Brainstorming and Research
This project begins with asking to choose a garden of any sort, and I chose the Chicago Botanic Gardens as my garden. I chose this garden because I have been there and found it to be very pretty.
Below is my research of the Chicago Botanic Gardens. This includes a visual map and historic information about the garden itself. This garden has a variety of different plant life.
Visual Research and Collage
While I was researching my garden, I thought about the plant life in the garden. As stated above, it does have a variety, but I stuck with basic plants. One of my favorites is the bonsai tree, so I included a picture of one as inspiration. Then I thought about how botanic gardens involve a community, so I chose the hands holding a plant as my representation of community. Then I looked at different typography for further inspiration.
Sketches for Garden Icons
These sketches are the rough sketches for the icons I created. They were meant to get my ideas down onto paper and not meant to be detailed. As I was drawing, I thought about how Chicago is considered the "windy" city. So I drew wind in many of the sketches, and Chicago is a city with tall skyscrapers so I decided to add those too. Then When those got repetitive, I thought about my experience at the garden and tried to translate that onto paper. I am not the best artist, but these are the result of my thoughts.
Digital Roughs of Icons - Includes Refinements
The idea was to get three icons total for a final result. So I chose what I thought were the three best sketches and then put them into illustrator and traced each one. You can tell which ones are the rough traces versus the finished product (I hope). The first icon (far left) represents a skyscraper in the shape of a flower, it is supposed to be organic. The middle icon is supposed to be a representation of wind because of the windy city aspect. At first, I had the curves of the wind connected, but it did not really look like wind. So I ended up disconnecting the curves from the straight lines and got a result I liked. Then I took it a step further and added flower like features such as leaves and petals. Then for the last icon, I took my inspiration of the hands from the research and then added the bonsai tree and a regular flower. This was supposed to show community along with plant life. Drawing and creating the hand was the most difficult part of the icons, and I believe after redrawing the thumb many times, I finally got it down.
Final Icons
After adding more of a sleek design to the rough icons, these are the final result. I hope you enjoyed my behance representation of how the project went! Many of the people I showed the final icons to really liked the last icon, the wind icon.
