Week 2 2D Design

This week our class had to email our lecturer links to our blogs. After this we were given 40 minutes to create a background design for our blog.

At first I couldn't come up with any ideas of what i wanted to create on the blank canvas. I had ideas about having the background of my blog for the exhibition have something to do with Timor considering that is my focus for my exhibit. When playing around with colours and shapes from the basis of Timor's flag I didnt really like any directions i was going with it. So i took a step back and thought about what colours i like and what jumps to mind when my friends might see me to help the image represent me. 

Colours were light blue and light purple for two reasons one because they're the colours of Eeyore...(my favourite character) and they're just my favourite colours.

My nick name from my dad and friends is NEEDEE, this is also the name and number plate of my car. This name holds alot of sentimental values to me and cheers me up when my friends find random ways or meanings to throw it into conversation the word "needee"

Once these two things came to mind i decided i would try make typography pattern that i liked. The reason i like typology pattern making is because of the strange shapes and illusions you can create.  To make the overall pattern trick the eye i added angled lines, this makes the eye think that the lines with slight gaps in it do not run smoothly at the same angle. However they do! :)

As part of the exercise of creating this background we had to address 3 points;

• Shape
• Media
• Style

The shapes i created were to create eye trickery as well as a whole look intriguing. The letters could have been in straight lines but that wouldn't have produced the results i wanted so by selecting individual letter they became shapes instead of letters part of a word. This also gave me the ability to arrange them in a way to make the word as a whole demonstrate movement.

Media that i used was Illustrator CS5 to create my background image. I choose to use this software to re-familiarise myself with Illustrated because i haven's played around with it for a while.

The style is my own. In the sense that its cute, simple, clean with the use of my favourite colours and personalised by using my nickname as the centre attention.

To keep some continuity to my blog I used the same image with different colours for my Exhibition blog. The colours I chose to use were from the timor flag;

http://www.123rf.com/lightbox.php?lid=498768&start=80

As you can see there is a lot of red (which represents the blood lost during the war) and "according to the Constitution of the Democratic Republic of East Timor (Timor-Leste), the yellow triangle represents "the traces of colonialism in East Timor's History"; the black triangle represents "the obscurantism that needs to be overcome"; whilst the star, or "the light that guides", is white to represent peace."(reference:http://www.worldflags101.com/e/east-timor-flag.aspx)

These are strong meanings and colours so i thought it was important to represent it as best as I could within my original pattern. I did this by having the centre N of each section white to represent the star. I coloured the angled lines yellow to represent the shape and colour of the yellow used in the flag and last of all held it all together with the black background.

Shape: While trying to keep true to the colours I wanted to ensure that shapes were not affected and the eye trickery still remained.

Media: To change all the colours I still used Illustrator

Style: To represent my exhibition ideas using Timor traditional colours and still maintaining personal touch using my nickname.

"That's all I have to say about that. " Forest Gump...