ABOUT THE SERIES
In Illustrative Chronicles, STIR looks at the art and design of illustration as a discipline to narrate stories of the contemporary urban, created in digital and non-digital formats. Illustrative Chronicles is an original series by @stir_world.
ABOUT THE IDENTITY
Illustrative chronicles was a STIR original series that examined works from the world of Illustration. For the visual language, I started to look at the works of the artists that were a part of the series and tried to dissect the stories they told with their illustrations. Whether it was Koketit’s ultra-romantic lines or Carissa Potter's portrayal of human connections, all illustrations exuded warmth and hope, which became the center of my visual identity.
While looking for inspiration, I stumbled upon this particular work by an Indian illustrator named Khyati Trehan, where she used a lot of different shapes - one on top of the other, almost like the game of Tetris. I loved how so many different shapes were making sense when put together, in a very odd way - organized chaos 101. I imagined random shapes falling from the sky and just taking up the space that they get. I was not too sure about this, since it did not relate to the series at all, but it seemed like an idea worth exploring. From my past experience, I have realized that ideas are very strange. Sometimes you get one that makes little sense, but you still want to explore it because it is interesting and your gut is telling you to, and eventually, it either leads to something that works, or you adapt it to make sense.
I started experimenting with different shapes, and when I put them all together, they started to look like letterforms, which was a good direction to explore. I decided to write Illustrative Chronicles with these shapes as letters, but the moment I put more shapes on the screen, it looked deliberate and cluttered. So I stuck to the initials, I & C, and tried different combinations of how they would fall on each other. I initially thought that I could make a gif of all of the different ways, but this one particular form, where the C was just at the bottom edge of the I, had so much more character than any other. A lot of ideas I get are in motion, and not to my surprise, the moment I saw the C just resting at that edge, I could see it rocking like a chair. The falling letters had now taken a different turn and I was excited about how this was progressing.
Positivity means different things to different people; to me, it often means humor. I wanted it to be funny in some way, and for people to relate to it - have a human touch. Thanks to all the stick drawings that we made in our childhood, almost instantly after thinking about introducing a human touch, the ‘I’ started to seem like a character without a head, with its two legs and hands spread out, and one of its hands pushing the ‘C’, instead of it rocking on its own. Two birds, one stone? Not so quickly, the two hands and two legs were making the creative very noisy, but I loved the hand pushing the C inside, so I removed everything but it. And it worked; it still felt like a character, but not in the most obvious way.
With the logo, I wanted to bring in contrast. All of the illustrations were so free-flowing, including the one I made for this identity. Now I got to thinking about whether I could make it restrictive and contain it in a grid. And this is precisely what I did - I used a very geometric font, and put it inside four grid lines. Art is often a balance of creative freedom and constraints.
ADAPTATION FOR WEBSITE BANNERS
