OUIL406 Visual Communications SB2 - Further Idea Exploration and Illustrator Experimentation

These are all Ideas and experiments in composition that I did to get back into the swing of using illustrator.  They're ideas that I either didn't think would work as a set compositionally or just didn't turn out like I expected them to when upon excecution.

This was an idea I had centered around the platforms of the underground - I initially found it really difficult to draw and get all the paths filled on one layer, since having a large amount of elements on it made it really difficult to seperate them all. By pathing out a sketch on one layer, I managed to then draw another set of paths on the second layer to plot a load of different shapes - and delete details as appropriate.

In hindsight I really kinda like how this looks - at the time I thought it looked to simplistic, and I was concerned with how it would turn out across the three as a set but the spot colour of the green signs looks really nice. I probably wouldn't have discounted this as early on if id've gone back and explored it further

Part of 2 outcomes elaborating on the idea I had to draw the seats of the undergrounds - adding a bit more of the environment of the trains to add context to them. To add pattern to the flooring and the chairs, I used a mix of the brush and the geometric tools to make textures that could be used as a "fill" for specific shapes. 

In the end I was pretty unhappy with how the colours looked on this - very gaudy, didn't really work or gel or really give off a vibe of the tube really looks like. Plus, I found that resizing the shapes didn't resize the fill of the texture with it, making it look much more like a generic bus seat in the end. Overall pretty bad.

The other, more successful outcome for the seat Idea. Here I started to use the textured brushes to add more depth to the flat shapes - recreating the 'worn' kinda vibe you get from the subway cars. I was actually a lot happier with this than the tube one - the main problem with this as an idea was that the orientations of the Metro and the U-Bahn are much more like a standard 'train' as opposed to the side running seats found often on the tube and subway and I felt it'd be too confusing to really make 'work' as an endpoint

Another alternative looking into using the profiles of the train cars as postcards - pretty simple stuff here, all made using the geometric tools. The MTI type was made using the warp and skew tools, but otherwise it was entirely crafted with basic shapes.

I think this could've made a strong set in the end but I personally felt it was too simplistic, and risked falling fowl of the typical "voiceless-vector-illustration" vibe you often get from stuff made in illustrator.