"My first major assignment in the GBDA, Digi101 class was to create a three-story digital composition reflecting the essence of my being to be displayed on the school Christie digital wall. The decided audience would be my classmates, teachers in the program as well as onlookers from the Stratford community. Being a personal branding assignment the main stress was on self discovery through the means of our design process. As mentioned in chapter one of the Layout Workbook, the function of design is to communicate a message from the designer to the viewer speaking on an emotional and intuitive level through the means of colour and composition.
My process began with identifying how I wanted to symbolize myself as a person. After reviewing the readings the one quote that stood out to me was “Design must be calculated and meaningful, it must reflect function with a high degree of commutative and aesthetic proficiency” (Layout p.26) .With my piece I really wanted to capture the weightlessness I feel when dealing with society. I’ve always felt I can deal with the stresses of everyday life in more of a distanced approach- hence the floating figure positioned in the top half of my frame. To continue, I chose to only draw the head and upper torso of the body to symbolize my connection and interconnections between the mind and heart. The tight detailing in the body came out of the trends I saw in my style tiles, I wanted to be able to make the viewer understand the complexity, direction and insanity of my thoughts though without overlooking the more calm and floating dual side to my personality. I wanted to achieve this with the more simplistic background as well as the horizontal lines above the head of the major character. This paired with a more muted colour pallet of soft blues, greens were used to calm the view’s eye and let them relax into the detailing. I paired this with a brighter yellow around the mouth to symbolize expression through language and poetry and also the deeper reds to symbolize raw human passion through the illusion of blood in the heart.
For the other characters in the design, the birds are again used to show the weightlessness and detachment from reality as they are the thoughts that distract and guide me away from my everyday in the material, systematic life. The sweeping clouds at the bottom of the piece are used to create depth in the piece as well as to keep the viewer's eye in the frame by catching them in the bottom left corner and pulling them back into into the frame by following the sharp mountains. During the process In all I wanted my design to be a curious combination of showing my intricate thoughts, distanced emotions, raw passion while still keeping a poetic, dreamy overtone. I’ve chosen to name my design Spira meaning coil as well as referring to the latin root spir- or the breath of life. "
