viscomtwo. icons. color swatches.

here's a little quicksie looksie at my color swatches in progress. lotsa more color swatches to do by friday, and not to mention to design this prettily, can't ever forget thattttt.

dezyne. thirtyfour. chiquita.

So Chiquita has come out with a new campaign and it fits perfectly with whats going on in viscom and the reading we just did about generating and culling your ideas.

This brand refresh was done by DJ Neff(creative director) and his staff at Neff Ink. Their main focus were the iconic blue and yellow stickers found on every Chiquita banana and how they could update them. They created a new set of icons from the basis of the original set. They immersed themselves in the culture and brand and took in as much knowledge that they could and then they "let it all spill out in different ideas, drawings, sayings, photographs, then start to figure out truths." He went on to say,"These truths all stem from the product and work outward, pulling from research and ideas to build upon the foundation, laddering up to a big idea."  What he was saying directly correlates to the icon assignment we, as sophomores, are currently tackling. We have been pushed to produce(or at least we should have been) as many different ideas, drawings, styles, colors as we can to help ourselves in this process of creating our icons. We can only produce the best icons possible if we produce the maximum amount of them to make sure we exhaust all of our possibilities.

So they took the iconic blue and yellow sticker with the woman wearing the fruit hat and turned it into a line of characters and above is the set of all of them. I love love love this concept so much. And they did it so very smoothly as well. All of the icons fit so well together yet they span such a wide array of faces. The same thing that some of us are struggling with when it comes to our icons, cohesion. It takes a  certain level of skill to fully pull off cohesion successfully.

sources: design:related, neff ink.


ABOUT THIS POST. This post has been a work-in-progress for the past week... and tonight i finally got the chance to finish it... so that being said, this had the potential to be a much stronger post but that week break from it kind of killed it...

blog colours.

updated helvetica seafoam & offwhite
i'm planning on keeping a running log of how my blog changes over the rest of my time here

viscomtwo. icons. two-color studies.

update. I've been talking to a lot of different people from the other section about this stage of the process, adding the second color. If you're lookin' at this blog post to see what I did, lemme give you this advice: do not let the color change the icon. Instead, let the second color add to the original icon.

So we have now entered into the beginning stages of adding color and a second layer of information to our icon sets. Above are the ten different styles of color I tried out. Clicking on the images give you bigger versions. With my icons, I had issues with coming up with ways to add a second color to my one-color icons. My entire object is one continuous contour line that makes up the entire object and because of that I had to be creative with ways of adding that second color. Some ways worked better than others. Each set of styles are labeled a-j and each set is the horizontal row of whistle, suit, and medal.

Sets a, c, f, and i are the four sets that Jamie picked out as being the strongest of the ten. With those four in hand I will continue my two-color process forward. Though with sets a & f she wants to see two different versions.

Sets b, d, e, and i all had issues because of the way I added that second color, it ended up closing up the continuous line and really took away from the overall feel to my icons that really made them strong so immediately we crossed them off the list except for i. I will redo set i but just pull the line away from the icon so it's still close to it but actually touching the icon itself.

I like the style of set j with the offset icons but it really is just too distracting from the icon itself and Joseph put it best: drunk swimming.

I really liked set c a lot, so I actually ended up taking it further. My original concept behind it from the very beginning was to make those splatters with watercolor and then scan them in and take the outline of the shape and apply it to the icon. Here is one of those watercolor tests:

So I scanned in three sheets of these and then picked out the most successful splatters, those being the most compact and iconic splatter shape. With the three best picked out I applied them to the vector icons:

So I applied them to the icons but through feedback, and my own observations, with the way I went about making the splatters they went too far into paint and ink splatter and less into water splatter, or puddle of water. I really like this direction and all of my icons have open white spaces for me to be able to apply this affect to. Plus, I love the aesthetics of the water color and it is a nice effect that I would be able to implement later on in the series. And that isn't to say that I can't apply the watercolor to my icons if I don't end up going down this route inevitably, it's a nice concept that fits well with my icons overall. This is what I was getting at in my latest type post about texture reenforcing meaning and giving additional meaning to what is already there.

All-in-all I have some very solid roads to go down and choose from for this part of the project and that excites me a lot. From here on out I love these two-color studies digitally.

typetwo. change one thing. final.

Here is the screen shot of how my poster looked on the front page! It was exciting to see it up and everyone who accessed the website at that time saw it as well. Will I win? Absolutely no clue, but this was definitely an enjoyable project to do nonetheless. Below is bigger version of my final poster.

So this is the final product. I'm rather pleased with this poster seeing as I started this entire process with this:

The initial idea was definitely there, but everything about it just wasn't anything absolutely stunning. With revisions, revisions, and more revisions I finally came up with the final design. Yes the aesthetics of the poster are just that, aesthetics, and doesn't help push content or meaning further, the poster just didn't feel right, or complete with a solid color or even a gradient background that echoed the colors of the paper. I realized once i finished this poster how much I despise 100% digital work without any sort of hand-made quality to it. This was a nice process to be able to spend such a long time on one poster. There is so much that goes into posters that I never fully realized. It's pretty dang difficult to make a shnazy poster and I have so much more respect for the greats who have come before me who have made such amazing posters.

sources: aiga blueridge poster clash website.