viscomtwo. icons. reflection.

I started out this project with a fairly good mindset as to what I wanted to do. I went ahead and chose something that I knew pretty well having swam on the boys swim team all four years of high school. I have a pretty nice understanding of how everything works and I also have a love and a passion for swimming so why not combine two of my loves in one project?

At the beginning of the creation process of the icons I was having a rather rough time making my objects less drawing-esque and more iconic. For some reason it just didn't fully click in my brain but once it did I whipped out a nice set of eight different styles of icons.

I loved the continuous line set. Not only was it a style that no one else was doing, but it also fit my story. Having my story be all about the swimming race and then having all my icons be one solid, continuous line fits magnificently perfect. However, the icons themselves are still not perfect and I more than plan on going back to them over the rest of the project to keep tweaking them, improving them, and even adding new icons to them.

I would say the starting block is definitely my weakest icon, as Jamie pointed out to me. All of my other shapes, for the most part, all have a solid form to them, not a lot of white spaces jabbing into them like my starting block. I will hopefully find a better starting block to reference my icon for that object to get it more solid like the rest. I would also love to have all these icons be as slick and smooth as the whistle. The whistle was my first, and still the best, icon of this set. It was the one that really set my direction into production.

viscomtwo. icons. going for gold.

My icon set, is about a swim meet. The objects I chose for this project were(in order from left to right in the image below) jammer(swim suit), cap & goggles, starting block, whistle, stopwatch, towel, medal. Below are the icons at 1/2 inch scale.

While thinking about how I wanted to draw my icons I had many different ideas. Everything from geometric shapes to cut outs. However, when it came down to choosing the route that I wanted to go with, it was without a doubt the single line route. My story revolves around a giant pool of water so the concept of having all of my objects made up of one continuous, fluid line made the most sense. I wanted to reference water and fluidity of it through that aspect of these icons.

Here is the linear process of my stopwatch.

Larger images after the jump.

desqtaup. one.

bulgarian stamps.

viscomtwo. readingfour.

Generate and cull. The term cull, for me, goes back to when I worked at an orchard this past summer. They grew hundreds upon hundreds of peaches each summer. We then sorted them and we had ripe peaches and culls. Culls were still good, just ugly. They would have dents in them, holes. This, in my opinion, correlates pretty well into design with what the article said. Create a gigantic amount of ideas and iterations and then go back through them all to figure out which ones work the best and which ones are ugly, dented, and bruised. You always want to pick out which designs convey the message the best, yet are, or have the possibility to be, aesthetically pleasing. The article also went on to say that if you feel you have a creative block, just start sketching everything or anything that comes to mind so you can see what you're coming up with and using what little bit you can get out to inspire you further. don't worry about how stupid or ugly they are, as long as you get the ideas out to inspire you.

sources: agrayspace.

dp. thirtythree. josef albers.

Speaking of AisleOne here is a post about something they featured. This is Josef Albers. We(us sophomores, at least) all know Josef Albers all too well from Terri's Color Drawing & Form class last semester. However, those weren't the only things he did in his life time. He also did album covers:

And this is just one example of a larger set of covers that he did. They are all quite magnificent(I would say wonderful but I've been forbidden to say that word, I've been told to update my vocabulary). They totally hark back to his color studies that he did, but they are still gorgeous in their own right. Follow the link above or below and there a more of them for you to gawk at. They have nice color palettes and the layouts are also very pleasing. Take a look at them, you'll be happy.

sources: aisleone, minus space.