Gap

Gap is a well-established brand with a highly limited style palette. Working within these confines was challenging but ultimately fun. Gap is already well-known, so the style shouldn't be "too out there", but that was my thought process throughout.

I started to understand the challenges that Gap has. Most of Gap's advertising is simple, centered, and white text. That is boring from a design perspective. I had to use four different marketing materials but still remaining consistent, which made it difficult. I took on this challenge by adding typography into the figure/ground compositions to create both a consistent series and visual diversity to avoid boredom. Ultimately, I isolated the point size and color of the word “Sale”—much like Gap does in their actual advertising. 

SPRING: "Iris, Monochrome, inspired by windy weather 

SUMMER: “Nile”, analogous, inspired by a river surrounded by grass.

FALL: “Navy”, complementary, inspired by Halloween and the orange leaves

WINTER: “Fortress of Solitude”, neutral, inspired by Superman’s home

Color

It's hard to describe color. It's something that everyone sees. If you wanted to get philosophical there is no way to know that the red I see is the exact same red that others see. I'd never fully know. But there is no doubting that color plays an important part in not just art, but in life.

It is pretty cool that each color has a different meaning and feeling to it. Like blue has a calming feel to it. Probably because the ocean and sky are blue. It can also represent sadness. Red has more angry feeling to it. Maybe because fire is associated with that color? Green is more nature-based and organic in that sense. Probably because trees, stems, and grass are all green. Yellow has a brighter personality and stands out in a crowd. Yellow is by far the brightest of these 6 main colors. Purple is trippy. But maybe that's my own view on the color. Orange has this high energy about it. Also, likely because it is red and yellow combined.

Primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. Secondary colors are green, orange, and purple/violet. Red and blue make purple. Blue and yellow make green. Yellow and red make orange. Tertiary colors are the inbetween colors of those six main colors. So yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, and red-orange.

Complementary colors are opposite on the color wheel. Yellow and purple, blue and orange and red and green. When these colors are used together they are made to pop. I always think of these colors in sports teams. Yellow and Purple are the Lakers colors. Blue and Orange are the Thunders colors. Green and Red are Christmas colors and also the Wild colors. Even the tertiary colors have their complementary colors like blue-green and red-orange. 

Analogous colors are three colors that are right next to each other. All three of these colors are primary, secondary or tertiary. So red, orange and red-orange are analogous colors. 

Monochrome colors are colors that only use one color but if you add white or black. Basically different shades of one color So for blue, you could use all the shades of blue from sky blue to midnight blue. 

Lastly, neutrals are colors that are without color. So like beige, ivory, browns, black, grays, and white. These colors don't have a ton of meaning to them but they go well with all primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

It's kind of interesting that every color can be described as a mixture of other colors. Turquoise is a light blue-green. Blue-green is half green and half blue. Green is a mixture of yellow and blue. Blue is a primary color. I guess you can't really define blue, red, yellow as a mixture of other colors, but for most colors you can. 

Even black and white can be described in relation to other colors. Black is too much color and white is devoid of color. Same for neutral colors I mentioned. Brown is basically a dark orange. Ivory is a really light yellow. Beige is a mixture of brown and ivory. 

Exercise: Sol LeWitt

When I read Color Me Real about Sol LeWitt, I was intrigued by his use of color for obvious reasons. He uses a lot of colors and geometric shapes. Towards the end of the article, it goes through his process and what materials he uses. It says that he uses gel-colored lights. This made me curious as to what that is. It turns out that gel-colored lights are opaque color cards that are tinted in a certain color. It's used for theatre and it's a way to alter the color of the lights. 

When I was told to make something, I started to make geometric shapes. I tried to make them all the same shape but that didn't go so well. So I went with this first image. I also was messing around with opacity to get that gel-colored light effect.

I made the squares in primary colors and the rectangles in secondary colors. It's all based on the color wheel. I then rotated it and messed around with the opacity even more to look like this:

This seemed so generic to me. So I combined the rotations together and that's the result of these 3 pieces.

So this is my final piece up here. It's a little different from Sol Lewitt because of all the overlapping but the use of color and geometric shapes is an inspiration in this piece.