#utilitydesign

Canvas worn soft by use. Leather marked by time. The Adventurer Canvas and Leather Shoulder Pouch feels like something meant to travel — practical, quiet, and dependable. It doesn’t demand attention; it earns it through use.

Ideas

This year we learnt about vurnecular design. I really loved the idea of using what you have and what you know, by connecting your design and final product with your experience. However while I have tons of hoarded material I didn’t have much to make the cards with that would be enough. Here is my solution:

My Design

I wanted to design my card to have some sort of utility/ user experience that made it more than just a piece of paper with my name on it. hey! composition frames! I came up with the idea to make the perimeter’s removable (perforated or cut lines) to then make a set of mini composition frames. I was taught a technique of using 2 ‘L’ pieces of paper, to crop out compositions in real life to use for still life studies or just composition practice. Every artist and designer makes compositions, and this would be a fun interaction for anyone to have fun and see what they can find. After all my work is very inspired by my everyday experiences, so this connects my inspiration to my business cards and the viewer. Since I was young I would either use a camera or just imagine capturing compositions anywhere, outside, in my room, a close up texture, etc. 

I measured out starting with 3 inches, and figured out how thick my cropped L’s should be, where they were strong enough to be functional but not take off too much space for the middle information. I went with a half inch for the width of the cropping Ls. 

Final Print Design

Giving a hint in how the cropping pieces function, I put a hashtag on the top “#find a composition” which could be used for people to post their compositions online! If that were to take off that would be so fun to see what everyone’s up to. 

I had fun making a hand-written version of cooper, the typeface I chose to be primary in my self branding project. 

I kept all the information and logo inside the cropped edges so there was still a functional business card after removing the cropping tools. 

Cropping!

Here is the unperforated version, I ordered a perforated and unperforated sheet from the local print shop just to see what works better. 

(yes there is a lot of dried glue left on my cutting matte from collaging)

Finding compositions behind my desk!

Perforated

Here is the perforated version. I debated whether to buy a perforation tool myself and do it by hand, or get the print shop to do it. I determined it was cheaper to leave it to the print shop for the assignment, but they did make an error by perforating all the lines through to the corners, so I had to carefully tear them only on the edges I wanted. For my actual business cards I will perforate them by hand myself. 

I like the look of the texture of the perforation, makes it a bit more real and feel more genuine. I think having the perforation would also be more of a hint and guide to the audience of the purpose of the cropping Ls. 

Finding compositions above my desk of my baby spiders! 

I printed a variety of colours from my self branding palette. It would be fun to print with a variety of textures as well because my work is very diverse in mediums.