BRIEF
The Palette is my way of bringing obedience to my creative work. Although intuitively all of my designs should reflect me, since they come from me. I still find it important that observers, collaborators, and myself have a designated place to fall back on to better understand the methods that go into my creative approach – which is what I hope to achieve with this palette.
I hesitate to condense my approach to “minimalism” whereas minimalism is the leanest form of art, reducing creation to only the necessary elements, I seek to convey “things that make you think”. Even to me at times, my taste feels ambivalent, but I have grown to realize it is friction that makes great art. Precise, methodical, contradictions are provoking, which makes for great creations.
THE PALETTE
LOGOS
There were a few different considerations going into the process of coming up with my logos.
- Look professional
- Constructed geometrically
- Can be looked at in different ways
Below are some of the sketches I made in the process of coming up with this logo.
Majority of the designs were made symetrically. Artistically, the idea here is to reflect one of the cardinal traits of my personality, which is the tendency to get conflicted looking at things emotionally and logically. Some might rebut the comprehension of that, but neverthless, those were my intentions.
It was one day where I came across a video talking about the science behind corporate logo creation that fascinated me. Seemingly pan simple graphics such as the Pepsi logo, actually took rounds and rounds of iteration with percise geometric considerations. I wanted to give my logo that same level of seriousness.
The logo consists of parallel lines that run the through the middle and horizontally, and all angles are 60 and 120 degrees. I achieved this by using smart guides in Adobe Illustrator, snap to grid functions enabled me to put down points with 0 room for error. Another small but key detail, every corner is butt-capped, slightly rounded. By default, these points are sharp. In large part, this decision was an artistic choice, a metaphor for my emotional brain coexisting with my logical brain.
On the surface this is 4 dots scattered on a perpendicular line. Or to few, it is a negative and positive 1x slope on the 1st and 2nd quadrants of a graph. Both of these interpetations are correct. However, I wanted this to design to be based on emotions. Earlier I talked about how I see myself as a very emotional person. This graphic is a series of emotions, once again, depending on how you look at it.
A reminder, the goals of these designs are to be interpretable, professional, and geometric. Once again, this graphic captures on all 3 goals.
Sidebar: The sunrise idea will come back around.
Professional brands have type style logos. Normally “Tommy Hilfiger”, “Calvin Klein”, “Louis Vuitton” are put side by side. So I was kind of just like fuck it, let me style it like this instead. Font used here is Oswald, it has been my favorite font for a while, and goes right into my signature typefaces.
TYPOGRAPHY
COLORS
Although in the palette PDF above, there are only 3 colors listed, this is one of the brand rules I cant help but break. I can’t/won’t be limited to just a few colors. But recall that sunset I talked about earlier, these are the colors I love, colors of the earth. This image was made by me in illustrator and I think it pretty much sums up how I feel about colors. My selection boils down to a specified spectrum, rather than a few narrowly defined tones.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
- MAKE IT GROUNDED
- MAKE IT TRANSPARENT
- MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
Grounded – Things that feel like they belong, nothing alien. Things that could blend into our world.
Transparent – Show thoughts and ideas behind creations. This blog is an example, my other social channels are examples. I am continually very transparent with my “why” behind creations.
Make Sense – I strongly strongly believe it is the context around art that accencuates the appeal of an individual piece. Even if someone is viewing something for the first time, I want that person’s experience in viewing the subsequent creations to feel cohesive, nothing is random. Everything follows certain design philosophy. This “palette” idea is a stake in the ground for that.
LASTING THOUGHTS
I really do think for the future, constantly. The reason why I share so much of my thoughts behind what I do is because I know how valuable context can be. There are magnificient pieces of art in history; musicals, paintings, movies. With those, there comes a tremendous amount of ambiguity as to what the artist was thinking because it was never documented. Some say that is the nature of the artist, to be an expressionist, I.E: Talk through the art, not explicity. I disagree, I believe my articulation is my strongest artistic traits I possess, above fashion design, music production, and design, I have always been great at communicating. Why should I limit that?
Sometimes I don’t fully understand what I put down as I do it. That’s the truth. However, I always enjoy questioning, “Where did that thought come from?” I believe in the divine nature of thoughts. I believe I have a great intuition in knowing what is a good idea. It’s a feeling I can’t really describe, I just know when it feels right. These annotations come after the reflection process, after I have sat with the idea and its divinity, and I have came to a sound justification for myself as to why I was gravitated to it.
If you made it this far in the read, thank you so much. Seriously.