Hey everyone, time for an update! I haven't been able to do much personal work lately because school projects have been keeping me quite busy, so this update will be about another task for my design class I recently completed. This was another project completed in Adobe Illustrator. It's still something that's not completely familiar to me so I had to jump through quite a few hoops to finish my design. It was tough, but I'm really happy with the end result.

The criteria for this project was pretty simple; illustrate a quote from a well-known literary or historical figure. The final image needed to be poster size (27"x40") so we had a lot of room to work with. After browsing the internet for a while and looking through quotes from people like Maya Angelou, John F. Kennedy, and few others, I happened upon a quote I liked. This one was from Aristotle; "whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." I thought there was a lot there to work with to create an interesting image so I started sketching out my idea right away.

I knew I wanted to break up the image into three distinct sections, then tie them together through the use of alternating font sizes. A colored gradient underneath would help the transition from one image to the next. Since Aristotle was Greek I decided to give the image a mythical punch by using Zeus as a supernatural force throughout. After doing a little research I found that Zeus was known to take the form of a bull, this worked perfectly with the quote and my idea so I felt like I was on the right track. After a couple of minutes scribbling on a scrap of paper I came up with this.

It was perfect (or so I thought)! The idea was approved by my instructor and then I got to work executing it. After a bit of googling for some images that I could use to layout the design I plopped them into Illustrator to see how it was going to look. Upon seeing everything together I realized I made a grave mistake. Take a look.

Way too much going on, no way possible to arrange the elements in the image to make them look connected, no font and gradient could save this. Bad design, bad. After staring at my computer screen in defeat for a few moments I knew I simply had to start over.

I reviewed my original quotes a couple of times, and not being too enthused with anything I was seeing I looked for some new ones. Finally I happened upon something promising by Ralph Waldo Emerson; "A man is related to all nature." It was simple, had a wonderful message, and got me thinking. This was the quote I would use.

I did a tiny sketch of what I wanted the final image to look like, then started figuring out how I wanted to arrange all of the elements within the composition. We had learned about Fibonacci in our discussion about proportion and creating harmony in an image, so I thought it might be neat to use his number sequence in my design. These are a few thumbnail sketches I did showing some representations of concentric circles and the various designs I wanted to include in them.

I decided I wanted to create and arrange symbols that would represent the natural world, mountains, trees, flowers, and animals, radially within each circle. I would then place a man at the center of the image and the quoted text at the bottom. I was going for a bit of a retro look since I felt the quote could easily be applied to the 60's, so I looked up some old posters for reference then started plugging away.

I tried everything I could think of to make the design work, but for whatever reason I couldn't quite get the shapes to repeat within the circles in the way I wanted. Again I had hit a wall. I tried looking through tutorials online, tried typing in what I was attempting to do into Google, hoping it would magically produce an answer but to no avail. I knew my concept wasn't bad but I just couldn't execute it within Illustrator due to a lack of knowledge.

Since I couldn't produce the elaborate thing I envisioned I thought the next best thing to do was to distill my concept to its essence. After all, a poster should be something you see that you don't have to pour over and analyze. I know I don't see many of them every day but if I do they're there to quickly convey a message. I realized my problem this time around was the same one I had before. I was just making things too complicated. The core of the quote is man's relationship to nature, that part of this sentence is almost the whole quote! There was no need to design something so ornate, it's a simple idea with impact. With my "Ah-ha!" moment came the final push for me to finish the piece, this is what I came up with.

I wanted people to see how closely connected we are to the natural world around us which is why the circles represent an eye. Within the "pupil" is man, and the color of the "pupil" is a loamy brown to symbolize the earth. The man stands on the earth because we walk on the ground, but also because when we die our bodies return to the ground, this is why he can also be viewed as laying down. The "iris" is filled with flowers and greenery to represent nature, and the blue symbolizes the water and sky. Finally the quote at the bottom is placed in such a way to emphasize the meat of the quote which is "man to nature," that's why that text along with the man are shown in white. I really wanted to drive that association home. I feel like this design is extremely successful at communicating what I wanted it to and I'm incredibly happy that this process (which was at times rather frustrating) ended up being such a great learning experience.

If you guys got through all of that I salute you! I'm pretty sure this was my longest post ever (had to make up for the fact that I missed that last update in October). Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. I've got one other project almost done, and another one I'm about to start. There will be much more to come this month so check back later!