Heart shape is symbol for female genitalia
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I feel this symbol is the most iconic in its form. The chosen symbol from my initial sketches is the heart positioned like an infinity symbol. Some of these designs are clearly stronger than others, but the process taught me that some things work but maybe not for the particular purpose you need it for at the time. I have tested here how I can incorporate a heart symbol in to my designs. A lot of my sketches include hearts as they are the most common symbol associated with love. What was most difficult about this exercise was creating a symbol that defined/represented such a broad concept as ‘love’. Some of these symbols include a typeface and others have no type or minimal type. Here I have a variety of different ‘symbols’. To begin with, I sketched out my initial ideas. Now I have researched a variety of things that signify love, I have started my own sketches to design a symbol that represents love. However, if I intend to attract a wider audience I could create an icon that symbolises platonic love to target a larger demographic. Obviously, the most common colour used for love is red. I feel these visuals target the meaning of love for the viewer. I chose to look at this in particular because I like the delicate, elegance of florals arranged romantically with hearts or typography. This mood-board shows the common use of romantic florals used to represent love. Here I have created a mood-board of flowers and love heart symbols and how they are used separately and together to represent the concept of love. The use of florals and hearts paired with typography is attractive to me, so I have researched additional symbols and illustrations before attempting my sketches for my own symbol.
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On the contrary, the modern sans serif fonts have a light hearted, friendly aesthetic and tend to use lighter colours e.g pink and yellow. calligraphy/script feel more meaningful to the viewer because they have historic meaning and a traditional form now associated with love. The visual language and typography has a modern take on tradition and history in its style, similar to Victorian calligraphic script. This style has a familiar feel for the viewer making the message in the visuals more relatable. This makes the type feel more personal simulating handwritten text from a loved one. The script fonts used have an elegant form. The common style in all the fonts used to represent romance/love is the stereotypical femininity. Here below, I have created a mood-board as I wanted to research the variety of types of typography connected to love. The typography that represents platonic love is far more ‘popping’ with less detailed, sans serif font. Whereas, the colours pink and yellow are softer to signify happiness, joy, generosity, friendliness and approachability. The typography used for romantic love is more elegant and refined and the colour red is used commonly, being the colour of ‘extremities’ – passion, seduction, danger and violence. Red roses signifying romance/romantic love and Yellow or pink flowers signifying friendship/platonic love. On this mood-board flowers are symbolic for love, platonic or romantic. Others representations believe the heart symbol simulates female genitalia/parts of the female form. The origins of the heart symbol can be traced back to an ancient plant called Silphium. A silphium seedpod looks like a valentine’s heart, so the shape became associated with sex, and then with love. Here the most common and obvious simple to represent ‘love’ is the ‘love heart’. Below is a mood-board I created to look at the imagery and design of different things associated with love. The mind map helped me to recognise the current knowledge I have about the common symbols and signs which represent ‘love’. I also, notice the different types of love and see how different things represent different types of love. This mind map shows my collection of thoughts on what I consider to be love, or what represents love in a variety of ways.
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Pictured below is the mind map I created to present as many ideas as I could about ‘love’ – as a concept. I will be researching how existing visual language represents ‘love’. The concept I have chosen to create a symbol for is ‘love’. For this section of my coursework I will be reading existing signs, symbols and images and drawing on their visual language create my own symbols.