Designing Doormats
For this year's Department of Interior Architecture Graduation Show I was tasked with making up some signage to announce the show. The department has been struggling to assert its identity here at RISD for some time. The running joke and general opinion is that we're decorators: curtain pickers and wall painters. On the contrary, the Interior Architecture program deals with spatial, architectural issues in existing buildings. Under this rubric we tackle everything from exhibition and scenographic design to adaptive re-use of existing structures. Interior Architecture is not ornamentation, it's architecture from the inside out.
We named the show "Spatial Education" to make a light of the fact that we're treated as a joke within RISD. The identity for the show comes out of the fallacious notion that we're decorators. Each of the two sign panels are meant to look like doormats, a traditional symbol of welcome and perhaps the quintessential element of design gone tacky.
If you look closely, however, the texture of the mats are blades-- Xacto blades-- the tools of the trade. Actually, one is comprised of Xacto knives and one of T-Squares. Another was compasses and the final board was glue bottles.
The posters were designed using 3d software which allows an initial element (the silhouette of each tool) to be repeated systematically over a grid. The density, scale, and rotation of each individual silhouette is controlled by having the 3d app use a grayscale image as a value ramp. The more black the pixels in the map, the more dense the elements in the poster. After tweaking everything to my liking I exported the file to Illustrator, added some shadows, and sent them to print.
This project is a cheap imitation of John Maeda.
--Posted 06/10/04 01:56PM