HW 1
Reading Response #2 to Artful Design • Chapter 3: “Visual Design” Derek Chung | 2019.10.06 Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University Fall 2019-2020 Reading Response: The Illusion of Motion From this week's reading, I'd like to reference a part of the book that talks about the illusion of motion:
The idea that comics can be seen as an animation really got me thinking. From a physical standpoint, comics are nothing, but sketches at discrete moments in time. However, the fact that our mind fills in the gaps between boxes speaks to how important change is within design. If we only saw what was written on the page, we couldn't understand the comic; we would have to watch a movie. Another example of this phenomenon is the graphical interface of a device. You don't need phones to have smooth animations when opening apps. Yet the constant motion of the iPhone as you click a folder, open Facebook, or hit the home button creates smoothness. Imagine if the iPhone had 'choppy' animations; would you still want to use it? The way the textbook framed the term animation was 'creating the perception of motion' by sequentially displaying static images faster than we can percieve individual events. A video is similar in nature. In fact, a video is just a bunch of still images played simultaneously. I think we can extend this definition to other mediums as well, not just motion. Take a picture, for instance. A picture is actually just a bunch of individual pixels, with each pixel being a single color. We don't see each individual pixel. Instead, there's a perception of fluidness created when multiple small pixels are combined together to create a recognizable image. Animation doesn't just have to refer to change in time. It can refer to change in color, sound, or anything else we can sense. |