Mission: Nature VS Nurture

As I stare at these innocent flowers I wonder: Did their parents teach them that it is bad to steal otherpeople's flowers' phones? Or did they just naturally grow to know that stealing is wrong?

-Phoneless Rebecca Irons

Week 5 Assignment: Color Schemes and Nameplates

The Mission: (As if you don't know) Take a photograph of something colorful and natural outside and use it as inspiration for a color scheme and nameplate.

The Location: The freezing, yet snowless, tundra that is HPU.  (Clearly Nido's weather machine is going haywire.  This weather is not extraordinary.)

The Side Note: Let me just say- taking pictures of beautiful and colorful nature things is sorta difficult in the winter. But I digress...

Step one: The Photograph

Believe it or not, I took this photo.  I know, real National Geographic quality here.  The photographic force is strong with this one.

This photo is of some of the few colorful blooming flowers I found around campus.  These particular flowers were found shivering in the flowerbed outside of Phillips hall by the fountain at the end of the Promenade.  I was particularly attracted to the contrast between the brilliant purple color and the bright, happy yellow.

Step Two: Color Swatch

Since, as I said above, I was particularly attracted to the purples and yellows, those were clearly going to be two of the colors I chose to put in my color scheme.  The last color was logically the green of the flower stems.  I felt the green would be the perfect addition to the trio since it tied the yellow and the purple together as the same stem color for both color flower.

I think coming up with the swatches and tints is my favorite part of the project.  Its fun to pick colors out of pictures and play with the colors you can retrieve.

Step Three: Nameplates

Nameplate 1

Nameplate 2

Nameplate 3

Anyone fun and creative won't like my typeface, but I love it. I think it looks very bookish and nerdy, which pleases The Boss.  I liked the aesthetics of having my list of professional/semi-professional qualities separated like you have yours, Heagney, but my need for individuality would not let me use the vertical bars like you had.  I thought the brackets were aesthetically pleasant, and had a book-end like effect for my qualities. 

Something else I was sure to toy with was the symmetry of the nameplate.  I liked the lingual symmetry of using an -er suffix for all of my qualities.  However I was (and still am) increasingly displeased by how unsymmetrical the list is visually.  I played with it for a while but liked the aural symmetry in the repeating pattern of the hard "k" sound in the second and fourth qualities in the list, so ended up leaving the list as it is shown above.

Since I know I'm probably way over the word count (SORRY), I'll briefly talk about how I chose colors.  You emphasized "contrast, contrast, contrast" in class so that's what I tried to do. I always used one of the lightest tints and one of the darkest tints in each nameplate.  The third color could be of any tint as long as it stood out enough and looked appealing.

Mission Completed. Agent 00Boss debriefed.

See you in class.