As a first step to designing a business card, I made a map of adjectives that best describe me. Here is the mind map that resulted:

The common theme that is relevant to a business card is my self-identification as a maker. Since I have a broad set of skills in electronics, carpentry, design.. a title such as creative technologist seems too constrictive. So I decided early on not to include any title.

I looked through my desk drawer for business cards and found a few samples to draw inspiration from. I particularly liked the simplicity of ny sci business cards. The portrait orientation makes it stand out and the watermarks give a pleasant second read without being too distracting on the first read. Inspired by this, I decided to adopt a portrait orientation and watermarks suggesting my skills. I got a lot of icons for tools, electronics, art and code to use as watermarks from The Noun Project.

 

I experimented with a lot of styles and combinations on my name and handle (tinkrmind) on paper, before looking for fonts online. I decided to go with ‘Sawasdee’ for the contact information. It is a compact font, which renders will for the portrait orientation. The fact that it is open source is just a cherry on top. For my handle and name I decided to go with ‘Neon 80s’. It is a playful and bold font in contrast to ‘Sawasdee’.

 

I wanted to develop a logo for my handle as a part of this project. I wanted the logo to represent both art and tech. I made the following two logos. I finally decided to go with the cog and brain logo since I think that the wrench and paintbrush look too much like a construction company logo.

Since I generally rely heaving on grids, I took it as a challenge to work without a grid and go with intuition composing this project. I settled on a fairly simple design, with a symmetrial composition for the back.

 

The following card is based on gestalt psychology of design. Specifically, themes in continuity and simplicity are explored in the two main images.

The images are made in Inkscape -source file on my github. The font used is UnDinaru.

Experimenting with changing color palette of an image:

The technique: I converted the image into 5 color palette using the imageMode tool in GIMP(~photoshop) and the used the alien filter to change the palette until I found something interesting.

I used these colors as an inspiration to get the palette below.

I made the following compositions with this palette in Processing – original image files and source code on github:

I really enjoyed changing the palette of the leaf image above, so I made a tool in p5.js to convert any image into my palette. (code on github and alpha editor) Here are some interesting compositions that resulted from playing around with this code: