The Original
The Redo
This project was from Digital Illustration, designed to be a three color t-shirt with the fourth color being the shirt's color. The object was to take a quote from Thoreau and find a way to represent it with the illustration. The quote speaks of natures rebirth from a burned forest, which reminded me of the story of the phoenix. I chose to use that as an inspiration giving the forsythia bush the slight appearance of a bird. I felt the explosiveness of the forsythia bush to match a fiery phoenix quite well. The audience would be those who are interested in Thoreau, or in unique T-shirts.
Ultimately what was decided was that what needed to be changed was the typography for readability. We stayed with a serif font because of the old time feeling of Thoreau as well as matching the shirt's qualities. It then became tricky, the only thing to change was the type's color. In the original it was black against yellow, in this design neither of the colors work well placed directly against the yellow. I decided to change the yellow shape to a stroke and change the type to yellow. This fulfilled a dual purpose, possibly easier readability and giving the logs their highlight which was removed. I do find this a bit easier to read, I think the black on yellow could have been too highly contrasting and became difficult to look at. It might also be that the highlight on the original logs needed to be larger to give the words breathing room.
I'm interested in hearing your feedback, I need to know what might make this more readable.
Hi Tom G, Very nice Illustration, I do not know how I could give more feedback to you however, I look forward to seeing other opinions as I could also learn from more knowledgeable feedback.
ReplyDeleteTom – this is a very strong portfolio piece because of your great use of shapes and color. The typography isn’t quite there yet… although you have improved it from the original. I wonder if the baseline for your type is too jagged, thus forcing the type to sit awkwardly from letter to letter. Can you use the “smooth” tool in Illustrator to make the baselines more smoothly curved, even as they echo the top of the wooden rails. (I’m guessing you copy/pasted the line work from the top of the rail… which can be the first step to making a good baseline for type to sit on, but only the first step). Concentrate of the relationship of the letters within their words… allow them to curve slightly and smoothly.
ReplyDeletePlease know that the byline is usually not larger than the quote itself IF it directly follows the quote… as it does here. Usually the quote itself is larger than the byline. BUT – I’m going to suggest you remove the byline from it current position anyway, because it looks really cramped down there. Where else can it go? What about along the top – small, bold and tracked widely across from left to right? That way we will actually see it first, not a bad thing.
Lastly – it appears that the quote seems to start very near the edges of your page… are they too close to the trim edge? Should you not leave a bit of a margin so they don’t get lost?