Journal 9

I think that everyone else’s presentations, at least the ones that were show on Thursday, were really interesting and shared a lot of useful information, not only about the symbols they choose, but how I should have, and will hopefully in the future, structure my own project.

By far, the most eye opening one was the presentation from Laura Hayes, specifically and obviously, because we coincidently had the same symbol to talk about, the power button. While I think the structure of both over our presentations followed the same order, I can’t help but feel she had some bits of different information that I didn’t initially think of, especially regarding the connection she made with the power symbol and gender. I only saw the symbol as gender neutral, due to it being associated with things that were not gender specific, but it would have been interesting to look more into that aspect of the symbol. I also liked the sketches she had at the end of the presentation. They were very consist and well put, despite they only needed to be sketches. One part that I wish I saw more of was discussions about the origin of the power symbol. I remember a bit of how the symbol was based on the binary system, and it bits of it was shown throughout the presentation. However, it felt a bit disconnected to the overall presentation. One of the things I thought I did well in my presentation was showing the evolution of the power button, which I thought helped give context to the symbol it’s and understand it better.

I also liked the presentation about the cross walk sign, especially how in depth it got about the history of how and where it started from. It really gave a lot of contexts and had me very engaged with the content, something I wish I could have implemented in my own presentation a bit more. The ending sketches were also wonderful, having them colored in different ways was an especially brilliant idea. It brought a whole new sense of quality to its well as support and emphasis the idea of diversity and representation that the presenter wanted point out and showcase. Though for my symbol sketches, I didn’t touch a whole lot on representation, I do thing adding color would have made my designs more interesting and played into color symbolization, like what we may associate with red or green. The only downside that I took from the presentation was the amount of information that was present, it could be a bit overwhelming and hard to process at once. Like many other presentation, like my own, it would be more effective with more pictures/diagrams and less text.

A lot of these ideas were peppered throughout all the presentation, and each one brought its own insight to each topic. To go over every single presentation would take for over, so here were some of them that really stuck out to me and got me thinking.