Christmas Break '08:
Analytical Drawing

Over the holidays, we were given two briefs. The first, to create a type source-book, which involved me walking round our deserted town centre on New Year's Day in the biting cold for around six hours taking over 250 photos of any typography, lettering, signage and shop fronts I could see. It would've been fun if I'd've had gloves, but cameras generally seem to rebel against any sort of hand-padding while handling them. Two lads asked me for 35p for a phone call, I had the exact change and nothing else. The referred to me as 'Mister' as well. Made me warmer.

Anyway, second brief was to take both a man-made object that had some sort of mechanical function, and a natural form, and to do some drawing studies on them, resulting in a simplified symbol or icon for each. Here's my stuff.

Man-Made Object: Philips Phillishave HQ6655

After doing a fair few drawings using my nice (and much sought after in the studio by everyone else but me) cool grey markers, I took apart my shaver for the first time... and it's pretty complex. After doing a good few pencil sketches of the various parts, blades and housing, I moved to Illustrator to get a decent amount of detail in. Much tinkering later, I'd created a lot of simplistic designs for the icon, and the exploded diagram of all the parts (underneath). I finally chose the icon above: the main feature of a Phillishave is the three circular heads, so those received the thich black stroke. The rest of the shape is recognisable enough through the piecing together of the different shades.

Natural Form: Courgette

It was originally going to be a pepper or something. I don't know. All I knew was a courgette was cheaper when I saw it, and I hadn't had one in years, since old family holidays in Devon. Strange thing, they don't have any sort of smell before they're cooked. But when they're in the pan, they're wonderful, and they change texture and colour so much, releasing this awesome smell that almost chokes you with the scent. I highly recommending picking up a cheap courgette, and frying it in some oil next time you go shopping.

Oh, you want design? Okay.

After doing some pen/pencil/marker work (and some collage), I went to slicing it up a bit to see what was inside. I was greeted by an extremely angular setup for the bottom one of those two: a three-pronged star, which was in turn its own three-pronged star, where the outmost points curve back in with perfect circular shapes to cover 180 degrees. It was nice, but still needed simplifying. I generated a quick gradient system based on the amount of each substance you could see at a 2D angle (outer skin, inner skin, outer pulp, inner pulp, semi-inner pulp), then simplified both that colour system and the central star to three colours, and a Y shape. Considering the outside of a courgette could be possibly confused a cucumber, a squash or something similar, I chose to recreate the cross-section as an icon, rather than a 3D object as I had the with the shaver. Making a quick style to perform to the text (VAG Rounded), then making the main feature (Y) a bit chunkier, and there it is.