This is a conceptual design called A Daydream. The assignment is to write down one of your daydreams first and design it with type only.

Concept: The daydream I wrote is about dreaming back to my previous college days in China. It starts with someone calling me by my Chinese name and taking me back to the school I used to attend. As I walked through all the places, lots of memory popped into my mind, just like a journey of memory. At the end, the person called me again by my English name and brought me back to reality in Savannah. For such a short and smooth story, I decided to focus on the word, daydream. My understanding of daydream is that it acts as the reflection of the things we experience, pursue, and desire.

Creative Solution: The concept of reflection gave me two solutions based on two different metaphors. One is “shadow.” I used the shadow of each letter to compose the whole context. First, a shadow is the most familiar natural reflection; second, the important feature about a shadow is that it gets blurry as it spreads. This is just like my daydream; when it started, everything felt so real, but it finally became blurry and disappeared.

 

The other metaphor is that of a mirror. What a mirror reflects is usually something physical, but once it comes to the daydream mirror, it reflects what you think, what you want, what you pursue, and what you dream about.

Final Outcome: According to the two solutions, I have come up with two different formats. One is an installation design, a daydream mirror. With the use of mirror paper, I cut each letter out and used the negative space to show the whole context, so that the positive space presents a wall mirror. I used Times Europa as the primary typeface to match the mirror’s frame style, which is classic, commonly used and legible.

 

The other format is a video based on stop motion. I sketched the story out and prepared all the materials with letters cut out. Using “shadow” as the major visual element made most of the context readable through its shadow. Also, I added different kinds of letters’ shadows as the transitions in order to enrich the content and create visual variation. There are around 700pictures in total used in this stop motion, and it was also my first time to use a new method.