Advanced Interactive Media/Designing Media -- Impacting Your Audience beyond the Eye

Color Design

When designing a concept for a media project, there are many things to be aware of. As it is important to keep the audience interested in the product visually and as it relates to sound, the color palette and the choice of soundtrack will be affecting the audience in other ways as well. For example, color can easily suppress appetites, make the body physically weaker, and help in creating a positive or negative impression of a product. Colormaters.com reported that the human eye can see 7,000,000 colors, some of which can strain the eyes. Certain colors and color relationships can also be eye irritants, cause headaches, and cause mayhem with human vision. Other colors and color combinations are soothing. Consequently, the appropriate use of color can maximize productivity, minimize visual fatigue, and relax the whole body.

Sound Design

As interactivity develops, greater demands are made on different facets of the whole that were never made before. On such area is that of audio. As technology has developed, the ear of the audience has become more and more critical. From the days of “Vitaphone” in the first “talkies” to today’s Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound, creating believable audio to go along with the visual aspect has been a top priority. For the cinematic pioneers, the goal was keeping the audio in sync with the film. Now, the goal is proper recording and mixing of ADR, Foley, music, and other audio elements. As interactivity develops, realism becomes more and more the chief goal. It is very likely that audio recording and playback will begin to focus on binaural quality as media becomes more immersive. We desire to hear audio in media just as we hear audio in the world around us. And why not? If media becomes more like the real world, shouldn’t audio be at least equivalent to that? Our focus in research and development in years to come should be on making sound design modeled after the real world, because media is becoming a very real, very integrated part of our world.