For the past three years I’ve been heading up the creative department at digital marketing agency Nitro Digital, which has been exciting, challenging – a learning curve. However I will be waving a sad farewell to my colleagues at Nitro at the end of February and from the first of March will be starting my own design studio, draw().
Draw() will be specialising in creating innovative design with technology at its core. Programming and electronics will be used to create experiences that are interactive, exciting and highly visual.
A new website with details of past work will shortly be launching at www.designbydraw.com, and this blog will be moving address at the same time, don’t worry I’ll post the link before it happens. In the meantime if you’d like to know more or receive a copy of my portfolio please drop me a line at hello@designbydraw.com.
I’ve been learning Processing on and off for a while now but were struggling to figure out what to create with it. Then I discovered OpenProcessing a site that enables people to easily share their sketches and download others, which is helping me move away from tutorials and into something new. What better way to share my experiments than to upload them back to OP. The first of which is this little interactive sketch that draws randomly sized rectangles based on the position of the mouse.
During my recent holiday to India I was fortunate enough to be able to go to Chandigarh. India’s first planned city, built to be the new capital of the Haryana and Punjab regions, although actually being apart of neither, when India gained it’s independence and was separated from Pakistan.
As the city would be planned rather than developed organically over centuries Jawaharlal Nehru India’s first prime minister saw that there was an opportunity to create something special and recruited the Swiss architect Le Corbusier to design a city that would be a symbol of hope and modern India.
The result is a place unlike anywhere else I have visited in India, the streets are wide and tree lined, traffic well organised and obeying the rules of the road, large parks and green spaces flow through the city allowing it to breathe and the grid system layout with numbering of each sector allows for easy navigation. Key building are designed by Le Corbusier himself and have a wonderful sculptural yet functional form, this style however is not confined to a few key buildings an continues throughout the city. The strong angualar concrete buildings create an interesting contrast to the lush greenery that surrounds them.
I was delighted when Ask Magazine showed an interest in my Pentominoes game and asked if it could be included in their website to accompany an article in the September issue about Archimedes, who amongst other things created the mathematical puzzle Ostomachion. The puzzle consists of 14 pieces dissected from a square that can then be rearranged to form a wide variety of other shapes and figures. Naturally I was intrigued and you can now play the puzzle on their site here.
I go through phases of reading lots of theory and then nothing at all, right now I feel like I’m embarking on the start of a new reading phase. I’ve just started reading Design as Artby Bruno Munari and am really enjoying it. This quote starts the chapter, and is a response to the question, What is a Designer?
“He is a planner with an aesthetic sense.”
This really amused and interested me. For years I have deliberated over the question of whether I am an artist or a designer or both, eventually coming to the conclusion that it probably doesn’t matter. But this quote seems to sum me up perfectly, I love order, organising and making things just so and I love to do this logically, functionally and aesthetically. I wonder if other designers see their work in this way too?
I’ve recently been learning the Programming language Processing and the more I use it the more excited I am by it’s possibilities, it’s refreshing to work with a language specifically designed for people that think in a visual way. However it’s easy to get bogged down in technical details and techniques and loose sight of what you can achieve with it, the exhibition section of the Processing website is a great place to see examples of how it can be applied to real world projects. This collection of works show how it could be used in a design brief.
Motion idents for MTV Brasil, 2009, by Dimitre Lima.
One of the central themes in my work from an early point has been the idea that the creative process is similar to playing. In my own projects I often try to develop an environment or situation where the viewer/user can experience the piece by playing with it and by doing so becomes a part of the creative process itself.
The design firm IDEO also places the relationship between creativity, ideas, innovation and play at the core of its philosophy. Tim Brown’s TED talk ‘On Creativity and Play’ is especially insightful on this topic. One of the central ideas put forward in the talk is that when you’re playing you are more open and relaxed and ideas flow much more easily. I think you’re probably also more willing and able to learn new skills and understand complex concepts in a playful state. Based on this we should all try to incorporate play into our work and work environment.
