Study Task 3

Grids

When looking for grids to make a symbol of my object, I explored a variety of different ideas that could produce very different outcomes. I looked at grids relating to the solar eclipse - moon charts and maps etc. as well as punk newspaper articles, a bar chart depicting harassment in India, an X-Ray, and maps of WW2. I wanted to ensure that I had a lot of different options for a wide variety of symbols. 

I decided to begin by focusing on one of my 'fun facts'. I thought that one of the more interesting ones that could produce good designs was 'women in Mexico wear safety pins on their belly during a solar eclipse to ward off evil spirits.' It's an interesting fact that has different elements that could be used to push a design further. For example, I began by using a moon chart to draw out a safety pin on Illustrator, but I then pushed this further by splitting the three elements up to resemble the Mexican flag. 

I think i could really push this idea further by examining my fact even further. I have represented the eclipse as well as Mexico, but how can I show evil spirits or the idea of feeling safe, protected etc. by the safety pin? - I could look into design rules and strategies surrounding safety and enclosure. 

After splitting my symbol elements into the 'Mexican flag' grid I thought about other ways that I could utilise it. I remembered a fact from a study that I read during my research about the ingestion of safety pins in Turkey. 49 safety pins were ingested in 16 years, so I decided to show this through the number of pins that are in the grid, split into 16. 

Visually I prefer the more simplified version of these designs because I think it allows for more negative space in conjunction with the texture backgrounds. These backgrounds were taken from the previous scans that I made, and then I applied a grain filter for added texture. 

I liked the design with visible symbol, however, because I applied a 'difference' layer blend mode onto the symbol - when I zoomed in I saw amazing results. Where the circles overlapped with the marks from the scans they created beautiful gradients. I think that these crops are incredibly successful, which I am very happy about as they were completely accidental.