Jabberwocky Design

Imposing Model – The Noun

This post is Part 3 of this Imposing Model Project. Feel free to start at the beginning, or see the last part here.

Once we had sufficiently fleshed out the form based only on our adjective, it was time to be given the noun, the actual object we would be designing. For this project, we would be making computer speakers. In my case, imposing computer speakers.

Research

As is often the case, I began by checking Google for images of “imposing speakers”. In fact, I scoured a number of image sites; DeviantArt, Flickr, and Core77 offered some interesting inspiration:

Most of these were relatively imposing, hitting on some of the traits I had identified in the adjective exploration. They are monolithic, top-heavy and solid, emphasizing a bulky scale. It was this sense of scale that I had found intrinsic to “imposing,” and I could see that it was not easy to convey through an object that sits on your desk.

Back to the Drawing Board

Now that I knew the “what,” it became a lot easy to start fleshing out some of the more abstract ideas that I worked on in the previous stage. This time, I started with hand drawings, drawing out thumbnail sketches of as many ideas as I could muster.

I was really liking the idea of a monolithic base that swept up and forward, going back to the idea of a huge wave bearing down on you. Early on, some of these sketches were exploring some more “organic” designs. Specifically I was looking at using the bare speaker as an icon for “eye.” I can think of few things more imposing than a huge, floating eye. But, somewhat because I was considering that I still had to build the thing, I started honing the design to simpler forms.

Once I had a good handle on what I wanted to pursue, I knew it would be faster to again move into SpaceClaim for some concept modeling, before I started building the speakers. I’ll cover that in the next post.

August 3, 2010 at 12:25 am | Classes, Projects, Work | 2 comments