Sunday 4 October 2009

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. I'm a fervent adherent of this principle. And it helps. Specially at times like this. It's been long since I used my creative juices and created something on Photoshop. Preparing for BSchool entrance exams takes up all my time, energy and patience; and I have little time to do anything else, and that includes eating chocolates too. With so little time remaining for preparation, I expect everything to be grasped, understood and remembered quickly. But my brain seems to take its own sweet time to push things into the permanent memory area. That is a huge frustration. So I've now taken up this policy of "Slow and steady, bell the CAT" and I'm putting the one-liner up every where. Since I use my laptop quite often, a wallpaper to this effect was imminent. So I made one, in a jiffy so I wouldn't waste much time on Photoshop, and came up with this. It's simple and stupid. But I like it!
The Making:
Though it looks simple and stupid, it took me about 20 minutes to finish it. First of all, font selection. It took time to find a font that expressed steadiness. After experimenting with about four fonts, I finally chose Poplar Std since it was heavy and sans serif (I have this obsession with sans serif fonts). The next ten minutes went in colour selection, the most dreaded part. I wanted something soothing and neutral. I didn't want the design to command me, or remind me of stuff, like green (would remind me of greenery and nature), pink (too gay :P), red (are you ordering/commanding me?? :-X), yellow (ewww.. why is that even a colour?), orange (fire!!), black (gives me an I'm-too-serious-to-think-about-colours, unenthusiastic feeling). I even tried chocolate brown, but that would again make me want to go out and buy a big bar of Dairy Milk Roast Almond :( My only option, and my favourite option, remaining was blue! No colour soothes me like blue does. It does remind me of the oceans sometimes, but in a pleasant, calm and serene way. So blue it was. After experimenting with shades of blue for about 2 minutes, colours were finalised. Then came the placement of the text. I had originally visualised the text to span the entire screen, but when I did that I felt as if the words were screaming at me. Besides, my eyes would have to span the entire screen screen, left to right, to read the text (Yes, I'm that lazy, that I don't even want to move my eyeballs :P). So I decided against it and kept it simple, stupid that would be in an aesthetic postion with respect to the four temporary icons on my desktop (For those who don't know, I usually NEVER have any icons on my desktop).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Muaah yaar Manasa!! What a beautiful post yaar and I am highly surprised about the way you write. Seems like Ms. Hawa Hawaii is finally transforming to Ms. Sensible, isn't it? The artwork concept is really super cool :D.

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