Design as A Research-Led Response Process Book
Reflection
This project was a little bit of a challenge for me cosidering how I wanted to it in the beginning. When I was given this assignment of recreating back alley ways of downtown Medicine Hat, I thought I had evrything mapped out of how I was going to do the project, what it was going to look like; everything. When I started in the beginning, I wanted to avoid using Illustrator and stick to hand crafted methods to design my back alley. I began by priting off a poster size image of my alley and took tracing paper to show the idea of building from the ground up by using different layers to convey what I wanted this space to have and what I wanted it to look like. It wasn’t working out for me, so I completely restarted and tried making it more digital and clean. This process made the project move a long a lot faster, but also I spent a lot of time teaching myseld day by day new tools that could help me a long the way so there wouldn’t be double the time spent doing one thing when I could have used that time for something else. Overall, I liked this project and I hope that the skills I learned doing this assignment will only help me to better my graphic designs kills.
Catalyst One
In Catalyst One, we were to walk around downtown to find and take as many photos as we could of back alleys from all different types of angels and view points. Then once we had all of the images we needed, we traced around the images we had, scanned them into Illustrator to create a poster using the scanned tracings to make a visually appealing piece.
9.08.2014
I started brainstorming what I wanted my space to look like by doing lists of what could be in the alley or the colors and texure. I even started to think about if the spaced could be turned into a farmers market. Also, I started to take notes of what were positivies and negatives of an alley way and trying to see if I could eliminate some negatives and hopefully insert more positives to make the space more inviting.
Notes
Next, I wanted to figure out if I was going to play with a much bigger space, like the entire alley, or go with a small section of the alley that could have attention drawn to it. At this point I knew that I wanted to physically draw out my ideas, but I hadn’t decided on what materials I was going to be using that would be easy for me to get my point across. Making the space feel comfortable and cozy was the main idea I wanted to go with for this project, because most alleys are creepy and are not usually the most exciting places you see.
9.10.2014
Research Images
Here is just some of things I was looking at to go with my ‘Modern Meets Rustic’ idea I had for my alley space.
9.15.2014
Pinterest Mood Board
I enjoyed making a Pinetrest board for this project, because I found so many neat ideas that I could put towards my design for my back alley. Pinterest helps me to better organize my thoughts way faster then what I can draw out in my head.
9.20.2014
My Alley
Layer 1 - Ground
Drawing Process
Layer 2 - Seating
Layer 3 - Greenery
Final Design
This is my final design for Project One. It is minimalistic because I didn’t want to make my design too complicated to the point where no one could really understand which direction I was going to design this space. I played with some textures, such as the cement to help give the design more dimension, rather than it just looking flat. Shannon Lee and I worked in a similar fashion as too making layers to help show our ideas to be more cohesive. My favorite part about the entire piece is the little mason jar lights I created to make the space seem more inviting and cozy. I believe I achieved what I was after with doing this project, it is simple and elegant with a modern twist to create a cozy evironment for people to come and enjoy.
10.06.2014