Inked

For my second design assignment this week I chose to do the “Ink” assignment worth three points. In this assignment we were to design a tattoo that displayed at least two design elements covered this week. I have been thinking about tattoos and designing one for a while now and this assignment gave me the kick I needed to get going on it. My inner nerd really came out while I was doing this assignment. I chose to take it in the direction of what I would get if I were to ever get a tattoo (highly unlikely because needles are not my thing).

I was inspired by my favorite quote, “Not all those who wander are lost”. This is a quote from the J.R. Tolkien book series, Lord of The Rings. I’m a huge LOTR fan so this is very fitting for me. The next step I took in the design was deciding how the quote should be written. I tried it in a few regular cursive fonts but none of them really evoked the essence of the quote. After trying this numerous times I decided that maybe it wasn’t the font, but the language it was being written in. This thought is what drove me to writing it in elvish, the language of the elves in LOTR. I chose to write it in elvish because the style of the writing is very free and flowing, like someone who wanders, and because of its mysterious nature. The language written down reminded me of the wind in a way. This is a good example of the design element typography.

The next step I took in the design also had to do with the way in which the quote was written. This time it had to do with positioning. I tried writing it out in a straight line first to get a feel for the quote written in elvish. It looked completely wrong written that way so I wrote it again in kind of a wavy line with the last letter trailing off. This again wasn’t working for me. That’s when I thought of the circle concept. Someone who wanders goes around looking for things until they find what they were looking for. This lead me to the idea of the explorers in the age of Christopher Columbus and Magellan. I wrote it out in a circle and something just clicked for me. Having the quote written in a circle really conveyed the message I wanted to send through my design, which is that though someone is wander around they always come back to where they were before. Wandering is a cycle. This to me is a perfect example of form/function/message.

I believe that my final product is very minimalistic, and element that I really enjoy, and successful. It is scaled to size, the size of a quarter.

Here is a link to the original assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/ink/