Monday, July 21, 2008

first day

first day back, and what a day it was!
we have to design paper lanterns for 4 weeks and display our final in a cafe or other shop.
it was pretty much a chance to play around with paper.
here is our lantern fortress! muahahahhaa

FORTRESS OF DOOM

FORTRESS OF DOOM (in negative, i love my camera phone)

Origami puff ball things, on a string made of paper, stuck to the wall


until the second half of the day.....
my group went looking for a shop that would let us display our lanterns, and after a few failed attemps, we found the coolest place!
this asian bar/restaurant in melbourne central. it's so cool!


the manager said he 'didnt see why not' when we asked if we could display our lanterns, he even offered to take down some of the expensive ones and replace them with ours!
but he has to check with the owner first....fingers crossed...

now we have to think of some really nice designs and sketch them out for the owner.

bye for now

Saturday, July 19, 2008

The 1st semester of Industrial Design at RMIT City campus wasn't exactly a breeze, i didn't expect it to be easy and i knew that with my bad studying habits from high school, it was going to be tough.

Although, in the rush of finishing all of my assignments for the mid-year assessment i did actually learn a few things about design.

- It's almost impossible to explain what design means to someone who isn't a designer, i'm even struggling to understand it, and i'm studying it! Most people have this image of designers who draw pretty pictures and have an easy life. Well...they're wrong, so terribly wrong.

- To further complicate design, it's meaning varies from person to person. Each designer has a different 'language', a method of communicating their ideas through any number of methods.

- Design requires both sides of the brain, 'creativity' and logic. This appealed to me because i don't favour either side, so design helps my right and left side to meet somewhere in the middle.

- You can spend your entire life on one image in Photoshop or Illustrator trying to make it look as realistic as possible. You need to judge when your work displays just enough relevant information.

- I really can't draw. If you take a pencil, eraser and ruler out of someones hand and replace them with a pen, they become a 3 year old all over again. Even something as simple as an ellipse or a 3D cube becomes the most difficult and frustrating task.

- To cap it all off, i'm doing Industrial Design, which reminds people of oil refineries and factories, and sure, if you're into that, its great, but thats not what it's all about. Industrial Designers can specialise in almost any field you can think of, toys, furniture, automotive, product, pretty much anything that is designed.

Well that's all i can think of right now. Second semester is starting tomorrow, i'll try to make the time to use this blog to expand a little on my ideas, and hopefully get a little feedback :)