Design Hero: Erik Nitsche

Poster:

Initial moodboards.

I had put way more time and effort in designing this first moodboard than I should have, but it ended up working out in the end. Later in the semester, I had been struggling with designing a good cover for my booklet, as my ideas were too obvious and not clever or subtle enough like other people’s covers. Brett told me to go back to this moodboard I had created, and said that it would work well as a cover. I had never considered going back to it just because it was one of my very first ideas for the Design Hero series, but I really enjoy how it ties is in with the back cover I created.

In choosing a designer, I was already panicking before the semester started, because I knew what the project was. I wanted to pick a Latino designer, but it was very difficult in finding any that resonated with me. I was nearly going to choose between Silvia Tcherassi and Oscar de la Renta, who are both fashion designers, but felt that fashion didn’t speak to me. I broke away for only looking at Latino designers, and then I was looking between Yusaku Kamekura, Ladislav Sutnar, Shigeo Fukuda, and Erik Nitsche. I chose Erik in the end because his work was just so beautiful, and he had thousands of works he had completed in his life.

One sketch out of ten (lost to time…) and initial posters.

Similar to my cover, for my poster, my first sketch was my best one. I enjoyed the depth of the pencil sketch shown here, but it didn’t translate in the poster version I created. Maybe one day I’ll recreate it? I think it’d work better if the corners of the room weren’t aligned with the corners of the poster, since it’s a long page.

2nd version, adding depth with variation in image size and more complexity with the line.

Final poster presented, made images more “dance-y” by changing their angle and added spirals to intertwine with the name.

Booklet:

Narrowing down best ideas from the sketches.

Terrible horrible irredeemable first book. Just concepts thrown together.

For the first version of the book, I hadn’t expected people to come in with such polished ideas. Mine was intentionally thrown together, and the ugliness made it hard to look past to envision the concept. I wish I had spent the time to make a refined first draft, but I didn’t do that because I was scared of boxing myself in and going with my first idea again.

2nd iteration, also horrific.

It was only later on that I was understanding the correct balance of density between pages.

Final Booklet:

Back and front cover.

The back cover was originally going to be in color. I was playing around with blending modes when I saw it in black and white, and I thought it made so much sense to have it transform to color when intersecting with Erik (He and I are on a first name basis).

It was at this point that I realized that I completely ignored the goal I had come into this project with. I wanted to restrain myself, make something clean, sophisticated, and elegant. But I couldn’t help myself to make something playful and fun, because it just seemed right for Erik’s work.

Erik App:

My app closely resembled my book, but I wasn’t exactly satisfied with it in the end. I wanted to push the interactions further and make them more unique, but I either couldn’t figure it out or couldn’t think of how exactly to make it better. If I did have more interaction (for example, I had the atoms spinning on the France page), it would usually be laggy or make Figma glitch. But with the music, I love the video. It has a calm and relaxing mood. With all the text in the app, I sort of thought of it as the News App. I even referenced the News App to make my typesetting for mobile better.

Erik Video:

For this project, I felt like I was in a race against time. I knew I would be finished on time, but I felt unmotivated being behind in progress compared to my classmates. Having to animate everything put me at a disadvantage since other people were able to use video clips. My script was parts of by “The Reluctant Modernist” by Steven Heller, the most extensive and one of very few articles about Erik Nitsche’s life. I wanted my video to be about Heller’s admiration for Erik, though I think this shows more in the last arc of the video. I see a lot of similarities with this video and my Gill Sans video, because my form of storytelling is like a journey that I think of in arcs. My video is made up of several parts of a whole, which I think makes sense with the multiple styles I used for my video.

The biggest obstacle for me was the part where the work is transforming into each other. I had gotten a suggestion to try it out with Smart Animate in Figma, and it looked horrible. The movement was choppy, and there was no good way to execute the spiral. I was really frustrated that I had lost an entire day trying to make it work in Figma. I moved on to do it by hand in Procreate, and I’m so glad I did that. I think it looks great and plays well with the other hand-drawn elements. Because I was doing so many things, I had to simplify and rework my video to make sure that it would make enough sense to other people and feel like a cohesive video.