Project 1: Spoonflower Design Contest - Root Vegetables

I love graphic design. I love the process involved in taking an idea and turning it into something tangible, visible, and beautiful.  That's why I have decided to create this blog, to show how a graphic designer takes an idea and turns it into a finished product. This is a behind-the-scenes peek at creativity in action from beginning to end, and hopefully it'll be worth the reading.

I love sewing, for the same reasons that I love graphic design. You start with an idea, and end up with a finished product that is not only beautiful but also practical and meaningful.  You can't love sewing without also loving fabric, and fortunately I have found a place where I can combine all three passions - Spoonflower.  Spoonflower also happens to offer a weekly design contest which in turn provides the perfect venue for demonstrating graphic design work in action.

The current contest is for ditsy prints, but since I've already submitted my contest entry for that, I'm starting this blog with the Root Vegetables contest. The deadline for entry is October 4, 2011.  That gives me one week to come up with a final design.

When I first saw the topic of the contest, I was a bit dismayed. Root vegetables do not exactly make my top list of inspiring things, but that's part of the challenge of being a real graphic designer - finding a way to take a subject and find something in that subject that you can embrace, some creative way to think about it that makes you excited to do the artwork.  After all, if you aren't excited about your finished product you can't honestly expect that anyone else will be either.

I started off by collecting images of root vegetables, preferably with their plant foliage still attached. I was looking for anything that might stand out in terms of color or shape patterns.  The color palette (excluding the plant foliage) is reds, oranges, purples, and whites.  Shapes are rounded rectangles, circles, and triangles. Nothing struck me, or stood out in particular (although as I am writing this I wonder what kind of quilt pattern could be formed from root vegetables shapes).   I decided to try a different direction.

I wrote out the word root. I added an s to the root, for roots.  Roots can mean a lot of things. Roots can be family, roots can be origin or beginning.  Origin, I thought, is the name of a rock band. That's when I started to think about what instrument each root vegetable would play if they were in a rock band.  I chose the carrot as the lead singer. I love carrots, and I don't think there are very many people out there who don't.  I thought of the potato as the drummer, then the rutabaga - the largest of the root vegetables - as the bass guitarist.  Lead guitarist could be the onion - another perennial favorite for those who cook.  Keyboardist could be the turnip, with radishes as back-up vocalists.

With this in mind I made out a rough draft sketch.  As I got to thinking more about it, though, I realized that the beet would make a better drummer (play on the word beat).  

I still have a few other concept ideas that I'll work on sketching out, just to see if any of them turn out better than this concept, but so far it's my favorite.  The other ideas are a block grouping of the root vegetables with their names emblazened beside them; a watercolor-style print of the roots growing below ground (think scientific textbook illustration); and now my quilt idea.

Stage 1 always begins with information gathering and a lot of thinking.  No idea gets turned away in the beginning, as you never know which idea will work out best.  Sometimes a concept proves too complex to pull off in the time frame allotted, sometimes it just doesn't work out the way you'd visualized at first, and sometimes it just doesn't carry the impact you'd like it to have when you finally get it all done.  That's why it's important to have multiple ideas you pursue, so you give yourself (or your client) something to choose from.