I've heard so many people say that they "aren't creative enough" to design things, or that they "don't have ideas".
Bullshit.
-Dictionary.com
If you've ever had a thought, if you're aware of your surroundings, and if your brain works even in the slightest you have ideas. They might not be good ideas, but they're ideas.
How do you come up with good ideas? You practice by coming up with bad ones! When I was a kid I read that we all have a million bad ideas inside of us, and the sooner we can get them all out the better. So even if something seems stupid, go for it. We learn by doing, and you'll soon find that working with one idea will cause you to come up with another.
For some reason, knitters suffer from the delusion that you have to be a capital-D Designer to come up with an idea or make an original garment.
Again, bullshit.
Designers (even the famous ones) are human just like the rest of us. They sketch, they write, they knit, and I'm sure they occasionally forget to put in a lifeline and have to rip back a lot farther than they should have. What seperates a designer from a garden-variety knitter is a willingness to try new things, to experiment, and even to fail. A designer looks at a simple idea and sees potential.
I'm going to help you learn to see potentail, starting with a simple concept.
This is my sketch, just a series of rectangles I doodled. As they get bigger, the space between them gets smaller.
You could have come up with that, right? Exactly! Ideas are everywhere, and sometimes the simple ones are the most effective.
When you look at your concept, think about what it could be. I could take this as it is and make a Modernist painting. I could line up appropriately-sized objects and create a still life composition to draw, paint, or photograph.
I started out with a simple, literal interpretation: I made it into a three-dimensional form, it could be an entranceway into a building. The empty spaces gradually get smaller, transitioning a person from "outside" to "inside".
As I was drawing that, the angles made me wonder what it would look like if I took two of my concept sketch and rotated one 90 degrees. I sketched it out quickly and got a pattern that reminded me of tartan.
To refine it a little more, I made a more finalized drawing in Photoshop. I could print this out as digital art, paint it (which might be interesting with some really texturized paint), turn it into a woven or knitted fabric, or use it as a layout grid for a graphic design.
As I was thinking about how I could knit that (I know nothing near enough about colorwork to puzzle that one out, but maybe something reminiscent of the
Ball Band Dishcloth), I had another brainstorm: Lace!
This is just a quick, sketched chart I drew that alternates solid stockinette rectangles with rectangles of yarn-overs, the simplest type of lace. The rectangles change in size and frequency, just like the original concept sketch. The next step here would be to swatch this and see if the proportions work out, and to alter it if they don't.
Ideas are everywhere. And design is just a methodical approach to "playing" with ideas, moving them around and changing the color and seeing what concrete things you can make of an abstract concept.
A great way to get visual ideas into a workable format is to take a photo of something (a line of trees, spokes in a wheel, the shape of a building) and trace the important lines and forms. Then you can work with that and see what comes of it. It takes practice, but you'll find that the more you do, the easier things get.
Yes, you're in the right place. I just did a total redesign!
Basically, I made it more organized (grid-based!) and easier to navigate. The navigation links at the top go to posts with that label, making it easy to filter and read only the posts you are interested in. The tag cloud in the right sidebar shows off what I talk about the most and gives you the opportunity to check out some of the post categories that aren't in the top menu.
In the footer, you can check out my profile, add me as a friend on your favorite social site, or see my Flickr photostream.
As always, Saltwater Purls is a WIP! If you have any suggestions or comments on the new layout, leave them in the comment section or blast me an e-mail.
Hope you enjoy.
HP Marketsplash offers 100 free business cards, no shipping or processing fees! You can choose from one of their customizable templates or upload your own image.
Being a dork, I wanted to create my own. I fired up Scribus, created a 9x9 grid, and punched out this:
And a few weeks later, I had this in my hot little hand:
Generally, good stuff. I'm very happy with the print quality. The paper's a tad flimsier than I would have liked, but you can pay a little extra for heavyweight cardstock if you want.
Apparently the first batch of cards came out with some color issues, but they sent them to me anyway in addition to the corrected set. Not sure what I'll do with them yet, but I'll find something.
The free cards are supposed to come with a little advertising line on the back, but mine came with the "premium" plain backs. Maybe it was a mistake in my favor, or maybe an apology for taking longer than promised?
Speaking of the taking longer...
The website says you should receive your order in 7 business days. On March 26, about a week after I placed mine, I got an email from one of their customer service reps saying that my image wasn't the correct size, which was confusing to me because the design page would only accept 1050x600px images. I emailed Ashlee with the original image, she was very nice and promised to fix it for me.
On April 11, I hadn't heard from them lately so I emailed Ashlee again, she responded on the 15th and said my package had been shipped. Yay! I got the package on the 17th.
The delay wasn't a big deal to me, I was in no hurry. If you need your cards by a certain date it may be a good idea to order a little bit ahead of time just in case.
Overall, I'm satisfied and will probably buy some more when the free ones run out.
Damn grid-based design is taking over.
I love organizational systems. I could geek out about designing hierarchies, making labels, and sorting for hours. And I love that a well-designed system doesn't have to be maintained... once you set it up, just make sure things are going in the right places, and you don't have to "clean" ever again.
Grids are a godsend. If you're designing a page (poster, book page, knitting pattern, whatever), you could spend hours fiddling with it and nudging things around to try to get something you like. With a grid, it's a lot more simple. Given some parameters, and placing elements becomes a lot more easy. Especially when looking at a lot of information, grids make it simpler to find what you want and "make sense" out of everything.
And so, combining the two ideas, I quite like the idea of a gridded desktop. Most desktops you see are a mess, some photo or artwork that you can't make out for all the icons and bookmarks scattered across it. I've been a "desktop minimalist" for a long time, I'll put up a photo and a shortcut for my browswer/documents. That's it. Recently I expanded to having a couple of shortcuts to projects that I've currently got in the works, but only one or two.
I was inspired by Sarah France's
Six Grid Desktop. I like to have a photo to look at, I didn't really need a logo (duh, I know it's a grid desktop), and I wanted fewer categories. So I made my design with that in mind. Thirds-based, the left section for an image frame, the center third for shortcuts, and the right third for my files.
Here's mine currently. The yarn photo is just a crop of a high-res image I had saved from somewhere. I plan on changing it out periodically.
And here's one with a blank frame. Use your favorite image editor to put in your own photo and change the category names. Enjoy!
Full-size downloadable version
here.
Last week for my Design and Graphics class, I was given an assignment to create a three-dimensional collage/model out of the following materials:
- Chipboard
- Corrugated cardboard
- Balsa wood
- Bass wood
- Styrofoam
- Polymer Clay
- Fabric I
- Fabric II
- Sheet Metal
- Wire
Fabric? That means fiber, right? Yes!
My concept for the project was to integrate the materials by weaving them together. Here's a snippet from the text I put in my portfolio:
Ten distinct materials, melded into one cohesive whole through weaving techniques. Each element either penetrates or is penetrated by another material, so that the finished model holds together with very little use of glue.
Intersecting planes, lines, and forms work together to create distinct spaces that are at the same time open to one another. From almost any viewing angle, each material is visible.
Dimensions: 8" x 8" x 2"
The solid-looking panel on top is woven.
The lacy-looking panel on the bottom is filet crochet, worked into a chipboard frame.
My professor and TAs were impressed. They found it interesting that I managed to "weave" a seemingly-unrelated part of myself into my architectural work. Sadly, I broke the sheet metal off during my presentation, but it's easily fixed.
There are more pictures on
Flickr.
Happy Knitting :)
--
J, who is working on her second all-nighter in a row.
