Door to door

Here's a little more on my Rough Guide research! To help capture the sense of movement, interaction and playing I felt as I journeyed from door to door around Chinatown and Soho, I created this little gif, mapping some things I saw on my route. 

A snapshot of my observations (October 2013, author's own)

It's the first time I've made a gif animation- but I think it works well as a quick, fun way to be reminded of the feel of your research. It would be interesting to carry this simple style of animation further along in the design process to experiment with colourways for patterns and prints, too. There is an inspiring post about animating colours on 'The People's Print' blog at the moment, actually. Here is an example of one of their animations. I love the dynamic feel it has; your eye can't help being drawn across the pattern with the transition of the colours.    

Colour pattern animation
(thttp://thepeoplesprint.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/blog-post.html, Accessed October 2013)

As I mentioned before, all the strong, bold colours really stood out to me when wandering around my given research location. Continuing to explore these colours in my sketchbook has been helpful, as our upcoming technical block work takes its basis in our initial research, so I'll need to have a colour palette at the ready by then.

Sketchbook exploration (October 2013, author's own)

Along with the different colours of the doorways I was obsessed with, even  the deliveries and piles of rubbish were surprisingly colourful in Chinatown!

Looking at the way the boxes were stacked continued to remind me of the idea playing a game, as with the intercom buttons before. Some of the stacks were not that different to a game of giant Jenga- knock one part and the whole thing could topple! I realised I wanted to keep exploring this concept of playfulness for our follow-on project, 'Box Clever', where we have to collect a box of objects to inspire our first week of drawing. But more of that to follow!