1 Basic Shapes, Signage Problems Pertemuan 3-4 Matakuliah: U0254 / Desain Komunikasi Visual I Tahun: 2005

2 Basic Shapes Geometry, (square, circle, triangle) often used in the design of signage and corporate identity. Geometry, introduces designers to the process of creating a reductive language for visual communication.

3 Basic Shapes Circle, Square, Triangle The basic shapes are crucial to mysticism and to magic. Shapes are perhaps even more fundamental in our understanding of universe than numbers. They describe spatial relationships, usually between things at particular points in space.

4 Circle The circle is an almost universal symbol of harmony and wholeness. While fractal geometers such as Benoit Mandelbrot can point out that "mountains are not cones" and "rivers are not straight lines," some of the basic shapes have been discovered and used as sacred symbols by cultures the world over.

5 Circle The fact that we find this symbol not only in European designs but in pre-Columbian American designs as well, often with a cross in the center, indicates that it creates some sort of resonance in the mind. It is aesthetically pleasing and relatively simple to construct.

6 Circle

7 Square The square, because of its fourfold symmetry, and its six-sided three- dimensional expansion the cube, is a universal representation of created order, or multiplicity of form. A square or rectangular structure needs supports to hold it up, hence the origin of the pillar or column as a symbol of preservation and continuance.

8 Square-Rectangle

9 Triangle The circle and square are somehow "static," one representing underlying or abstract reality while the other represents manifest form in its final state. The triangle though represents the process, the verb, the way one thing becomes another. This notion of the triangle as dynamic seems to be just as primal. The triangle's angles are "sharp" enough to indicate a lack of inertia; it must always "point" in some direction. In magic and some mystical traditions, triangles pointing up represent fire, as this is suggestive of fire's upward motion; triangles pointing down represent water, as this is suggestive of the cup or vessel.

10 Triangle Bucky Fuller attempted to see Universe through a child's eyes, and what he came away with is the notion of the triangle, rather than the square, as the fundamental shape of nature. He based this on a personal form of vector geometry, where a line is not a static line but representative of energy. Thus the stability of the triangle, and the shapes based on it (tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedrons) is a stability of dynamic forces pushing against one another, restricting each other's movement, cooperating to make more.

11 Triangle Claude Levi-Strauss used the triangle as a symbol of process as well, by positing a dialectic duality represented by two opposites (like, say, raw and baked) and a third position which represents something in between, a composite

12 Triangle