Creature mark
CREATURE mARK
Creature Mark Project?
A traditional design aesthetics project generally completed by first year UC College of Design students.
How do you represent a complex animal as a graphic translation?
The simplification of form to a list of chosen associative attributes and a “toolkit” of parts to build it with.
What’s the goal?
To portray a chosen animal’s physical and associative traits within a simple and aesthetically pleasing composition combining written poetry and imagery.
references
Discovering what gives my creature its own unique identity and the features that comprise its form, I created a “mood board” to help me build a visual reference that I can use as a starting point.
SKETCHing
A wide variety of sketches helps me slowly simplify my ideas from complex pencil drawings to Illustrator translations. All of these lead me towards my eventual, final digital product.
DIGITAL IDEATION/ITERATION
Inspired by my sketches from the previous stage of my design process,
I developed a variety of digital illustrations using simple components and iterated on them until I achieved a final result that communicated what I had intended to about my selected creature for the design.
“Through crashing waves and Icy spray the rockhopper penguin paves its own way…”
–Milla Wright (classmate)
poetic narrative
For the next stage of this process, descriptive, poetic phrases were written by a peer and were related to the chosen creature. Emphasizing the determined look in the penguin’s eye and its trail-blazing outlook on the future, this phrase was selected to make a composition based around.
COmposition Drafts
Based on the poetic narratives that were provided to me, I constructed three different compositional drafts reusing shapes from the creature mark to help with visual cohesion.
Color and typeface
While exploring potential typefaces, I wanted to find one that encapsulated the independent feeling of the penguin while also providing an aesthetic similar to its tropical island roots. For color, I was inspired by 20th century punk rock design, specifically the british band Sex Pistols.
FINAL PRODUCTS
Representing the rockhopper penguin through both its physical traits and personality traits, I had a goal of communicating all of these aspects in a visual manner that felt reminiscent of late 20th century punk trends and rebelliousness.
