Project 3 – Colours

Value: Perseverance

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

To me, this quote meant that, no matter how sour a situation is, I should always try my best to make the most out of the situation. Not just because something doesn’t seem good at first impression or first try, I give up trying.

Working with this quote, I wanted to introduce fun and liveliness to my poster. This meant I needed warm and pastel-ly colours in my work. I also chose fruit as an object in my quote as it would create a focal object, rather than having too many shapes.

This poster consist of a lemon, a straw and bubbles. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This is shown by the straw sticking out of the lemon. The bubbles are pink to signify joy. Rather than treating lemons as sour, we try to perceive it positively. The lemon is also not a full rounded circle, this is because a lemon is not perfecty shaped (slightly uneven), just like how the problems being thrown to us in life, they are not perfect, but we can always turn a negative situation into a positive one for us.

Design Elements
Lines – Except for the straw, all the lines are curved. Curves suggests a form of relaxation and comfort, which are pleasing to look at. The reason why the straw is straight is because it creates stability and balances out the curves in the poster.
Texture – Lots of circles of different sizes and opacity representing bubbles, creates a happy texture.
Space – Lemon shape does not clutter the entire poster, neither does it take up too little space. Allowing space for the poster to “breathe”.
Proportion – Fizzy pink bubbles are smaller in size as compared to the lemon. It also creates focus on the lemon, while not creating clutter.
Typography – Text is aligned to the right. The comma and full stop is also aligned
Colour – Colours used are very in line with nature, like how the straw is the same colour as that of a lemon’s leaf.

Design Principles
Rule of Third – Lemon takes up 2/3 of the poster and the straw occupies the top 1/3.
Golden Ratio – We can also see the golden ratio as the lemon curves towards the placenta of the lemon, which is nearly about the golden ratio.Image result for anatomy of a lemonContrast – Contrasting colours is used where green and yellow is in analogous but pink is in contrast to both the colours.
Depth – The whole lemon is in a solid colour while the pink bubbles have a lower opacity, this allows the lemon to pop while the pink shade recedes into the background.

Gestalt Principles
Closure – Although the poster does not show the full shape of a lemon, we can tell it is a lemon due to the law of closure.

Colour Palette
My colour choice consist of light colours which have a pastel tone to it, evoking a calming effect. The yellow colour is warm which makes the lemon pop.

Yellow: An energetic colour signifying joy and happiness.
Green: Fresh and earthy.
Pink: Playful and bubbly.

I chose to use split complementary colours where it consist of yellow, green and toned down purplish red (pink). Here’s how I pair the colours together as shown in the colour wheel below.

Yellow and green are analogous to each other. Which meant that they blend well together, however I want my poster to have a playful tinge of contrast, and pink felt like the best choice. Therefore I end up using split complementary colour combination.

Difficulties
Initially my poster design was very flat because I dare not go bold with my idea. So what I did was placing my object in the center of the poster. After consultation with our teacher, I shifted my design to occupy 2/3 of the poster, and it really created more focus to the object.

It was my first time working with the pen tool and using shapes to create a design. It was difficult to use the pen tool to create desired curves, but I really enjoyed the process of learning and mastering the bicycle handle of the pen tool.

Conclusion
To conclude, I am very thankful for the opportunity to learn illustrator. I feel that it is a very valuable skill to learn in school. I now know how to create objects using simple shapes, and I have also learnt that illustrator is  much better than photoshop when it comes to creating logos and designs as it uses vector, which meant quality of image will not be compromised.

 

Poster Design Research

Research

Values
There are so many values that I feel is admirable of a respectable person. However, I feel that someone who has a never give up attitude wins it all. If a person has integrity and diligence, but is pessimistic and gives up easily, he/she could potentially make it far in life, but due to not having perseverance, did not make it in doing what he/she wants to do.

Thus, the value I chose is: Perseverance.
When Thomas Edison did not succeed in his creation, he says:

I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that did not work.

His sheer perseverance is a motivation to all of us, that no matter how much we fail, we should always continue to persevere through life’s obstacles. He is highly respected for his work and contributions to the world. If he had given up just one time, the world today may not have this many inventions.

With that, I picked the following quote,

When life gives you lemons,
make lemonades.

Visual
I then went ahead to do some visual research.

For the first inspirational work, it is made up of three circles and one straight vertical line connecting the red to the bottom outlined circle. Also, there is a colour contrast of using only red while the rest of the circles did not have a fill. Could you tell what it is?

That’s right! It’s a wine glass. I like how satisfying it is to see all these simple shapes illustrating an object.

The next poster that inspired me was this one that says mouth Fuji. I really liked how they used the shape of lips and between the mouth, it kind of looks like teeth and an opened mouth, and yet it also looks like Mount Fuji. This poster is nice because it plays with the negative space between the mouth. The colours used are only red, black and white. A very safe choice of colours.

The next poster I saw also really attracted my attention. It uses the rule of third where the squares are all in the top 2/3 of the poster. The squares are also placed side by side to create a neat pattern. This poster speaks so much to me, although I am not diagnosed with OCD, but I believe everyone has this little OCD in them in different situation. And for me, the one misaligned square did get on my OCD nerves. By having only one square tilted, it was able to create emphasis on it.

The word OCD at the bottom 1/3 of the poster, although small, speaks a loud voice.

During our illustrator workshop, I created these icons accordingly to the class exercise examples. I also chose pastel-ish colours as I really like colours with lower saturation.

Some other shapes I created to try out the functions of illustrator:

 

A hand I created using square, rectangles, polygons and ellipse tool only!

Sketches & Mood board
I wanted to come up with a design revolving around lemons. Thus I did some sketches with lemons and lemonade (juice) in it, trying my best to sketch with simple shapes like triangles and circles.

That’s about it for my research, next up will be the actual work on the final piece! 🙂