50 Shades of an Apple🍎
I was standing in my kitchen while waiting for my morning coffee to brew, thinking how I should do this assignment -to pick any physical object and make 50 different versions of it to learn to “see differently”.
There was a bag of Honeycrisp apples and thought that I should eat them soon as I bought them more than a week ago. I kept staring at them for a couple of seconds and remembered about this assignment. I noticed how each apple differed in colors and shapes -not one of them looked the same. Every single apple differs in color, shape, aroma, size, texture, and flavor.
Apple has been one of the most popular fruits in the world. Simple and staple, yet it represents many things: the forbidden fruit from Adam and Eve, the falling apple that helped Newton discover the concept of gravity, and of course, Apple, founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and all of its iconic products.
I started by writing down the main characteristics of apples to think about what makes an apple, an apple. Based on three categories (shape, color, and flavor), I wrote down anything that came up to my mind.
From there, I first took pictures of the apples in my kitchen from many different angles and cut them up in multiple ways to capture how each cut and move reveals a different surface. Then, I started experimenting with shapes on Adobe Illustrator with the assumption that people will recognize anything red with a short stem as an apple. After creating these simple illustrations, I asked 4 people to tell me what they think these are, and they all answered apple.
Then I took pictures of apples in the grocery store, and Apple, Inc. products that I own to capture the difference in texture and color.
I also experimented with different colors and shapes.
- Sketches to colored illustrations
- Short stem vs. long stem (with the assumption that an apple with a longer stem would be considered as a cherry)
- Bunny-shaped apples (my mom used to cut apples like this for my school lunch)
- Seeds
- Different slices
- Making orange and tomato look like apples
- Different colors, illustrations, and pictures inside shapes of an apple
- One line drawing
This exercise was challenging yet very interesting to work on. I thought about apples every day for a week and every time, new perspectives came to my mind. Observing a simple object like an apple from different perspectives taught me that there are countless views on everything depending on who, where, how, and when people see them. If someone else worked on ‘50 shades of an apple’, the 50 renderings will be entirely different from mine. When I worked as a UX Researcher, my hypotheses were proved wrong all the time, even simple things that all team members agreed on. It is important to keep in mind that there is a countless viewpoint on everything even a simple object like an apple.
Tools used: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate
