Our Forced Connections assignment for Identity Design gave us the challenge of taking two words, an adjective and a noun, and forcing them together into a Positive and Negative space logo design.
I only had a specific idea for some of these chosen words, in the beginning, and just sort of winged the others. I knew I wanted the Dizzy Dragon to be more-so associated with a pub-like style, and I knew what I wanted from the twisted feather. I had originally had Brainy Manatee, but that wasn't working out for me so I switched it for Quiet Tune. When I switched to Quiet Tune, my original idea came from sign language, because just a few days before I had had a conversation with another student about how she was learning sign language. So that was on my mind, and I went with it and researched what the ASL for "Quiet" was, and I chose the roughest version. Trendy arrow was a bit more difficult, because how could you make an arrow trendy? My original idea was a fidget spinner, since those were pretty trendy for awhile, but the idea didn't work out. So my model came forth. Narrow jelly had some of its own complications, but I worked it out pretty simply by adding some more little details (the multitude of circles in the illustration) and more tentacles to make it look more like a jellyfish instead of a squid. Sweet nest was probably one of the hardest ones I had to do, and I went from attempting cotton candy nests, to an S-shaped scoop with one bird on top and a large, pointed cone, to what I have here. After the WIP critique, I ended up changing something about all of my pieces, and I think it turned out for the better.
My process is usually the same throughout all of my projects. Pick something, usually without doing a mind map/equivalent (sorry), doing my preliminary sketches, refined sketches, and then building in the computer. I tend to do all of my stuff by hand with my tablet and the brush/blob brush tool because I'm not very fond of the Pen tool. Nothing against it, I'm just more used to doing things by hand. So the rest of my process is experimentation with the illustration, line textures, and then color before going to the WIP critique and then taking other peoples suggestions into consideration. I always take feedback into consideration, and attempt it into my pieces to see how it will turn out even if I don't think it will. But I take the time and try it, and sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't. But I'm happy either way, because it usually gives me new ideas to work from even if it doesn't work.
Probably the hardest part of this project was working with negative and positive space. I had this problem with several of my pieces, which were my Trendy Arrow and Twisted Feather. More so speaking, Trendy Arrow. I'm so used to just drawing what I want, that for early stages for most of these, there was no positive and negative space. And for my Trendy arrow, there were lines that would have been lost once scaled down, and it was more of an illustration than something being worked on from "space". So figuring out how to draw what I wanted, and keep it in that positive and negative space style, was difficult for me. But including the circles as backgrounds for the images really helped, and it gave me a better vision of creating positive space or imagery separated from the background. I was told that I should scrap my WIP of Trendy Arrow, because it simply didn't work. But instead of doing that, I re-visioned it and kept it, and now I'm very happy with it.
