Assignment 5 - HP Notebook Design: Critique and Developement
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
When I presented my idea of the Japanese Bento notebook design, some found it adorable and others found it amusing. But I am glad that most people liked the idea and did not have much comments about it. One of them did mention that the food could look more realistic.
So, I went back and did my own critique of the design. The overall look was fine, but the flowers on the cover did not seem as obvious as it should be. The Sakura ( Japanese Cherry Blossoms ) are suppose to represent the country and its traditions on a bento box. So I used Photoshop and redesigned the flowers. I added an internal shadow to give it a fuller look and also brighten the colours of the purple stems slightly.
For the insides of the Bento, I gave the food items a slightly 3-dimensional feeling by using internal shadow and slight embossing. Now the food looks more realistic and less like something that I have drawn using my Tablet pen.
Here's the final product after the changes :
Posted bymadguitarist at 8:19 PM 0 comments
Labels: notebook-design
Assignment 5- HP Notebook Design
Saturday, October 20, 2007
This Notebook Design assignment is so far the one where I had the most freedom deciding what to do. We were given a choice as to what kind of theme we wanted to follow. During the lecture, we were to tell Julian what we wanted to based our designs on. I chose 'Japanese' and ' Music'.
The designing of the item is definitely more interesting then the others ,but I still have to consider that this is a Notebook design, so the specifications of the notebook have to be considered carefully when creating the design. I took very long staring at my own Notebook before I had an epiphany of an idea.
The basic structure of the notebook is very similar to that of a Japanese Bento. The Bento is a lacquered traditional Japanese lunch box. I was in fact very inspired by the interior of the laptop, because the huge keypad reminds me of the 'rice' section of the bento and the touch pad reminds me a lot of a dish compartment in the bento.
As for my 'music' themed design, I based it on a keyboard DJ machine, with a volume dial on the side and pitch tuning knobs. I took the touch pad into consideration and changed it into the black keys of a keyboard.
After looking at the two drafts of the design, I decided to develope the Japanese bento one as it is very much more unique and I am quite sure that most people would not have thought of it the way I did.
I chose to colour the given template in Photoshop, creating swirls for Sakura flowers stalks and had Japan's name written in traditional Japanese Kanji script at the right lower corner above the Hewlett-Packard logo.
The final design looked like this:
Posted bymadguitarist at 4:17 AM 0 comments
Labels: notebook-design