Project Two: Form and Composition

Part I: Sketching Thumbnails

I initially drew five sketches for each of three word pairs.

When I did my rhythmic sketches I was inspired by thinking about symmetry and beats. For erratic, I thought of words such as unorderly and uneasy.

For boundless, I mostly thought of creating sketches that would feel like they continued off the page. So a few of sketches had squares bleed of the page. For compact, I thought of small, and closed together.

For tension, I thought of uneasiness, and for playful I thought of fun-loving and exciting.

In general, I had an easy time creating thumbnails inspired by the words Tension and Playful. I had a much harder time with sketching thumbnails inspired by the words Rhythmic and Compact. For rhythmic, I kept thinking about music and musical notes and I initially couldn’t visualize an appropriate way to portray that with black squares. Lastly, for compact I initially kept thinking of the literal definition of the word so it took me a while to draw five sketches.

Overall, I thought my sketches were a good initial start but that I could play around with uneven spacing and the orientation of the squares in my digital iterations.

Part II: Sketches to Digital Iterations

I tried to improve on some of the initial sketches I had by trying out different things in illustration. One example is one of my boundless sketches:

The one on the left was my initial boundless sketch that I created on illustrator and the one on the right is my final boundless sketch. First, I decided to use the rule of thirds instead of a straight line because I wanted the viewer to move their eyes back and forth. I did this by having squares start at 2/3 line and go to the 1/3 line and then come back to the 1/2 line. Also, for the sketch to feel like it doesn’t stop on the page I wanted the squares to bleed in both directions.

I continued to revise my initial sketches in Illustrator and played around with uneven spacing and orientation. Here are my final sketches:

Lastly, some feedback I received on my final sketches during the critique session was to play around more with patterns and color. I will take that feedback as I work on future projects.