Contact tree

Mithi's design project for the day has been the "Contact tree". Sunshine is currently busy writing a book about "contact juggling", and he wanted to have at the end a tree showing how the each of the moves and variations relate to one another. He's already had a bash at it, but considering how much ELSE he has on his plate now, he decided to give me a go at designing the graphics for it. Its not yet finished, but I think we've got something we're happy with in principle.

1. My initial ideas etc. Looked up some pictures on the web, and had a look through what Sunshine had already done. Eventually decided that as nice as it would be to have a tree (with leaves and fruit!), it didn't quite go with the asthetic of the book. Also, the format of the book meant we had to do it in two chunks (hence the "tree from the top spreading out both directions" sketch was also no-go. So I went with the first graphic.

2. Sunshine wanted to see a mock up so I started making something that looked more like what it would appear in the book (the thing at the top is Sunshine's tree that I was following).

3. The overlapping branches meant that I needed to put in a bit of shading to delineate the lines. We might eventually also do a complete gradation of grey in each section of line.

4. Did as much as I could before the grey marker started to run out ... Then I scanned one of the pages on the book, shrunk it down, printed it, and cut out little pictures which show each move. Sunshine is not convinced that it would work so small, so we might end up drawing some kind of icon for each one.

Anyways, we've decided the wide flag-like line works much better than the skinny one he had. His text boxes were also all sizes, so we're happier to have those little squares which make it all a bit more uniform (the text will go just outside the box, on the bottom right of it, inside the grey bit). Hopefully the next thing will be to try and edit his illustrator file and make it look a bit more like my drawing.

If anyone is interested, the idea for the graphic is a variation on this. It is a double page spread from the Penguin Book of the Natural World, 1976.