Amongst the ho-hum scribbles of any designer, the few gems that rise above are at times scarce. Until today, I hadn't made it outside of that stagnation. It's important to remember though that some of the best work comes out of the times where you continuously make, instead of spending days and days on one single piece.

Similarly, I was inspired by an image I came across previously, and it knawed at me until I satisfied the urge. I don't often scale my work very large in Photoshop unless forced into it, because I find the vast amount of working area to be more revealing. I have to stress over more detail in the work area, while in Illustrator, I can start small and scale later. So I created the image at 2560x1920, meant to be used as a wallpaper mostly for myself. The exercise/goal was photorealism, no use of tutorials, and accomplishing a visually appealing image.

Here's the end result: 

Full resolution for download can be found here.

So what happened? Well, I learned some helpful new tidbits about lighting, edges and shadows, and texture. It's incredible how different an image can turn out when you rough up something, add a little noise, get the shadows just right. The more I mess around, the more "aha" moments I come across that allow me to better understand how my favorite designs came about.

The lighting is too nuanced to me, particularly on the button and the rest of the structure. Either something should have been done to more clearly separate the foreground and background, or the lighting/shadows perhaps more contrasty.

I also realized that while I love typography, I suck at it. I can't tell how many revisions I went through before settling on what you see here, and in retrosopect, there was still more I could have done. Oh well. Practice practice practice. I'll grab a book or two, snag some online articles and gun for a type class. Should help smooth things out.

More to come as this term picks up and I start setting a better pace this year for designs and experimentation.