Identity

As I have my laser cutting induction tomorrow, I need to get my business stationery from the identity project ready. I drew Debussy from the hat to design a business card, compliments slip and letterhead for and after researching him and finding out how he ignored convention to produce music which was dreamy and experimental I decided to mirror this by subverting the assumption that business papers should be straight edged and rectangular and go for shapes which would be completely random and unique for each individual piece.

I would do this in practice with some sort of algorithmic shape generating computer program which sounds pretty technical but is definitely possible as I've seen it in some computer games where it is used to generate random level maps (worms 2 is one example).

However as I am not a computer programmer I need to create the shapes myself. It's actually really difficult to do this so it looks truly random. Drawing the shapes whilst not looking has proved the best way of doing this so far but you can find yourself drawing what you think a random shape should look like and the resulting shape looks far from random. They have also been likened to countries by some of the people I have shown whereas I wanted them to look more cloud-like to allude to the floaty dreamscapes evoked by Debussy.

To achieve this I tried to photoshop photographs of clouds so that I could get a definite edge which I could use as the basis for my shapes. After doing this though, the clouds looked exactly like countries on a map anyway.



I thought of inkblots and paint splashes but they look like paint splashes and ink blots not random shapes, people may think the cards are for Hermann Rorshcach or Jackson Pollock because the forms would be so recognisable.

I think as hand drawing has worked best so far I will explore it more with different variables, a paint brush might give me a more cloudlike edge as opposed to a precise fineliner. If I listen to Debussy whilst doing this and try to draw as unconsciously as possible I should get some good results.

I still need to source some pastel or light coloured card with a nice coarse, organic texture which is quite visible for this to work as well as I want it to. The texture will give the stationery some depth and the pattern of the fibres will further the random, organic feel of them so it is important that I find the right material, It also needs to be suitable for laser cutting which could be another headache.