Design dice

Image of Design Dice Collection

Overview

  • Product design for Art Gallery shop
  • HND Visual Communications: Interactive Design
  • Team project
  • My contributions
    • Researching artists, designers and art/design movements
    • Designing and illustrating 16 artworks
    • Developing and creating physical prototypes

Brief

For my interactive design course, I worked with a partner to create a product for sale in an art gallery shop. The product needed to feature our own artwork in the style of 32 famous artists, designers and movements.

Project

My partner, Krzysztof Lulek, and I decided to create cubes displaying a piece of art on each side. These could be thrown to provide inspiration when stuck in a rut. If the user threw three dice and Paula Scher, The Bauhaus and Abstract Expressionism came out on top, then they would have to design something inspired by those three. Alternatively, the cubes could simply be stacked as a decoration.

Image of Design Dice Collection

Artwork

Krzysztof and I decided to do 16 artworks each. For Milton Glaser, I created my own version of his “Poppy Gives Thanks” poster. Given that Glaser was both a designer and an illustrator, it seemed appropriate to hand-draw elements of the piece. I replaced the turkey with a grouse in honour of my home, Scotland.

Design Dice: Milton Glaser

My other 15 artworks are shown below. The first one is based on Vaughan Oliver’s design for the back of Pixies’ Bossanova album.

Design Dice: Vaughan Oliver
Design Dice: Futurism
Design Dice: El Lissitsky
Design Dice: Alexander Rodchenko
Design Dice: Art Nouveau
Design Dice: Letterpress
Design Dice: De Stijl
Design Dice: John Heartfield
Design Dice: Constructivism
Design Dice: David Carson
Design Dice: Giambattista Bodoni
Design Dice: Herbert Bayer
Design Dice: The Arts & Crafts Movement
Design Dice: Bauhaus
Design Dice: Emigre magazine

Assembly

To create the cubes we developed a net as below, then had them printed on the thickest cardstock available.

Design Dice Net for printing and assembling

We carefully cut out, scored and assembled the cubes. As there were 4 sides without artworks, we added our names to these and used them as a base.

Image of Design Dice Collection

Conclusion

I really enjoyed imitating the styles of various artists, designers and movements. In the process I learned a lot more about Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. If this design was put into production the dice would need to be sturdier so they could be thrown repeatedly.