Child's Room

Before starting the designing for the child's room, which would eventually fit two 6 year old twin boys, I needed to get create another concept model. I created a separate concept model for the child's because a child's room had to be designed to be more kid friendly.

The best place to start looking for inspiration for a child's room is a child's book. The book I discovered was titles "What's Up?", which is basically about two children that want to find out what's up?. They start by going up stairs, then they climb a tree, climb a skyscraper, then end up on the moon and finish past the sun. At the end they come back down to ground and the reader realizes that it was all in their imagination. From that I wanted the focus of my concept to be focused around the imagination of a child.

I started with the idea of using circles to show the never ending imagination of the a child's mind. The fact that a circle is the only shape without corners or places were the line stops is what intrigued me the most about the shape. Since the children are still on earth I used the black boards to represent the real world or reality. The motion of circles through the black boards represents a child's imagination breaking though reality and showing that children have not limits and can do anything since they don't know any better. This is also seen through the entire book "What's Up?" as the kids do things impossible in reality, but when they use their imagination they can do anything.

A small part of the concept that I really enjoyed was fact that I used pastels to color the circles. A type of drawing media that can get quite messy made sense for this concept because children often get messy in everything they do. One of the final touches that I made to the concept was the fact that I took the pastels and smeared it all over my hands and wiped it on the black boards to give the visual affect of children finger prints. I thought this was the perfect way to wrap up the entire concept. Below is an image of the final concept for the child's room.

From the concept came the child's room. My main focus on the child's room in connection to the concept model was the circles. I used the wanted to use the idea of the different colored circles to create a an interesting lighting fixtures that would hang from the ceiling. All the fixtures were set colors that were made of transparent material that would let the light from the skylights above shine light through them and create colored lights below. The circle fixtures would also be have built in lights for night time when the sun is not shinning through the ceiling.

One of the parts to this project that I would like to improve and change was my delivery of my information. I feel that my room and designs were solid but the way that I presented them to my audience through my visual ads were poor. Looking back at my perspective sketches and two smaller sketches I feel they could have been stronger. Adding small details into drawings to show life, a human figure to give scale to the room, and a little more rendering would have really brought my drawings to life giving the clients a real idea of what I am trying to communicate to them

Kitchen Design

The Gregory Kitchen was the first room that I have worked on, studied, and designed. It was something that is new to me that I have been looking forward to but sort of nervous about too. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. After all I had all my concepts created for the kitchen, inspirational song, and had just learned a great deal of information about different kitchen design.

The first thing that I considered was the overall shape of my kitchen. I had a large space for my kitchen so I knew that I could pretty much have have any shape. I ended up going with a L-shaped kitchen with an average size island. I went with the L-shaped instead of the U-shaped because I wanted to make sure that there was plenty of room for person in wheel chair to access the space and function with no mobility problems.

The next thing I worked on was figuring out the work triangles. Since the home will have two adults doing the majority of the cooking I wanted there to be space for two adults to cook. Having one primary work triangle and one smaller secondary work triangle.

The last major part I focused on was the placement, heights, and material options for all the appliances and finishes. This is the step that I feel I needs the most improvement. I was not to sure which materials to choose and when I did choose them I was not think to much about how they combine with the other materials that combine. Since completing the project I have gone back and thought about what I would do differently choosing as far as choosing materials go.

Below are the pieces of trace that I mounted on foam core showing my initial ideas for my the Gregory's kitchen.

Concept Development for the Gregory Home

When Interior Designers start searching for new and creative ideas they don't just come up with them on the spot, they take time to develop.

A concept is one of the places that they originate ideas from. This concept below is the concept model that I will be using on redesigning the Gregory house. From it I will create different rooms, spaces, and unique circulation for their home.

I used the song "Soul Meets Body" by the band Death Cab For Cutie as my main inspiration in creating the concept model.

I want to live where soul meets body

And let the sun wrap its arms around me

And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing

And feel, feel what its like to be new

Above are the main lyrics that I used as inspiration because this part of the song pertained mostly to a home or place to live.

The main parts that I took from these few lines are "Soul Meets Body" and "Water cool and Cleansing"

"Soul Meets Body" - I took the idea of two different things coming together and meeting and applied it to a square cut in half that to form two triangles. This can be seen best in the overhead view on the image below. It shows two forms moving to and from each other, representing thing meeting and going away.

"Water Cool and Cleansing" - From this line I abstracted the lyric partly and came up with the idea of a wave washing over someone and cleaning/"cleansing" them. This can be seen in the perspective image below that shows the height of board ranges from five inches to 1 inch. This height difference represented waves

crashing and cleaning.

There were a few other parts I used as inspiration that helped lead up to my final design but those two lines are where a large amount of information was abstracted from. Below is the final product.

While this might be the final concept model for the Gregory home, there are still certain aspects that I would change. The main thing that I would like to change would be the overall structure of the model, I would make the model not so symmetrical. Since part of my inspiration is a wave it would make sense that the structure is not perfectly lined up and even. I could change this by moving each row up once set. This would create an uneven look, more realistic wave, create a structure that is not symmetrical, and more visually interesting concept model. Having created something like that would help to better communicate my concept and the direction I want to take with designing each room of the home in the future.

Process Poster

One of the jobs of a Interior Designer is being able to explain their ideas and process of a project to a client. This is an example of a process poster that I created for a model of a room that created. It shows every step of the process in creating the room. Starting with the artists that I choose to base my model around. Then I took something from nature and examined it from different perspectives. Took that and created my room model though a few 2D models and 3D models.

If I was to go back and improve this process poster I would work on integrating the four distinct quadrants that I have created. They do not flow or move together on the poster, which does not help to make transitions though out the entire poster. Although the intention maybe to have the viewer read the poster like a book , the bright and vivid colors may halt that from happening. Along with that I would also have more color mixing allowed in order to keep the persons eye from focusing on one part of the poster. That would create more contrast and be more visibly appealing. These steps would not take a lot of effort to change but the results would be really affective.

Interior Design Resume

This summer I hope to secure an internship with an interior design firm in the Portland/Vancouver area. I put together a little resume to show future employers my skills and experience. Since I am only a freshman in the interior design program, I do not have a whole lot of experience in the program. Everyone has started at this point in their career before, so I am not to worried about it being a negative aspect to my resume.

As a designer, I was able to make the layout of my resume more interesting than a ordinary resume, but stay professional all at the same time. I incorporated my logo into the layout of my design since my logo is a representation of myself. I took the human figure part of my logo, separated it from the rest, shrunk it down and used it as bullet points for each section. I feel that my resume is simple, but creative enough to catch the reader's eye and make it stand out against the rest. Below is my actual resume.

Click on image to enlarge

Computer Sketch

This new sketch is something that I really enjoyed creating. It was not made in the traditional way, with pencil and paper, but with a computer and stylus. The product is called a WACOM Tablet. It is a large touch sensitive pad that transfers to the computer when you draw on the pad with the stylus. The pad is just as realistic as the traditional way, allowing the artist to have different line weights based on the pressure they use on the pad. The product is very useful if it is used in Photoshop because there are many different pen/pencil/brush tools that can be utilized to make the sketch one of a kind. The only down side is that it is a little tricky to use at first. Since the drawing and pad are two separate parts it is sort of hard to match up the stylus to the place that you want to start drawing again. This is only a problem for about the first five minutes, then it is really easy and fast to find that spot left off at. All together the WACOM Tablet is a great new inventions, that has opened a millions doors of possibilities that I might not have been able to create with traditional sketching. Below is the first sketch that I drew with the WACOM Tablet.

Image By: http://joeledbetter.com/

Logo Design

A logo is an important symbol that is used to represent a business, person, or group. I felt that it was high time to create one of my own to use on business cards, stationary, and other important documents.

Here is my first logo idea:

In the process of creating my logo I started by writing down some things that summarize my style and life. The words simple, unique, straightforward, green, environmentally friendly, easy to follow, and people friendly came up during brainstorming. The biggest words that I really wanted to emphasize in my logo design was environmentally friendly and people friendly. I knew that the simplest way of doing this was to use the color green and have a person in my logo.

The human figure part was created by complete accident. I was using the letter W and trying to make it into a human figure. I pulled down the middle of the W to get the legs and body, added a head, and then accidentally hit some button. That button warped the entire figure making it have a curved look. It was not the direction that I was thinking about, but it worked better than what I was planning on doing.

Adding my name was the easiest part. I found a simple font that would be easy to read and understand. The color had to be green to give it a look that says environmentally friendly. The color green is also bright and can catch a persons attention.

I have many ideas, for future logos, but for now I am very satisfied with my first design.