seven deadly jars of sin

for my seven deadly sins/seven holy virtues imagery, i decided early on that i wanted to use jars. i like the connotations of a jar: the encapsulation, the isolation, the sterility against a clean background. it holds its contents separate from the outside, not letting anything harmful escape, nor letting any contaminants in. the idea of containing sins and virtues in jars, separating them from any context, distilling them into one object of essence: this was my initial idea. however, even though i was able to come up with an object for all 7 sins and all 7 virtues, trying to get each of those single objects to have the same sort of relationship both with their sin/virtue and also with their opposite made that something of an unwieldy goal. some objects were artifacts, evidence of the sin/virtue, props to be used in the demonstration, like a knife or food (wrath & gluttony), and some were abstract symbols, like a flower (kindness), and some were little puzzles of vague references with an a-ha! moment that might have been somewhat hard to come by, like binoculars (envy? it made sense to me.) some were directly related to their opposites, two sides of a single idea, (credit card/coins for greed and charity) and some didn't fit together all that well (that kindness flower and the envy binoculars).

regardless.

as happens, it evolved.  i simplified to just the sins, because i would rather have 7 strong objects than 14 pretty okay objects.  i started thinking about the variety of relationships my objects were having to their concepts. i found myself wondering if there wasn't something telling in that aspect, maybe more potent than trying to choose one single object as a representation. couldn't i build a meaning out of several things? maybe each one can't communicate a whole idea on its own, but using all of them together, letting the viewer try to find the connecting thread... there it was. so then i brainstormed further, without trying to limit my objects to one relationship. if you're curious, ask, and i promise i can explain what all the objects mean. otherwise, i'm gonna leave the backstory out, because when they work, they work, and when they don't communicate, me explaining it is not going to help. they will, of course, get tighter by the time i'm done.

with no more ado:

envy

gluttony

greed

lust

pride

sloth

wrath

some digital icon process

i've kind of been keeping you posted on my analog process as i go along, but i thought it would be helpful to show my digital process as well. as you can tell, i do a lot of zooming out and duplicating. there are a few directions on this page that i tried, and abandoned, or tried and totally redirected, like the microphone (too narrow), the record case with record inside (too confusing) and the white-inside or double-outline speaker (too overcomplicated for such a simple shape), but i don't delete them from this "workspace" page because i think it's helpful to see everything i've tried all at once.

most of these, it is easy to follow the progression from more complicated to more simple. a few hardly changed from that first sketch, like the turntable. i had already simplified enough in my analog phase to keep that one pretty similar. others? well, you can see the record case. it's received a lot of nudges.

honestly? i am so fond of these! it's a little scary to be so excited about them because of how satisfaction can slide into complacency and complacency is pretty willing to lead into stagnancy. but. that's reason to be really excellent in my future applications of my icon set: to set them up on stage and prove them worthy of my fondness.

remix icons

djs are a class of people whose livelihoods depend on the technology they use. they take the newest instruments, the cleanest and most precise tools, and with those things, they deconstruct. i wanted to get at the smooth, round perfection of new technology with the shapes of my iconset. tech goes through phases, i think, of connotations of roundness and streamline and simplicity, and connotations of sharpness and angles and speed. perhaps in several more years, the highest tech will be angular and jagged again, but right now, the round corners that apple has been making ubiquitous are most indicative of the clean, bright culture of people who use electronics. this speaks to the contemporary, up-to-the-minute nature of the idea of revolution, as well as the taking of the best and newest things and subverting them into the iconoclastic idea of the remix, which is represented in a related clean and simple way by the slice, which introduces the sharpness and angle of taking our safe, round technology and doing things with it that others might never have expected.

pretty pale blue buses

having wrestled buses a while longer, i have another set to show! i like these. i feel like i'm finally on to something that is related to my billboards without being a copy of them. i've paid more attention to the form of the bus itself, and gotten a better sense of how small the type can be without it being problematic. i think the trouble was, i couldn't stop working for the 1:80 or 1:40 on the wall and remember how much bigger a real bus would be. i also delved into my kit-of-parts system to explore new options that were consistent within my system while adding some variation.

the result:

pretty pale blue buses!

i was careful to keep the tint light enough not to become watery (any more saturated and i started to worry about aquariums again, and any less, you kind of lost track that there was any tint at all).

let's start with the back, because, as i said with the last iteration, i standardized the back panel of my three buses into a single neuron and my text. the sides, (at a bigger size, because i didn't have to accommodate my back panel for each one!) are as follows.

the next step is the tv spot that i'm building in flash. this is the storyboard i'm working from! my storyboard is a bit lengthy, but i wanted to have a frame for every big step to help me with my animating. once i'm done with that, i will be able to screen-grab different points and streamline my storyboard more easily. i'm excited about it, it's nice to see the neurons actually move and grow, considering how much movement i feel like there is in the shape itself.