Andrea Karan

Welcome to my blog where I showcase the different stages of my creative journey.

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Hello there! Here’s how you best experience my blog:

This tumblr has been created by me as a visual portfolio, a place to gather and generate ideas, to share my thinking process with my tutors and friends and family and to present final outcomes, sometimes fully completed, sometimes as semi final outcomes possibly yet to change as I find new influences and widen my design horizons.

Since there are so many different things and projects to see on this blog, I thought I would give you a brief introduction on how to fully appreciate all the steps of my creative journey. 

At the beginning of the year we were told to work on one main project and then create side projects either related or unrelated to the main project. I have taken a slightly different approach and sort of worked backwards: I started off with completely separate side projects like different kinds of competition briefs and then came up with a theme that I enjoyed enough to make it into my main project. I would encourage you to navigate through the blog in the same way my design process came together. 

The individual competition briefs I was working on were the Navigator Dreams competition, the Greenscreen Documentary Festival Poster competition, the  Festas de Lisboa sardine design competition, the Bucktown Artsfest Poster competition, the That’s A Mole Illustration competition and finally, last but not least, the Penguin Random House book cover competition for which I was eventually shortlisted.

So as you can see, I first worked on these 6 different individual projects. I see it as a creative warm up process, to create meaningful work while at the same time coming up with briefs I would generate myself.

My main project finally ended up revolving around food in all its aspects: Nutrition, aesthetics and usefulness (educational and playful aspects included). Firstly I focused on the pure aesthetics and decorativeness of some types of foods like herbs and salad leaves that translates to my work with ceramic plates and later on also inspired my seeded cards project. But at the same time I have integrated my knowledge in clinical nutrition to create a blog on its own featuring only food photography, recipes and their corresponding nutritional information.

I feel like my creative journey has been very long but equally as rewarding and I am very happy to be sharing all of this with you. Please enjoy navigating through my blog!

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After several small alterations and design choices the final Emil and the Detectives book cover that was shortlisted for the Penguin Random House Award is also ready to hang for degree show.

Here you see the final book cover as a mock up on the actual book as well as a concept bored explaining my design and thinking process behind it as well as an open flat display of the front and back cover as well as the spine.

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My 3D printed vegetable/fruit mobile: final 

Here you see a handmade mobile using 3d printed fruits and vegetables I had prepared a couple of weeks earlier. The mobile is meant to be an aesthetic outcome to promote the 3d printed objects and also create awareness for the beautiful organic shapes of these fruits and vegetables, whether they are of regular or ‘ugly’ appearance.

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All ready to go! My work is all hung and ready for degree show.

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Masking tape and scrap paper help you trying to position your work correctly. Almost there.

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Getting my work all set and ready! Now it’s the time to bring that degree show wall planner illustration to life!

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DEGREE SHOW COMING UP!

This morning most of the freshly painted white walls were still blank. Here is an idea of how the degree show hall looked like pre work hung.

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Here is a time lapse of a 3d print being printed with the same printer used to create the personalised card holders for my degree show. This is just to show you how the printing process looks like. You can clearly see the individual layers building up on top of each of one another to create the final designed shape.

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3D printed customised card holders that can be mounted on a wall. Preparation for degree show.

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Another version of how I could possibly present the concept behind my food photography and my blog development for my recipeas.

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Version 3

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The check board version

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Version 1

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50 Meticulous Style Guides Every Startup Should See Before Launching – Design School

Don't even think about scaling your design without one.

A very useful link for designing concept boards. I am going to use this as research for developing my degree show layout.

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Making the seeded pads

By having mixed together a mix of cornstarch and water I obtained a sticky glue like substance that is completely natural and won’t harm the seeds in any way. I've placed a little bit of the glue on a thin piece of paper towel or in this case a roll of toilet paper and sprinkled a couple of seeds on top. Then I have covered it with another sheet of toilet paper to seal it all. The seeds remain visible which was visually very important to me so it’s obvious that these pads contain seeds.

The ready made seeded pads will be included on the inside of the cards and will represent the actual gift that that people can simply plant in a thin layer of soil and like this grow their own lettuce mix!

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Instead of actually printing onto the cards with a printer, I have decided to go for a method to inscribe the ‘Grow your own Salad’ concept onto the cards by using stamps and an ink pad. 

This makes for an imperfect unique look and feel of the cards that communicates the spirit of this project very well.

I was firstly thinking of colouring the seeded pads themselves but their transparency got lost in that process, this is why I decided to place them onto pre-coloured circles (blue and green).

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Seeded cards in progress

Cutting down the cards to the right size and folding them. The inside will be decorated later on with some few colourful accents.

The look of the cards is supposed to be as natural as possible to communicate that this is a self growing project that encourages people to rethink some of their habits in a discrete and non-invasive way. These cards would make for a great gift.