Emotion Grid: Relief

The emotion I chose to illustrate was relief. The colors involved in this story are blue (blue-green spectrum), red, and black. I think of relief as being like a wave. It sweeps over you and washes away any feelings of despair or anxiety. Here, the calming, cool blues and greens are the relief rushing in to overcome the darkness and twinges of discomfort represented by accents of red. 

In the planning stages of this project, the design was more chaotic with colors that didn't necessarily relate to one another. That element of contrast still exists in the final product with the bright blues directly battling the dark blacks. The difference is that now, the blue/green colors act together more cohesively as one moving force that evolves from one part of the plane to the other. The hues of the cool colors become brighter and more intense as they move from the bottom left toward the top right to show a growing strength in the emotion that it will need to overcome the negative feelings.

Language and type gave the color story additional meaning due to the contextual nature of words and letterforms. Words have meaning behind them and evoke emotions from the reader, whether consciously or not. Words like hope, cascading, and rebirth have light and refreshing conations that are necessary to convey relief. Likewise, typefaces are also able to communicate through their forms. I chose Optima to help me display relief because, as a humanist typeface, it is has an organic feel. The strokes do not looked machined and vary, calling to mind the way a person might write with ink. This organic flow within the letterforms aided the look of a naturally cascading and evolving form.

Through both parts of the project, grid played a huge role. In part 1, it required me to think about the placement of images very carefully. Relationships between images were completely different depending on where they were placed. The grid played an even bigger role in part 2, even though the appearance of the grid is much subtler here. I was able to place certain letterforms in the correct places and get just the right accents of color by referencing the first image grid. This also showed me where the meeting of the blue and black forms was so that I could communicate it in the type grid. Due to the open spaces between the words and letters, that meeting place was translated into white space to act as a more defined area.