Moonlight Paddle Icons: Watershed Non-Profit Community Event
My hypothetical client, Watershed, is a non-profit that works to improve and maintain water quality in the Springfield, MO, area who wanted an illustrated trio of icons to be used as temporary tattoo designs for their Moonlight Paddle on Fellows Lake event. My role within this project was to determine what event Watershed would want temporary tattoos for and then illustrate three icons in raster software that cohesively represented the non-profit and their event while connecting to an audience of nature lovers.
Concept:
My initial step was to sketch as many different motifs that I associated with water and the night sky, such as boats, lanterns, and constellations, and then come up with ways to combine them while keeping the values and purposes of the non-profit in mind. After I sought feedback from my professor, I decided that there was too much emphasis on the water imagery and I should further explore different ideas that combined the concepts of the non-profit and the event more cohesively.
Feedback:
Based on my initial designs, the feedback that I received was that I needed to find more of a sense of unity across the designs as well as make the constellation lines and stars less harsh because they were reading more as barbed wire. With this feedback, I added color and blended the water texture in each design more to create cohesion, and I altered the shape of the stars and lowered the opacity of the constellation lines so that the constellations did not seem too disconnected from the rest of the design elements.
Outcome:
The three icons that I illustrated consisted of imagery that cohesively connected the purposes of the non-profit Watershed to their Moonlight Paddle event in a format that could be used for temporary tattoos at the event or as standalone icons. Because this project was an assignment, the designs were not used in the actual context that they were designed for, but the final feedback that I received is that I found a creative way to approach the problem and my illustrations connect well with the proposed audience.
