Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Brief

There is probably some special reason of why Silver has the Ag symbol on the periodic table. I never looked into it, but it was interesting enough for me to choose Silver (Ag) as my Design symbol. I was initially going to use the Ag symbol to make a poster, but I thought more into it, and was compelled to make a logo and place it on a business card.

Research

For my research, of course, I looked up silver, learned a lot about it’s basic structure, and found Silver related compounds. I walked around the campus taking pictures of anything silver, and noticing the same gray shining in every piece. After I knew I was making a business card, I worked on making a business card for a silverware company. I researched different silverware companies and visited the Oneida website for reference.

Concepts

After looking at silver and studying it for a few hours, I lost the sense of color, and there was nothing in my brain but a gray-scale. With that in mind, I had the idea of creating a value based business card, rather than color. I also figured that it made more sense, due to the fact that it is a silverware company, and at first glance, I don’t want it to be mistaken for a Diner business card. After embossing, and beveling the letters, and after drop shadows and lighting, I saw that too many effects were being applied, which distracted me away from the actual logo that is in the business card. The logo is fairly simple and minimal, but has a strong feel to it. I wanted to separate the back of the business card from the front, so that one can appreciate the logo and the strength of the typeface.

Sketches

When it comes to sketching on paper, I can either make very few thumbnail sketches, or I can fill 4 pages of thumbnail drawings. It all depends on the project I’m working on. For this project, I felt like sketching anything that came to mind at that time, which were mostly logos of the symbol and different ways of writing them, along with a couple of sketches of what I wanted my business card to look like. Generally, my sketches are just different layouts of the same idea.

Execution

I used InDesign to create my business card. I usually create my logos on illustrator, but this logo was strictly typeface so there wasn’t going to be any Illustrator needed techniques. I used the pen tool to create the shapes on the business card and the type tool to create my type and logo. In addition, I had to adjust the leading and kerning to make the type and card as a whole attractive and legible

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