Skills
UI/UX Design
Visual Design
Motion Design
Organization & Categorization
The Sound of a Drop—A Collection of Sounds & Abstracted Images of Falling Objects.
Project Goal: To create a public (or widely accessible) collection of gathered images, materials, sounds, objects, based on a randomly selected source material.
Randomly Selected Source Material: The Splash of a Drop, by Professor A. M. Worthington; 1895; London.
The images above are extracted from The Splash of a Drop, and jumpstarted my deep-dive into collecting images of things dropping, falling, slipping, dripping, collapsing, leaving, decreasing, etc.
Collect, collect, collect!
Below are is a photo of ~50 collected images surrounding the theme of "dropping," from literal to figurative & abstract.
Collect → Organize
Once all these images were gathered, I began to examine the relationships between all of them beyond it being sourced from the notion of dropping. Below is a scan of my brainstorming for how to organize these images after receiving feedback and discussing ideas from peers.
I decided to thematically organize my images based on the sound that they elicit. Things that drop are often associated with a loud noise—BANG! CLASH! CRACK!—that can often be imagined when viewing an image. I decided to Keep all the images that elicited some sense of noise, then Discard images that do not from this collection. After organizing these images to Keep and Discard, I heavily annotated the printed images to begin to brainstorm different ways that I can begin to make this collection public.
Left: Keep in Collection. Right: Discard from Collection.
After synthesizing these thoughts, I noticed that a lot of my annotations were words describing the noises that I could hear from these images—all expressed through onomatopoeias. To further explore how this idea could take life, I created more "finalized" and intentionally designed posters of the above versions, including my annotations and citations for every image.
Left: Keep in Collection. Right: Discard from Collection. Posters printed 24 x 36 inches.
Because this Collection has progressed to be more about the sound that the images represent rather than the images themselves, I applied a halftone effect to represent the actual sound and vibrations that these images evoke. Below are a few trials of different effects before I finally selected the halftone. After feedback from my peers & more research, I found that the halftone-dot most successfully represented the notion of noise, vibration, and sound waves without being overtly cliche.
Left to right: Original, Line, Diamond, Cross, Dot
Sketches leading up to final web experience
The Final Collection
After producing the finalized posters with annotations, I created the following web experience for individuals to access my collection of images, organized by the onomatopoeia that it most closely resembles. I split up my images into the following onomatopoeia categories: Ahhhhh, Bam, Crack, Drip, Fizz, Plup, Plung, Splash, and Whoosh. Below is a high-fidelity mock of the final web experience. The sound included in the video is a compilation of noises related to drops, collected from the Public BBC Sound Library.
Interactive Prototype
For optimal performance, externally view the prototype in full screen, linked here.
For optimal performance, externally view the prototype in full screen, linked here.
I also printed various posters of the images with the applied halftone-dot effect; below is a gif of these posters.
As this was produced for a class, the below is a peak into the exhibit-like setting that I crafted to present this project.
