Symbols Project ("Matrix Methodology Project")

The purpose of this project:
"To familiarize yourself with the formal and conceptual aspects of signs you will create a symbol created from a matrix methodology, exploring their potential to impart meaning, your design decisions (about line quality, mass, orientation of forms. etc) will help to enhance and clarify the specific intended meaning to be communicated by your symbolic form."
First, I had to select a focus from this list of industries:

I selected "telecommunications." Next, we had to brainstorm to find three characteristics (with four descriptors each). My brainstorming can be seen below:

   

After brainstorming, I selected the following three characteristics with their appropriate descriptors:

Network - global, connection, transmission, data
Information - knowledge, identity theft, messages, propaganda
Technology - satellites, smoke signals, radio, telephone

Once brainstorming was complete, I went to my sketch book to draw one image for each of the twelve total descriptors. For each set of four under a characteristic, I had to have one that was rendered from an actual photo, one that was an abstract, and the other two rendered from a hand drawing. Before sketching, I selected the following images for my photos:

      

After sketching, I had a total of 34 images to pick from for my twelve:

      

After critique, I opened up Adobe Illustrator CS3 and began to create black and white vectors of my twelve images:



After completing the above twelve, I was critiqued and went back to clean up existing problems and concerns on the vectors. Once this was complete, the next step was for me to begin combining the symbols under each of my characteristics using the following matrix combination formula:

 
Photo
Hand Drawn
Hand Drawn
Abstract
 
1
A
B
2
A
C
3
A
D
4
B
C
5
C
D
6
B
D
7
A
B
C
8
B
C
D
9
A
B
D
10
A
C
D
11
A
B
C
D

This matrix created a minimum of 11 new combinations for each characteristic, creating a total of at least 33 new symbols. With the help of the matrix above, I created the following symbols for each of my charcteristics:

      

Once critiqued, the best symbol from each characteristic was selected. I went back into Adobe Illustrator CS3 and did some modifications of the three, then did a minimum of three new iterations for each symbol:



After the new iterations were critiqued, the best of each was selected for the final three. I took the final three into Adobe Illustrator CS3 again for a final clean up, then printed them on a paper at both one and three-inches and mounted them to a board: