Surface Design

Choose a word with personal connotation and express it by creating hand-drawn letterforms and patterns using Adobe Illustrator.

Mind Map based on me to brainstorm for the word I'm going to use for the project.

Mood board picturing some possible design choices I might want to make for the Surface Design project. Texture, color, pattern, and letterforms are all pictured for inspiration.

My 35 personal colors I found from research that I'll take inspiration from/use in my projects.

First pass of thumbnails where I explored lettering and possible pattern design options. For the refined thumbnails, I elaborated on those designs in a little bit more detail.

Round 2 of thumbnails and refined thumbnails! This time I tried to focus more on the type and how I wanted that to look. I also focused on themes associated with musical rhythm, such as natural rhythm, and balance.

Mind map for the word "rhythm" to see what I really wanted to try with the pattern. I ended up really liking overlapping shapes and flowing gestures.

For my pattern, I decided to focus on the rhythm of dancers (ballet dancers in particular). The curves contrast the sharp angles in the font. The first 3 pictures are my sketches, and the last picture is the vector versions.

For the variations in letterform, I focused on color. I really liked the placement of the dancers, so I focused more on what feel I wanted to create with color. The pattern variations in the last picture are mostly based on the colors I used with the letterforms. However, the first pattern variation was a total experiment.

I went back and tried to make my patterns more visually interesting by adding more movement and depth to the original pattern. I included two variations of that type of pattern in place of two from before.