phones, they can be anything with a similar basic shape. Because of the lack of detail and representation, this image has become more general and encompassing. Between the two branches abstraction can take this can go towards abstraction towards symbolism with one or two simple detail additions, to give a message of the lack of differences between different phones. 

This image is symbolic because it is something man has created and fixed a meaning to. Nearly anyone recognizes it immediately and knows what it means and what it does, as it appears on many electronic devices that we use in our every day life as a symbol to turn the device on. As Dondis 4 mentions, this image can be easily recognized and reproduced because of it’s simple and lacks any sort of detail which gives credence to it being a symbol because, as Dondis says, a symbol cannot have a lot of detail. Dondis goes on to mention that the more abstract a symbol the more education is required to understand its meaning, but this is a symbol that requires very little to no education. We push it and the device turns on, we push it again and it turns off, we learn that this icon designates the power button. This meaning is universal, always meaning the same thing no matter where it is.