Project 3: Surface Design

BRAINSTORMING & MINDMAPPING

While mapping out my word, the one thing that stood out was how important music was to me. I listed out musical terms, but none of them really stood out to me much. I was very close to choosing "Ensemble" but "Unstoppable" won out due to extreme feelings of nostalgia for marching band.

RESEARCHING

After settling on "Unstoppable," I thought of using either instruments or marchers for my pattern. Upon further research I noticed more music symbols and decided to use those for my pattern. During a discussion with a friend, she pointed out using varsity letters for texture. With this in mind, I thought, "Sure. Why not?" and started to consider using music symbols but with a letterman type feel. I was also originally planning to use purple and gold as the main color scheme to pay homage to my high school back home. But it was a bit too much of an inside story so I ended up using black and white with purple and gold accents.

FONT CONSTRUCTION

As for the font, I considered putting the word on a music staff and have the letters be the notes. The second from the top was my first attempt. It looks too busy and unreadable. The next one down looks cleaner and slightly more readable but still too busy. The one in the bottom was too basic to convey my point. I ultimately decided to have every other letter be a note to make it striking but also readable as demonstrated by the very top line.

I ended up having to make more versions of my word because the earlier versions were too thin and didn't fit the idea I wanted to convey for Unstoppable. I then went and incorporated the word into the music staff. While all three of them look amazing in their own right, none of them felt quite right. So I combined the second font I did with the music staff to create the final text.

I later put the final version into Illustrator and did something purely unintentional.

I originally meant for the word to have a varsity letter feel but I did not intend for it to be 3-dimensional.

SYMBOL CONSTRUCTION

I decided to draw music notes and instruments for my pattern. For the instruments, I decided to choose three: one from the brass section, one from the woodwind section and one from the percussion section. I sketched the notes and instruments and cleaned it up on Illustrator. I then rearranged the symbols to make it easier to form a pattern. I still kept up with the purple and yellow.

FINAL PRODUCT

For my products I felt that this pattern would work best with bags and travel mugs on my society 6 profile. My repeating pattern would definitely look best on objects rather than apparel.