Wednesday, March 25, 2009

socks

I recently started working on some fun new surface design for a sock maker, Sock It To Me. They are a Portland, Oregon sock manufacturer and make some really fun stuff. As I started designing I found it was so much easier, and yet more difficult. The easy part is that the artwork needs to be simple shapes and vector. The manufacturing process, knitting, colors = knots and obviously more colors is more money and more work. I also learned more colors means a tighter sock since you have more knots when more colors are used. Less really is more! 

Now for difficult. It is funny to me, how often what is the easy part, can also be the hard part. Creating simple work turns out to be challenging since you must reduce ones concept to simple, digestible bits, that are tiny. Sort of like designing 'favicons', little bits that are easy to read. I find that I design with loads of color and often with odd angles. But this project required flat, straight on views, or profiles of items at the most obvious angle. 

Example to the right >>

The designs will be in Sock It To Me's next sock release so visit the site and buy some groovy socks!

1 comment:

Della Rae said...

Very Cool Karyn. Art always amazes me and now to be able to do this and produce such complicated designs on the web.

Congrats on your new gig too!