Richmond Recycles, 2004
Proposal for visual identity (logo) and its application to uniforms.
We researched the history of the environmental movement, the development of the U.S. recycling logo, the process and organization to recycling programs around the country, the costs and benefits to recycling, and engaged in a discussion about how to raise awareness to the importance of recycling in Richmond. Can graphic design (and the design of a new visual identity) raise the presence of this important activity and service and inspire a community to participate?
Matrix and Methodology | Logo | Uniforms
Our design approach involved collecting objects that had been discarded. Next we developed a matrix grid to guide our formal experimentation into possible visual solutions. Each object collected, now a graphic translation (photographed or drawn), was combined with another. Our next guide and welcomed influence was poetry. How does a poem direct the questions you ask yourself as a designer while working? How can it influence you and inform you of other structures, imagery, rhythm, metaphor, and ways of thinking?
I worked from Purity (from Questions about Angels by Billy Collins, 1991). In the poem Collins describes his approach to writing as he gets down to: "skull and bones," being "concentration itself," "just the essentials." Thinking about the skeleton imagery in his poem and the network of bones, inspired me to propose the entire matrix as the visual identity. Excerpts and details from the whole matrix can be used for emphasis or distinction. The identity is esentially the entire network: the system that processes the stuff we buy, use, and must recycle.
The matrix of objects.
Process book.
Matrix and Methodology | Logo | Uniforms
The logo is the conglomerate of objects, graphically reduced, and rendered in hazard orange (the highly visible color of alarm, energy, and worn by people out safety concerns as they work in the streets/on roads).
The logo is the conglomerate of objects, graphically reduced, and rendered in hazard orange (the highly visible color of alarm, energy, and worn by people out safety concerns as they work in the streets/on roads).
Matrix and Methodology | Logo | Uniforms
The logo is applied to uniforms as an all-encompassing pattern, in the manner of armor. The pattern (the matrix, and details) are laser cut from highly reflective material and can be affixed to all types of garments, generated as dense detail patches over particularly stressed clothing areas: at the wrists, elbows and thighs.
The logo is applied to uniforms as an all-encompassing pattern, in the manner of armor. The pattern (the matrix, and details) are laser cut from highly reflective material and can be affixed to all types of garments, generated as dense detail patches over particularly stressed clothing areas: at the wrists, elbows and thighs.
