My sister, Ly (AKA “The Pod“) has guessed the sound correctly. The mysterious noise is the sound of me feeding a nickel into a pay phone on campus. Here is a breakdown of the sound and why everything is the way it is in this, a more finalized concept version of my onomatopoeia project.

As I mentioned, I’m not allowed to just fill in the composition with any shapes unless they relate to the text somehow. In this case, the black box represents the pay phone. It’s flush against the wall, and so I moved box from the first concept to the far right side of the page. The pay phone on campus does not accept nickels. It just drops them down to the coin return. This is why the word goes in a semi-circular motion from the top (the coin slot) to bottom (the coin return) and doesn’t stay within the black box. The text also changes font and color for a reason. It starts out as the Futura font because it’s relatively round and fat (like a nickel) and changes to Bodoni because by the time it enters the pay phone it makes a more mechanical sound. Since I’m limited to a specific list of fonts, I think Futura and Bodoni work the best. Because the nickel eventually returns to the coin tray, the font changes from Bodoni back to Futura. The black to white change in the text is also intentional. I made the box black and the text white to represent the path of the nickel traveling inside the pay phone (inside the pay phone would be dark, so therefore the box is dark, too).

Congratulations, counselor, you figured it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.