Author: kevin.kang

“Visionary Security” logo design

Table of contents:

1. My padlet
2. My initial thoughts and inspirations
3. San Diego teams
4. My 20 quick designs
5. Moving onto a new company
6. About Visionary Security
7. Visionary security designs
8. Peer/Teacher Feedback
9. Final Design

My Padlet: 

2. My Initial thoughts, designs, and ideas: 

When first given this task, I wanted to work on a logo for a company or thing that I enjoyed. Therefore, I naturally looked at NBA team logos. Recently, i fell in love with the NBA and thought it would be really cool if I either create or improvise an NBA team logo. I originally planned to improvise the hawks logo since it was my favorite NBA team and the Hawk’s logo looked very plain and bland compared to other teams like the Mavericks or the Nuggets. After trying out some different designs, I realized that the Hawk’s logo while being very simple is actually really good. I also realized that improvising a logo of an existing NBA team would be much easier since I already have a foundation to work with.  I wanted to challenge myself and decided to make my own team and its own logos. I searched up the popular cities in the U.S that doesn’t have a NBA team.  San Diego caught my attention. It was a good place to start a new NBA team. It had sufficient amount of population meaning the team could have a lot of beginning fans from San Diego. There are a lot of competition with other teams  in California like Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers, and Los Angeles Lakers but California is one of those cities where a lot of foreign people and celebrities live. Foreign people might influence their foreign family and friends to support the team and celebrities have a lot of influence on their fans. Therefore, there is enough room for this team to grow. I then looked for the team’s name.

3. San Diego Teams:

San Diego Beaches: 

After settling with a specific city, I  looked for the team’s name. I noticed that San Diego was known for their beautiful beaches. Therefore, I decided to think of things that were related to beaches. Some of my ideas were: San Diego Sanders, San Diego Sharks, San Diego Horizons, San Diego Wavers, San Diego Seagulls, San Diego Krakens, and San Diego Sailors. 

San Diego Sharks:

One of the first things that came to my mind when thinking about ocean was “finding nemo”. It really inspired me to respect the ocean and its diverse marine life. Anyways, I still remember being scared by the shark scene. Therefore, I decided to think of a team name with a shark. San Diego Sharks. It sounded relevant and catchy so I decided to work on it. However, I noticed one crucial mistake. There was another team with a similar name: San Jose Sharks. Therefore, this idea went to my reserves.

When creating a type design of San Diego Sharks, I went on dafont.com and looked at the horror section. I found this font called “help me” which I thought was perfect for my design since “help me” is what a person would say or feel if they are getting attacked by a vicious shark.

Font inspiration:

San Diego Sanders: 

When I searched up sand, a sand castle was one of the few things that came up. I liked it because it was related to sand and sand castles itself was related to beaches.   However, I did not want my team overlap with Bernie Sanders who is a popular politician. I wanted my team to show up first when you search up Sanders. I also felt like a sand castle design would overlap with Sacramento kings and therefore, left this one.

My prototype design:

San Diego Horizons:

I personally didn’t like this one as I believed it might overlap with the Phoenix Suns since both team names were related to the sun. Therefore, I  left this one.

San Diego Wavers: 

I think design was one one of my favorites. I think the team name and this design really capture what beaches are. There was a problem though. Wavers meant, “shake with a quivering motion and become unsteady or unreliable.” This made the team look like bunch of cowards which was not what I wanted to represent. So I tried to go with just San Diego Waves but that one didn’t sound catchy and it also overlapped with this team. Therefore, I had to leave it.

Inspiration design:

My Prototype design:

San Diego Seagulls: 

This one was inspired from all the bird teams in the NBA: Atlanta Hawks, and New Orleans Pelicans.  I realized that the most visible and common animal in the beaches are seagulls and it even had the “s” in the front making it sound catchy. Then, I ran into a problem again. There was already another team with a very similar name: San Diego Gulls. Just like the sanders situation, I didn’t want any overlap and therefore left this one.

Inspiration:

San Diego Krakens:

I thought Krakens were mythical and extremely strong which was the right feel that I wanted my team to radiate.  Besides, I guess krakens were slightly related beaches.  This design was a good inspiration because the color contrast made it really look mythical and strong. It also illustrated distinctive features so that people would know that this is a Kraken and not an octopus.

Inspiration:

My prototype designs:

San Diego Sailors: 

While looking for more ideas, I saw this image with the title, “best things to do while visiting San Diego”. I thought sailing was perfect for the San Diego beaches because it was common in beaches and San Diego. So I came up with the name San Diego Sailors.  I believed San Diego sailors was the best one. It fit all the categories I was looking for.
1. Was it related to beaches? Yes because people sail at beaches.
2. Does it sound catchy? Personally, I think so.
3. Does it start with a “s”? yes
4. Does it overlap with anything else? Nope, not a single team that has the word sail or sailors.

My prototype designs:

4.My 20 Quick Designs: 

5. Moving on to a new company: 

After experiencing some difficulties with my NBA team logo design, I wanted to look for another company that I could work on. So I spent some days, looking for inspirations. One day, I was on YouTube watching the kill-count series from dead meat which was about a guy going over a horror movie talking about the story and showing the kills in the movies. I really enjoyed this series because it showed the story but also the efforts and all the designs that the producers put into making films. Anyways, I was watching the kill count for purge(2013).

And the main character has a luxurious home and seems to be a rich businessman. James(the YouTuber) then explained that the main character owns a security company that everyone pays for the purge. That’s when an idea sparked in my head. A security company. In real life, crime happen on daily basis. Therefore, I thought a good security company was going to be lucrative business. So I settled down with a security company idea and began looking for more ideas.

I was settled with my company and now I needed to find what my company’s focus was going to be. Was it going to be unbreakable doors? Bulletproof windows? I was still lost. Then again, one day, I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a similar meme to one above. That instantly gave me a good idea.  A 4k security camera that could record in 60 fps. Technically, this would be almost impossible to create right now but it would have been revolutionary if it existed. So I settled with my company’s vision. A 4k 60 fps security camera that can also record slow mo and night vision.

The meme:

6. About Visionary Security: 

Client Name: Visionary Security

Background: Visionary security is a security company that mainly sells their home security products such as door cams, door locks, cameras, and sensors. They are a brand new company and their headquarters are located in Silicon valley, California. They are most famous for their innovative cameras that can record videos in high quality and frames and has the ability to even record in the dark. Their cameras also adjust to its surrounding so when the environment is a bit darker, their camera lenses will expand and when the environment gets brighter, their camera lenses will shrink. Their cameras work like our eyes and is why the company is called visionary security. The company believes their security camera provides clear footage like our vision but also consider themselves visionaries since they always look to advance in the future.

Audience: Their audience is mainly focused on the people that live in California. California has the third highest robbery rate out of all the U.S states which means living in California without proper security could result in robberies. And since California is home to a lot of big companies like Wells Fargo and celebrities who need good security. a security company will easily thrive in a place where the market for security is booming. Visionary security intends to replace famous security companies like ADT or RING and to do that, they have brought down the prices so even the poor people could afford their services.

Keyword: The three keywords that represent this company are eyes, vision, and security.

7. Visionary Security designs:

This is the original first design

This is the design that is inspired by the product that visionary security sells which is a security camera. I still wanted the the idea of  using the red ball to represent the camera so I used it for my app interface

This is inspired by the ADT logo. The ADT logo is an octagon. This logo is a pentagon.

I don’t remember what inspired me. I think it was just a random idea.

8. Teacher&Peer feedback:

Peer feedback:

1. Keywords feedback: Eyes: “Works great. It exactly reminds me of an eye.” Vision: “Same as well” Security: “It has a sturdy feel which works great to represent security”  My opinion: I agree with him.
2. Logo feedback : “It works great because you use simple shapes to create a logo that clearly represents your company My opinion:  Yes, I intentionally kept our logo very simple because again, our company’s goal or concept is very simple. “We are a security company and we protect your security.” I did not any color either since I wanted my company to be just simple.
3. Feels similar to security but also feels something like medical. Suggestion: Make the eyes look more abstract since the keywords are very vague. My opinion: I don’t really agree with the “make the eye look more abstract” part. I feel like our logo should be very clear since I want to give an impression that our company’s goal is very clear.

Teacher feedback:

This was the initial logo that I shown to Mr.Griffin.

He noticed that my “visionary security” looked a bit off and realized that it wasn’t aligned. So he clicked some buttons and tried to align them. However, it kept looking a bit off. So he suggested me to first delete the bottom line “we envision your future and security” and then put security at the bottom. So I tried to do that. The problem was, I couldn’t really understand how to adjust the type font so the security wouldn’t be flipped. I went to Youtube and watched this video. I didn’t really follow his steps but I did get a general solution out of his video.

I decided to make a new artistic text frame, type security at the top, and space the word “security” until it reached the bottom. Then, I pressed reverse which reversed the word.

So my new logo was now made. However, the problem was, I think what made my previous design unique was that it didn’t fit that generic logo in a circle. Therefore, I decided to use two types of logos for different purposes.

This logo was going to be used for smaller uses like paper bags, and business cards.

This logo was going to be used for bigger purposed like trucks, and t-shirts.

This was my app logo.

This was my app interface

9.Final Design:

Client Name: Visionary Security

Background: Visionary security is a security company that mainly sells their home security products such as door cams, door locks, cameras, and sensors. They are a brand new company and their headquarters are located in Silicon valley, California. They are most famous for their innovative cameras that can record videos in high quality and frames and has the ability to even record in the dark. Their cameras also adjust to its surrounding so when the environment is a bit darker, their camera lenses will expand and when the environment gets brighter, their camera lenses will shrink. Their cameras work like our eyes and is why the company is called visionary security. The company believes their security camera provides clear footage like our vision but also consider themselves visionaries since they always look to advance in the future.

Audience: Their audience is mainly focused on the people that live in California. California has the third highest robbery rate out of all the U.S states which means living in California without proper security could result in robberies. And since California is home to a lot of big companies like Wells Fargo and celebrities who need good security. a security company will easily thrive in a place where the market for security is booming. Visionary security intends to replace famous security companies like ADT or RING and to do that, they have brought down the prices so even the poor people could afford their services.

Keyword: The three keywords that represent this company are eyes, vision, and security.

Our first task was to find songs that we would use for our design. The very first song I thought of was “talking to the moon” by Bruno Mars. There wasn’t any particular reason, but I thought the lyrics for this song were pretty cool, and I have been listening to it recently. Then, I wanted to have a rap music option since I usually listen to many rap songs. So I decided to pick out some artists known for their lyrical talent: Joyner Lucas, Cordae, Kendrick Lamar, etc. I just went with Kendrick Lamar since he is a rap legend, and even English IB courses are studying his music for his lyrics. Then, I had to choose  between “DNA” and “Humble.” which were two of the most popular songs that Kendrick produced.  I originally wanted to do “Humble” because that was my favorite music. However, I realized that “humble”‘s hook contains many swear words that would make it school inappropriate. Therefore, I just switched it to “DNA.” For my third song choice, I wanted to do one from my childhood, a nostalgic and heartwarming song. Without hesitation, I chose Spongebob because my entire childhood (until middle school) was about Spongebob. I used to love the show and watch it every day. It helped me through bad times and made me laugh my worries away. Therefore, I chose the song “It’s the best day ever,” by nickelodeon which is a song that I still sometimes listen to. 

Now that I got all the music I might want to design, I had to choose between them. And to do that, I decided to create some rough drafts of each one and see how they turned out. The factors that I considered while choosing for my final songs were: 

1. Did it look creative?
2. Did it have any areas that I could work to improve and refine?
3. If I were actually to design that song, would I have multiple ideas on its appearance?
4. Do I enjoy making the design?

I thought question 4 mattered the most since you can only produce the best quality work if you enjoy the thing you are doing. As I was working, I started to like the SpongeBob song more. I liked how Spongebob has a bright atmosphere and can put a smile on a person’s face. I also loved working with bright and tropical colors. My two other songs were pretty dark and gloomy, which made it less enjoyable to work on. Therefore, I made my final decision to go with Spongebob.  However, I will explain the process for each song. 

“DNA” by Kendrick Lamar

The very first thing that I did was just create rough drafts on what type of fonts and colors I could use for this song. Since this song is pretty dark and hard, I wanted to avoid bright font colors. I also wanted to incorporate red since DNAs are related to the human body and black since some of the lyrics in this song are pretty dark. These were some of my rough drafts:

In this rough draft, you can clear see that I tried using different font sizes as well as different font color and effects to create emphasis on certain words. I thought in this song, the words “loyalty” and “DNA” were very crucial. Therefore, I used a color red. For DNA, I used a wet paint brush effect in an attempt to imitate the blood splatters since DNAs are in our body.  When writing “loyalty”, I wanted to express the classiness of loyalty. Therefore, I used a Montagu Slab font which makes the word “loyalty” look fancy.

For this rough draft, I took inspiration from the typography design on the right.I really liked this example because my song also needs emphasis on one word only which is “DNA”.  Since this work also puts emphasis on one word “attention”, I thought it would be a great example I can follow. Therefor, if you look at my rough draft on the left, you can see that I have the black background and white font setup for a clear contrast. This would make the texts more easy to read. Agin, I also used the color red for “loyalty” and “DNA”. However, this time, I took inspiration of the neon light effect on the right and applied it to my rough draft. If you look at “DNA”, you can see that I air-sprayed weak red around the “DNA” to create a neon light effect.

This one is the roughest draft where I just play around with the fonts again. This time, I tried a horror font called “Another Danger” that I found on dafont.com. I think the font had a similar look as the design on the right which was also one of my inspirations.

Then, I decided to level it up and tried creating a more advanced rough draft:

For my second design, I decided to work on “talking to the moon” by Bruno Mars. I first looked at the album cover for this design since artists usually have symbols or colors that match the message they are trying spread.

I think this album cover gave me the general color of the song. After looking at this, I wanted to have a yellow moon instead of gray or silver and have a dark background to represent the loneliness that the person was feeling.  After finding the general color, I wanted to look for inspirations.

This was my first rough draft. From this design, you can tell that I got inspiration from a lot of the designs. To create that light effect from the “attention” design, I again used an airbrush tool to color around the yellow moon to make it look like it’s shining. For my background color, I used a really dark blue because using black made the background look like space. Since I wanted the background to be a dark night, I just used a really dark blue. However, you can see that my font itself does not have any features to it. Again, while making this design, I ran out of ideas and how to improve more. In addition, I really wanted to do spongebob because I was starting to get nostalgic after thinking about the show. So I immediately dropped this song and started working on Spongebob instead.

“It’s the best day ever” by Nickelodeon

I first looked at the music video again to understand the general theme, color, and mood of the song.

So this is a screenshot of a scene in “It’s the best day ever” music video for spongebob. I took a screenshot at this moment because I think it really captures the atmosphere of the entire song and provides me with a general direction on where I should start. From this image, we can see the sun and Spongebob both smiling. This creates a happy, positive atmosphere where the listeners begin to smile with the characters. Then, the bright color of red, orange, and yellow only help the bright mood of this song. Therefore, I wanted the lyrics typography for this song to have a cartoony feel with positive and happy vibes.  Then, I started looking for fonts.

While looking for the font for “It’s the best day ever”, I saw a photo of a graffiti and it instantly caught my attention. I thought it was exactly what I was looking for. It had that cartoonish feel and was radiating with positive vibes. However, this picture was not enough. I did not want my typography for “It’s the best day ever” to be in cursive because that would make the song appear fancier even though it’s a children’s tv show song. So I decided to look for more graffiti arts that was more suitable.

“Wow”. Those were the words that came out of my mouth when I found this. It was perfect. It had no flaws in my opinion. This font was so entertaining and was radiating positive vibes. I also loved this font because it was a new font. I believe that typography is special because it allows creativity to roam around. It does not have specific requirements and allows beautiful fonts like this one to spawn. After finding my font, I decided to work on my rough drafts to see whether I needed to find new songs.

This was my initial rough draft. Compared to all my other rough drafts, you could definitely notice that I put more efforts into it. It’s because I had so much fun making designs for spongebob. For this design, I was planning to put the lyrics inside spongebob’s mouth but I realized that his mouth was too small. Also, I didn’t like how terrible my spongebob looked. So I decided to put more emphasis on the typography more.

In this picture, you can see that I was practicing the font but also creating another rough draft idea. This time, I just wanted to draw a big yellow sponge to symbolize spongebob without actually drawing spongebob.

This was my refined rough draft. You can see that I really tried my best to achieve that tropical, ocean feel with that bright blue. However, the background felt empty and I really needed more improvements. Luckily, it was time for feedbacks.

PEER REVIEW, AND FEEDBACK FROM CLASSMATES AND TEACHER:

CLASSMATE FEEDBACK TIME: 

So my feedback partner said the 3 keywords for my design were Tropical, vivid, contrast. He said my design had a tropical feel which made me happy since that was what I was going for. He also said that my colors were very colorful and vivid which created a good contrast.

The design elements he saw in my design were line, shape and texture. The only part I agreed with him was the shape part. I didn’t think my edges had any textures nor lines.

The design principles he saw in my design were  balance, contrast, movement, and pattern. I agreed with pattern and contrast because the bubbles were my pattern. I also thought blue and yellow were a good contrast. However, I did not see any movement or balance.

He said my song style felt like tropical feeling pop song. I mean, my song isn’t a pop song but still, I felt good knowing I achieved the tropical ocean vibe.

He also liked how I didn’t have any empty spaces and did a good job with contrast and brightness.He said the design reminded him of a clear sky. I again, didn’t agree with what he said. I believed that my only problem was the amount of empty spaces I had. I wanted the blue background to represent an ocean, not a clear sky so I definitely needed to work on that.

TEACHER FEEDBACK:

The first feedback that Mr.Griffin gave me was to change my color fill.

My original typography had black coloring the insides of each alphabet. However, Mr.Griffin said if I changed the inside to yellow and instead make each alphabet black, it would look a lot more neater.

And it did. It looked much more cleaner and professional(?).

I was having trouble with the empty space I had on my background. I initially thought of drawing the main characters of Spongebob like patrick, Mr. Krabs, and etc. However, I worried that the drawing would take all the attention away from my typography design. So I asked Mr.Griffin for feedback and advices. He also agreed that the drawing would take the attention away. He also mentioned that drawing the actual characters would give away too much hint on what the typography design represents. Instead, he told me to add elements and designs that explicitly illustrate Spongebob. So we went on google to search for elements, designs, or things that just illustrated the general art style of Spongebob.

Background for spongebob:

This picture caught my attention because of the small bubbles in the background. Every time a scene changes or a character moves, little bubbles spawn in the screen. I thought the little bubbles would perfectly illustrate the general style of Spongebob. So I decided to add them to my background.  I then spent more times gathering things for my background.

These were the cloud flowers that I also added to my background.

From this picture, I also added the rocks with white and purple plants as well as Spongebob’s house and the silver metal building at the back.

FINSIHED PRODUCT: 

In this design, I used bright colors to represent the childish show of Spongebob. I used movement to represent the waves that you often sea in oceans. The bubbles were used as my pattern in the back ground. I think I did a good job with the colors because it really does a good job communicating my song. The bright colors really highlight the friendly, bright, and positive vibe of the song.  I liked how my font turned out because it looks more like lettering than typography. I think it adds more authenticity and does the better job delivering the emotions of this song to the audience.

This was how I did my composition for different types of music.

For classical music, I always felt like rich and smart people listened to classical music. Therefore, I gave it a fancy gold look.

For jazz music, I thought of saxophones, trumpets, and other instruments. Therefore, I chose a shiny brass color.

For K-pop, I used “ㅋㅋㅋ” to represent “LOL” but inKorean.

For ambient music, I made it super blurry because ambient music are usually very calm and make you tired.

Graphic Design Principle: Pattern

What is the role of elements & principles in graphic design?:

a. The elements and principles to graphic design are like atoms to matter. They are the most fundamental tools that become the building blocks of any graphic design. They are the basic elements and principles designers need to start their work.

What is this design task all about?

a. This design task wants the students to reflect and think creatively on the elements and principles they learned in class. Students need to develop their own thoughts and think more abstract. This task also helps students review what they learned and show to the teacher that the student fully understood the concept and will be able to apply the concepts in his or her’s future work.

My thought process:

Star pattern design: My first idea for my pattern was a pattern with stars. In our last project with was a graphic poster design, I used a photo of me wearing a t-shirt that had the American flag.

After seeing the flag and finding out that my principle was pattern, I wanted to do a pattern that represented America. First, I chose a blue background. Then, I put the white stars.

I felt that the dark blue the American flag was using didn’t look visually appealing to me. As a result, I decided to change the dark blue to a much lighter blue. However, I thought about the pattern more and realized that the pattern was too simple to understand. I wanted to create a pattern that challenged the audience to think more. That’s why I changed it again. This time, I took inspiration from a purple Louis Vuitton bag.

The shapes were very pretty yet simple so I tried my best to replicate them in procreate:

This design for me, looked the prettiest. And my peer also said that this design looked pretty and would look much more prettier and organized if the shapes were all the same. So I went to affinity to try it. I couldn’t find the “bling” shape that I used in procreate and tried to replace it with star.

However, the same star shaped pattern ruined it as it looked too plain and boring.  Therefore, I decided to leave this pattern.

Chess board pattern: This was also one of my first patterns I created to experiment.  This picture was my initial sketch:

Because my initial sketch was done in procreate, the squares were very uneven.  My partner also added that I should improve on this piece and try to make the square sizes the same. I still loved this concept of the simple black and white square pattern. It was clean, and visually pleasing. So when I took it to affinity, I first tried to use the pen tool to draw. However, I am a bad artist and by the end of my drawing session, no squares were visible but only weird shapes. So I researched a way to create straight lines. Then I used the straight line technique to make the chess board patterns. I finished the piece which ended up looking like this.:

By the time I was done with this, I already lost interest in this pattern. I liked how it was clean, but again, too simple. I also felt like this work relied more on negative space and contrast. So I left this one too.

Water pattern: I was always fascinated with water, especially deep waters like the Mariana Trench. I loved the fear of the unknown and how we have only explored 5% of the ocean. That’s why my first idea was related to the ocean.

The green/blue water represented the water color you see at the bottom. The white circles represented a vague creature that is unknown to mankind.

Then I took this idea to affinity where I tried to recreate the water pattern using a realistic picture:

I tried my best yet I noticed that it was going to take a long time and it still looked awful:

Therefore, I gave up and went for another design.

Tiger pattern design:

For this pattern design, I always loved tiger pattern design because generally, those with power and authority usually wore this pattern. I also liked this design more than any other because this pattern did not have a same shape repeat.  Therefore, I designed something that I believed was a tiger pattern:

My partner also said this design was very pretty and said that I should work on it to cmake it more visually pleasing and also include more various types of shapes. After the feedback, I took it to affinity, changed the shapes and also added different shapes. It turned out really good and soon became my favorite. When most people think of pattern, they think of the same shape repeat, but this pattern is also a pattern.  It’s just without the same shape part and I think that’s what made it special:

graphic design pattern poster

Personally, I am a big fan of scary novels. I usually get too scared by scary films because of the sound effects and the visuals. So it surely intrigued me when I saw the name “Stephen King”. Stephen King is one of best author of scary fiction books. I loved The Shining, IT, and Misery so automatically, I picked up the book. I was hoping that the book was going to be scary but it did not meet the scare expectations of mine. Although Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, this book was not for me. It could be the fact that this book is the first book of the whole series and that’s why some parts felt disconnected.However, this reflection will be based on only this book. This article will cover what the book could have done better, and some final words from me.

First of all, this book was way too slow for me. Of course, the book gets much better towards the middle and the end but the beginning is very important for readers.Yet this book was very slow in the beginning. It was just not my type. Another thing I hated was how confusing some of the parts were. There were parts in the beginning that annoyed me to the point where I wanted to throw the book out of my hands. My thoughts were like, ‘Huh? What does this even mean?.’ ‘Wait what are they talking about? Mountains? Why?’ Don’t get me wrong. I think a good book doesn’t always tell everything in the beginning. Many good books would later explain and defuse the confusion. But this book’s beginning was overloaded with confusion for me. I had trouble keeping up with the story. Last thing that I hated about this book was the main character. I feel like the main character, “Roland Deschain” is a douchebag machine that is motivated only by the quest to catch the man in black. I just couldn’t relate to him because he was not the nicest character and he rarely showed emotion. My life is also not motivated by the quest to hunt someone. It sometimes can be hard to relate to a fictional character but I just couldn’t understand Roland’s behavior and motives.

I would just like to say this book is definitely not for kids. This book contains topics of violence, inappropriate language, substances, and sex. Although these topics were used to add realism and make the story more interesting, this book should be avoided by those that are still young and innocent. I would recommend this book to anyone above 15 as it is an interesting book and might be more enjoyable to those that enjoy slow-paced books.

After finishing my last book, I’ve decided to look for something that might intrigue me more because my last book was not the best in my opinion. So it was definitely eye-catching when I saw a book that was bright orange and titled “The Martian” which was a movie I saw in the past. I picked it up and started reading. From my perspective, I would say it was a good choice.

One thing I loved was the comparison with the movie. As mentioned before, I have watched the movie before. By comparing both, I was able to see which part the movie did well and which part the book did well. For example, in the beginning, Mark Watney(Main character) is abandoned by his crew mates on Mars. In the movie, it shows us a good visual on what kind of situation Mark is in and how alone and fragile his life is. However, I feel like the book failed to do that. Sure, the book did start with “I’m fucked” to emphasize Mark Watney’s situation. But after that, the book only talked about how he got abandoned. One thing I loved about the book was more detail. In the movie, the runtime is limited. Therefore, the book was able to explain some parts better than the movie such as the bacterias in the soil and his thinking process. The book also gave us more background on Mark Watney.

Although this book’s plot and character development was decent, there were some parts that bothered me. One of them was too much scientific detail. It might sound odd or hypocritical because I mentioned that detail was one of the pros. But this book has too much complicated scientific detail. I love the author’s effort to make this book realistic and detailed, but some of the concepts are too hard for some readers to understand. Another thing I disliked was the cliche ending. Mark is sad and alone and in the end, he is happy and now reunited with his crew mates. The build-up and the plot was good but the ending was just too obvious. I did enjoy seeing Mark happy and finally heading back home after all the hardships he experienced. But I feel like the book would have been more interesting if it had a shocking and tragic ending. Because it would have shown that life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It would show that sometimes in life no matter how hard you try, things won’t always work out. Another bad thing about happy endings are that it gives no tension to the dangers Mark is facing. No matter how devastating or risky those dangers are, we all know that Mark is gonna still going to live.

In conclusion, this book is very fun to read and is very fascinating to see how Mark will develop from having nothing on Mars to going back home. This book has some explicit words and scientific concept that might be unsuitable to younger readers. I recommend this book to teenagers and young adult readers.

As soon as I saw this picture, the whole vibe of this artwork caught my attention. It was very noticeable because compared to other art works, it had a dark and gloomy vibe. I thoroughly inspected the painting and found some points that made me feel attracted to it. The first thing was the facial expression of the boy. How tired and lifeless he looked. The thing is, I am also going through a hardship. Going to a new school itself is already hard but going to a new country is harder. With covid and all the other stuff, it has tired me out and I would really really die for a break. I was able to relate to his face because I am also very tired and just want to give everything up for awhile. His little light also was very notable. It felt like it was the only thing that was shining him through all the darkness. For me, that little light was video games. Video games bring me joy and help me regain my compassion for anything. They are still helping me get through the darkest times. After inspecting only the picture, I read the story. It was basically about a boy who burned down his village because he wasn’t accepted by his people. Now, although I don’t want to harm or endanger anyone, I kind of understand and empathize to him. When I get stressed, I sometimes want to destroy the source of stress and be peaceful. His tragic story and his expressions are just so well drawn that it made me think about my hardships and how I deal with them