Rietveld Chair/Torture Device

This thing looks like a torture platform, when you think about it. Anyway. Rather than make different angles in different renders, I felt it would be more efficient to put multiple angles in a single render. Shazam!

For the yellow ends I selected the faces, detached those, and then applied a material. For the black, I used a slightly diluted shade so the angles would show up easier in the render.

I think these chairs are replicating themselves!

They’re like rabbits, it’s out of control! Calgon, take me away!

IFDM 105 Portfolio 2012

This is my work for the portfolio assignment. The typeface I used is called Century Gothic. It is a beautiful, I think, and clean alternative sans serif to typically used fonts such as Helvetica.

chamberlain_eric_IFDM_portfolio_2012

New Collage 02

Here is another version. Some of my work is monochromatic and as I noted that in the original it reminded me of another aspect of design/ideation/creation that I wanted to share. So in this version I have added some colors on either side. I could have put them across the entire composition but they are compelling this way because they hint at a larger, unknown space or idea. What is off to the side? One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it is often better to just hint at something, just show a dash of something rather than have it dominate what you are looking at. If you have a great hook in a song, would it still be great if the hook made up the entire song? Look at Jaws and Cloverfield; you rarely see the whole creature because your mind is actually more titillated by what might be than what you can actually see.

New Collage 01

I made this using elements from my three other vector posts, including mechanical and organic work. The forms in the background are meant to be an abstract skyline, and they have come full-circle in the design process: The original shape was a skyscraper, warped and turned into a landscape, then that landscape was turned back into the skyline you see above. Given the depth and complexity of the organic forms, I opted to balance that with the cold, clean lines and arrangement of the cars. You’ll notice a slightly blurry texture over the whole composition. I think it would look fine without that element, but for the sake of the assignment I added the clouds form my Chicago Architecture Foundation, which I also added as part of this general assignment.

Vector Assignment 03

Chicago Architecture Foundation

This is one of several posters I made as a pitch for the Chicago Architecture Foundation. I was inspired to do this project after taking the river cruise on a recent trip there to view the various building designs. I include it here because the basic design was made with Illustrator. What appear to be abstract architecture are simply vector polygons extruded in various ways. As in my first entry for this assignment, I also used these shapes to make brushes. I have found that when individuals begin Illustrator they have trouble grasping just how powerful it is. I would say that just about anything can be made in Illustrator if you know what you are doing.

The final composition was made in Photoshop, mostly for the cloud textures. Regarding mechanical versus organic this, like my other two assignment entries (Who does three times the required work? A Nexus 6!), has both mechanical and organic elements. Mechanical in its origin, organic in its shaping.

The image above uses the same techniques. Everything was designed in Illustrator, with the background texture being a blurred photo I took. Whether I assemble a design in Illustrator or InDesign depends on the goal; for something like this Illustrator is fine. For something that uses a lot of type and a typical publication format then I would use Illustrator.

Mechanical and Organic Vector Collage 02

These two images, the more mechanical of my assignment entries, were made with a Honda Civic in Illustrator. I used the Pen Tool to draw over a photograph and then I altered the stroke widths so that the closer and more prevalent lines were more bold. The first composition/collage was made with elements created in Illustrator that were assembled to look like roads. The textures were added in Photoshop but if I had needed to I could have placed a texture jpg in the document and then used the multiply blending mode and transparency to get the same effect. Just as a point of interest I almost always begin all of my illustrations in Illustrator. I prefer working with vectors.

The image on the right uses the same car, but since a lot of my other material presented here has textures I wanted this to be straight vector line work. I took the car and rotated it and duplicated it (60 degree angles) to make a flower. Another note: Once you make a single rotation, you can repeat it with CTRL-D, so that way you can make shapes like that very quickly.

Mechanical and Organic Vector Collage 01

The shapes seen here were made purely within Illustrator, and then assembled in Photoshop. The whole thing could have been accomplished in Illustrator, but sometimes I like to experiment with things in another application to explore what else is possible and also to fine-tune the tone and contrast of the image. Even though this image begins with a structure, which is mechanical in nature, the final forms and landscapes are quite organic. Making something that is organic out of the cold lines of vector graphics and abstract forms of the math creates an interesting aesthetic quality, I think.

Above is a detail that shows the original mechanical structure used to make the entire image. This was made by creating basic polygons with the Pen Tool. Hold Shift to constrain proportions or angles while working.

In the above detail you can see a more organic look. This was created by taking the original structure shape and dragging it into the Brushes palette, thereby creating a brush preset out of an image. Then when you create a stroke and apply the new brush, the original geometry will match the contours of your new object. Looking back at the original image, you can see that I created form, structure, composition, a landscape, all with a unifying aesthetic, all from a single, original design.