Surface Design WIP
The purpose of this project is to create an emotional connection between my designs and my audience. First, by choosing a word that I believe will encapsulate the year ahead of me, both emotionally and creatively. Then taking that word and designing custom letterforms and patterns to illustrate my word and its meaning as it is relative to me. I had a lot of fun exploring different lettering and pattern styles, as well as exploring my own personal styles.
Mind Map
I started my mind map with my name and surrounded it with some things that described me and also with things that I wanted to focus on this year. “Growth” was the word that stood out the most to me, due to the amount of change that has occurred in my life recently.
Mood Boards
For my color palette I wanted colors that were fun and bright but still very natural, which is why I chose greens and rosy pinks. I’m usually a san serif font kind of girl but I wanted to use a nice serif font somewhere in my project, and possibly some secondary 3D type.
Lettering Sketches
When I started my sketches I wanted to keep in mind the idea of sophisticated femininity, but also create something that was light and playful. I loved working with my word because the capital G was such a beautiful letterform to experiment with. I typically start off with a pen and paper, and then when I get stuck I switch to my iPad and do some digital doodles.
Pattern & Motif Sketches
For my motifs I knew from the start I wanted to incorporate a strawberry in some way, especially working with a green and pink color palette. I also wanted to include other elements related to a strawberry such as the leaves and small flowers that grow with them.
Roughs
Since I decided I wanted to create a san serif font, I also wanted to incorporate something strawberry related into it as well. I started with filling the empty space with lines to mimic strawberry leaves, but eventually decided to break the edges of some of the letterforms and give it a more naturalistic leafy feel.
Vector Letterforms (no color)
For the semi-final letterforms I decided to only break the leaf outline out of the G and the O, and add small leaves to the ligatures of the R and the T to add to the natural theme.
Motif Color and Shape Variations
When I had started sketching my motifs, I was going fore a more realistic style, but since my letterforms are relatively formal, I wanted the motifs and pattern to be more illustrative and playful. I also played with many different color variations between my four core colors, and adding an accent yellow color.
Secondary Patterns
I wanted to create simple secondary patterns to compliment my motifs and help fill some of the negative space on my pattern. I used various brushed in illustrators and doodles different line patterns and placed them sporadically throughout the pattern
Pattern
This is before the actual pattern was created. It definitely took a good amount of time to place all the motifs evenly and make sure the colors were evenly distributed. I used a couple of the variations from above but stuck with mostly the same couple of colorways.
