Stir Competition Submission

Every year Sherwin-Williams holds a paint swatch Interior Design competition. I submitted a poster this year with my Art Gallert design from a recent project that I am in the midst of completing. This design is an art gallery which represents my concept of organic around the synthetic. This design is part of a historical restoration project of turning an old railroad depot into an art gallery, while keeping the original ticket window represented in these renderings as the large brick wall with a complementary second brick ticket window inspired wall to unify the original one. My inspiration for this particular design came from an object at the train depot site. I chose an old and rusty nail covered in moss and organic matter essentially leading to a design conveying the history and wonder with a synthetic man made material piercing into the wall of the complementary organic material and how long or why it was ever there. Conveying emphasis, asymmetry, contrast, strength and unity, the inspiration of the nail pulls a viewer in to wonder of the history and story of what’s behind that nail, all while the two contrasting elements of organic matter and metal represent unity and beauty. There is a sense of cohesion with the organic rock and moss coinciding with the nail and brick while still seeing complements of the contrasting synthetic vs. organic material. In this Train Depot design, contrast is seen throughout the design within the ceiling, curved walls, and materials. The ceiling embraces the complementary colors of Sherwin-Williams paint and represents the organic through flow, color, and texture. The ceiling also has multiple clouds which directly represent the idea of piercing into the organic, while looking like a large replica of the nail itself piercing into the ceiling. The ceiling plan directly pulls from the concept from the contrasting curves of organic against the rigid synthetic design of the wooden beams stained with Sherwin-Williams Stain. The colors chosen for this design directly embody the concept of this design in representation of organic and synthetic colors, a complementary color scheme, and the unity seen within the overall color palette in the end. Through this project I learned a lot about color palettes and design with color in mind. I feel that this skill will be essential for future project in my career.

Eames House

Autocad Drafting and InDesign Poster on Eames House

Case Study - Architect of 1890-1930

Kirtland Cutter

For this Case Study, I chose to research Kirtland K. Cutter of the Spokane area. I was very fascinated by the architectural designs that he had done and decided that he was the most interesting architect of the time period that I found. Each case study was given to multiple people to then research and combine graphic design ideas in the poster layouts to allow for the posters to aesthetically match each other. I feel that the partners that I worked with were very good at working with others so organizing and agreeing on a layout design was very easily done and agreed upon. Learning about Kirtland Cutter was interesting and I felt that I learned a lot about the time period which the project I am working on now is based out of as well as Cutter's style of design. Being from the East side of Washington, learning about the architecture and reasons to the design of Spokane was also interesting.

Habitat For Humanity Design Project

In a group of three , we worked to design a home for the Palouse Habitat for Humanity. With an approximate square footage of 1,100, we worked to design a two story, 3 - 4 bedroom home with two bath and the possibility for aging in place. This made for a pretty difficult task as we also had the maximum of a 640 sq. ft. foot print of living space (garage not included) to work with. My partners and I worked on multiple different preliminary layout designs and as a group chose what we thought was the best usage of space and met with a Habitat for Humanity Architect who then told us the positives of our design and the ways we could improve it and we went from there. In the end I felt that we came up with a very efficient design for Habitat for Humanity in a realistic manner in that it could be built for a fairly low cost while meeting requirements for Habitat for Humanity’s financial needs. Sticking to the foot print and roughly to the square footage, sacrificing the cost of a complicated roofing system for a larger square footage, we were able to add in the family room as it saves money in the roofing materials and complicated building systems. For this design, we were able to add in multiple 5 ft. turning radius within the 1st floor plan in order to accompany the possibility of a family member needing to use a wheelchair in the long run. Moving the laundry into the garage and pushing the garage out a few extra feet spared living space within the 640 sq. ft. footprint and allowed for the laundry and bathroom to share water walls. This also led to a shared water wall with the upstairs bathroom saving Habitat for Humanity money in building. To keep with the idea that Habitat for Humanity had to encourage family time and interaction, our group decided to add in the family room and the shared study nook on the 2nd floor. This will encourage the children of the family who lives in this home to study and work together and to have possible game and TV nights together. Our overall design came from the word "roots" as we felt that this home would become the foundation to the new life to come much like the roots of a tree stabilize its growth in time. To come up with our word of roots, we looked at many Habitat for Humanity photographs and made a large list of words that came to mind, varying from love, hope, thankful, life, family, opportunity, all the way to elements like contrast and repetition, we settles on the word roots as we felt is was the strongest word we could work from and said much more about the home itself as well as the family inhabiting it. These are the two final posters which we presented our design with and a photograph of our final model of the home design. Overall, I feel that our group did an excellent job meeting the requirements and keeping the Habitat for Humanity workers and cost in mind as well as the possible home owners. I felt that it was a difficult task handed to us in the beginning, but with reworking the layout and thinking with the client in mind we were able to meet the needs for Habitat for Humanity. I feel that our rendering and hand drafting abilities in this project show our strengths as with the design idea that we came up with in the end.

Progression Reflection: A Semester at a Glance

Throughout ID 205, I learned a lot about perspective drawings, Photoshop, InDesign, and communicating through design. I came into this class confident in my sketching abilities and with more constructive criticism and minor tricks for sketching, I was able to improve on sketching leading to it now being one of my strongest skills. As I have already been pretty good at graphic design when communicating through posters and layouts, I feel that this class has led to these skills being even stronger than they were before which has helped me in my other Interior Design classes to be able to not only layout a grid effectively but to also incorporate a single idea, simplify, or overpower throughout multiple displays tying them together. For example, with this assignment I am focusing more on the work that i have done throughout the semester so aside from sticking to a grid and following that grid throughout the posters, I am keeping the background and fonts very simplified as to not distract the viewer from what is supposed to be the focal points. Along with learning poster design, we learned the sketching and rendering skills needing to be in interior design. Though I was having a very hard time with the rendering at the beginning of the semester, I was able to learn the techniques of rendering on my own without the instructions in the book through exploration and practice. In the end, my growth in my rendering skills has improved tremendously and I would consider this a class success. When looking into my sketching abilities, I came into this class with much sketching experience and have taken other classes, learning the techniques of how to draw in perspective was very beneficial to my drawings. I had not learned the skills needed yet in order to use the horizon line and vanishing points in order to draw in a more true to the eye view. This will continue to help me throughout my schooling and career. having the ability to do so has helped with the assignments that are on this poster set. All in all I feel that my overall communication skill through design has improved tremendously.