Emotional Design

The purpose of this exercise was to take an ordinary object and use different techniques to morph the object into an image that appeals to one's emotions. I chose to do this exercise with a partner. First, we chose an ordinary object and found a simple image online. We chose the lamp featured below.

Original Lamp

Then, we had to decide what kind of audience we would like to appeal to. After playing around in Photoshop we decided to target Women ages 16-25. The emotion we chose to portray was confidence. First, we used the paintbrush tool to create a silhouette of a woman as the lamp stand. We chose to make the woman curvy rather than super thin as to avoid the subject of negative body images. We made her head slightly tipped towards the sky and the lamp shade tilted as well to look like a hat in order to symbolize her being so confident in her self that she is not worried about others' opinions of her. We chose a cheetah print lamp shade because we felt the cheetah was a good symbol of fierceness leading to confidence. Also, we applied an outer glow effect to the silhouette of the woman as to show that she is "glowing" with confidence. This is also used as irony because the stand is the part that is glowing, as opposed to the actual light bulb. We added a text box and wrote "Be Wild. Be You." This statement is used to urge women to be unique and proud of it. We applied a shadow effect to the letters to show the reflection of the light coming from the woman. Finally, we chose a deep red background because we felt it was bold. We chose to have the image off to the right rather than in the center to make it more interesting. The final image is shown below.

Our Final Product

This is by far my favorite project thus far. This project consisted of a lot of tweaking and creativity. I am very impressed with our final image and feel it is really interesting to look how far we came from the plain white lamp we started with!