Assignment #1

Work produced as part of U101 - Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century, Open University degree module

Phase 1 looked at design and the individual. The brief was to produce a T-shirt design using an image of my hands focusing on design concepts such as symmetry and repetition, proportions and unity, emphasis and dominance.

I chose an image of my hands making a heart gesture. I chose the slogan “love”, with my image placed inside a heart shaped letter “o”. I chose a flowing, looped style of text in a deep pink colour to convey a soft romantic feel and used a lighter shade of pink to compliment and contrast with the line detail. I purposely positioned the heart shape to be where the wearer’s heart would be when the t-shirt is worn. I started out with a photograph of my hands and worked with a printed image, tracing paper and marker pen to capture the outline and simplify details and the shape. I did not realise until I started to trace my image that the heart shape is repeated and mirrored by each pair of touching fingers.  This is a detail I really like, to me it reiterates the message of love multiple times over.  I think I could have gone bigger with the heart to better showcase the detail inside and made the lines bolder with more contrast, especially around the fingernails.  I intentionally tried to align the gesture inside the heart with the outline. I think that keeping the hands coloured pink and having a white background inside the heart would have created a better contrast.

There is a unity between the slogan “love” and the image of my fingers making a heart.  This is a gesture my daughter and I make to each other and so I decided to ask her to model it for me.  The process of transferring my concept onto the T-shirt helped to develop my design.  I experimented with prototypes of paper cut outs of the design and placed them across the chest area to try different alignments and spacing between the letters.  I decided that I wanted the heart placed centrally where the wearer’s physical heart is and I also wanted the letters to stand out more.  I went back to the design and experimented with the positioning of the letters.  I wanted to achieve a balance between the capital "L" on one side of the heart and two letters on the other so I decided to introduce the extra heart details.

#hands #design #love #t-shirt