Anti-Virus Mask

Creator: Yiwen Zhang

Design Description

Under the circumstances of the Covie-19 pandemic, wearing masks used to be a controversial topic - people used to say that it would deteriorate the condition, and can’t help to prevent the virus from spreading among people. However, from my perspective, masks definitely help to control the spread of viruses. The importance of wearing masks has been proved in China - our strict policy of wearing masks has successfully helped to control this terrifying outbreak. When I was still in the US, I was shocked to know that some people still thought that wearing masks takes away their freedom - which, from my understanding, is such a ridiculous idea because your life is way more important than this so-called “freedom”. I intend to send this message to two groups of recipients - one is the ones who refused to wear masks, the other ones who do wear masks, because this visual strategy can be viewed from two opposite perspectives. For the ones who seek for “freedom” and put their lives at risk, this graphic warns them that you would become the attack target of the virus if you don’t wear masks. While for the ones who do wear masks, this graphic shows how the masks protected them from the virus because it is like a shield against the virus. The movement of the for loop and nested loop vividly represents the two concepts. I will explain more about the visual strategy in the reflection.

Assignment Reflection

Since I already explained the choice of what to design and who to design for in my description, I would like to talk about my use of shape and color as the basic choice. I choose circles as the main characters to form this drawing because its abstractness is in the perfect amount to represent the virus properly, without too much of other meaning. Also the randomly appeared circles can be considered as the droplet as it is a way of spreading the virus. About the color, I choose the dark blue to represent the virus because this color feels ominous and depressing. I choose red because it carries two opposite meanings, each represents the different perspective. For the audience who refuses masks, the red can be read as a warning sign - you would become the target of the virus and “bloody” results would happen. This color theme is on the dark side for this perspective. While on the other hand, red also passes on an auspicious sign - red cross aims to help people and bring hope. In this perspective, the red forms a shield to protect you from the virus. As the dark blue dots (virus) keep trying to attack you, the red dots(shield) keep running to block the virus. As the red shield runs, it covers the virus to guard your safety and brings you hope.

As for the visual strategy, the final effect really was a happy coincidence. At first I was planning to draw a mask, maybe some effect would appear when you mouse over or some other mouse interaction. But this idea was too literal without too much creative thinking. So I tried to approach my goals in an abstract way. I was trying to make the dots(virus) spread out from the center spirally. And I saw one example on Nazia Fakhruddin’s webpage that showed the effects that I was thinking of. So I tried it out by following the code guide of the example, but it didn’t quite work out. I had to change the code. I was thinking how to utilize the exercise we did in class. So I adjusted the code I made for the class exercise into this sketch, and the result is surprising! The for loop created concentric circles and the nested loop generated some randomly appeared circles - a perfect combination to represent my concept in an abstract way. And I think this visual effect definitely fits more into my design intention: the red concentric dots forms a target or a shield shape that visualizes two different concepts; while the virus dots appear randomly instead of spreading spirally makes it even more realistic - you never know where the virus comes from, and its spreading pattern can not be predicted and simply defined into a spiral pattern.