The odds and ends of design

There’s a wide range of designed material with which we can make an impact. Unless you are a professional designer you are unlikely to win a commission to design the packaging for a commercial product, but it’s quite possible that, if you are known to have a computer and design software, you may be asked to produce something for a local event, give some pro bono assistance or just create designs in your day to day work at the office.

The point is that we are all instantly affected by the visual experiences we see around us and a graphic of some sort or another is an immediate way of making an impact or getting a message across. Lack of training seem to deter nobody. Somehow it is felt that the computer will produce a professional product. In fact there is so much design around that it’s difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff – particularly as, in Britain, we don’t receive a good visual education.

Sometimes during this process studies are made of a particular design interest or problem and which illustrate something which might be developed later. These drawings, which illustrate different characters of geometric patterning, are of – from left to right:

• an Arabic grille, or mushrabiya
• a Celtic design, and a
• cosmatesque design.

and were investigated while working on Islamic studies. The musharabiya is a very strong, traditional design, here based on ten-point geometry. While carrying out research on Arabic geometric design, I was also looking at other cultures and their geometries, in the case of Celtic – in the middle – with a view to comparing and contrasting the different structures. The pattern on the right is a cosmatesque design and was drawn for comparison with the two geometries adjacent to it. This latter type of patterning, originating near Rome, exists in England only in the pavements inside Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.

These three patterns are part of a hand-drawn study series I made on Arabic/Islamic geometries quite a time ago. The drawings were developed with only a compass and straight edge in order to explore the manner in which I have seen craftsmen setting out their designs on gypsum panels before carving them. The three are also all based on ten-point geometry which, as I’ve explained here, relates to the Golden Section, a relationship considered to demonstrate a perfect proportion, and one which is found in many Islamic geometric designs.

I have placed the central pattern here in order to show the even grid on which a variety of patterns can be developed. The top and bottom studies were investigations into two door panels, and are relatively common patterns in the Islamic world. The studies looked at the variety of patterns that can be developed from similar geometries. Here I have illustrated only two-dimensional line patterns, but they can be seen to be quite different from each other. When coloured in as they would be in Islamic tilework, there are an infinite number of ways they can be presented.

From time to time there is a need to produce a quick design for one reason or another. Here a pair of crossed pencils was quickly drawn for a small project. The perspective is not correct, but it met the need. To the right, an A4 cover was needed for a report about the State of Qatar in the Arabian Gulf. It’s unusual coastline, similar to the outline of a hand and linked to a sloping coastline of Saudi Arabia, suggested the staggered, overlapping design with the colours being an approximation of the colours of sand and sea.

And, to the right, are three examples of visiting cards, proving the rule that a designer really shouldn’t work for himself or, perhaps more accurately, he really should know when it’s time to stop. They are all completely over-designed and not at all good of their sort. The good news is that none of them was used because at least I recognised they were poor. I really must have another go at it…

On the right of the three visiting cards is a design based on my signature in Arabic. It is not ’proper’ Arabic writing or calligraphy but is a version of my signature based on the ’tughra’ – a stylised form of calligraphy where the artist is permitted considerably more latitude than there is in the rules of basic calligraphy. It is a design which catches an Arab’s eye, but perhaps not for the right reasons. There’s a larger version of it below, right.

And here to the right is yet another visiting card, quickly made and relating to this site. I prefer it to the others in that it’s simpler and has better proportions, being based on the Golden Section. Looking at it now I can see that it can – and needs to be – amended.

Here, to the left, is a sketch design made to illustrate a children's story relating to an old diary. It’s useful to make quick sketches to see if you are working on the right lines. A version of this would have been developed as a frontispiece to the book. To the right of it is a version of the same piece of calligraphy you can see a little further up the page as a visiting card. I struggle with this particular design from time to time knowing more or less what I want to do with it but never quite being able to get exactly what I want out of it. I think it works well as a hand-drawn piece of calligraphy but not so well when formalised.

And this design, to the right, is the latest formal version of it complete with vowelling – the diacritics – but is nowhere as attractive as the tughras produced by the Ottoman empire where the rulers used their tughras as seals, the design having a legal resonance on official documents. This version of the design is getting a little nearer what I want to create, but I think it still has a long way to go in terms of the geometry of the different curves.

Kufic patterns

Scripts in Arabic are required to conform with precise calligraphic rules in the execution of their manuscript form, but some of the most beautiful examples of calligraphy have stretched these rules, and this is certainly true of the work of many of the designers of modern Arabic calligraphy. Traditionally, calligraphers learn their craft formally over several years and, of course, continue to learn and develop their skills with time and experience. The skills here are both mechanical as well as artistic and it is fascinating to watch them at work as they think through and execute their work. The examples here, though, are very different.

Kufic script has interested me for some time now, particularly in its cubic, three-dimensional form which has so much in common with architecture. Here are two studies based on the first part of the shahada where the Kufic letterforms have been used to produce a building-like structure, one that could, in theory, be constructed. The first is deliberately designed as a continuing tower, the second as a regular cube. They both consist, in effect, of two-dimensional letterforms, given depth and then used on a three-dimensional form. So far I have not been able to design them as true three-dimensional constructions but, from time to time, I have another attempt to think it through.

These two examples are similar to those above. They are essentially the same design using a Kufic form in two-dimensions, but I have formed the top one as a hollow cube, the lower as a solid. In many ways these are the type of exercise that used to be common in design schools of various sorts. They make you think about three-dimensional forms and the spaces in and around them. It would be more interesting if I could get the design elements to interlock, but I have not yet been able to do so. I find this type of work fascinating and have used it from time to time in greeting cards such as this example, again using the phrase ‘eid mubarak’, where the design has been constructed in the form of a maze, a design which lends itself to the laying out of a real maze or, perhaps, a parterre ’ although these are usually symmetrical about a central or cruciform axis.

The Kufic form of the design above and this to the side also bear a strong resemblance to a wooden building toy I designed and which is illustrated on a later page of this section. This form of design is also a good student activity or exercise, enabling conceptual spaces to be investigated within a self-specified series of rules, either as blocks or as spaces – in both cases they can be considered as sculpture at whatever scale is appropriate.

In this case the rules relate to the form selection of the Kufic letters and its repetition over a six-sided cube which introduces the problems of whether or not to employ reflection: in this case there is only rotation. There is more information on patterns here on the Islamic geometry page.

The benefit of this kind of exercise is that it forces the designer to think in three-dimensions and develop solutions to problems of his or her own making, an exercise faced by all designers working in both two and three dimensions. It may be a truism but designs which are inherently and internally consistent tend to be more coherent whether they are easily understood or not. In a sense it can be seen to be similar to the coherence which comes with the underlying geometry of Islamic designs.

Contrasting with this is a much earlier graphic originally intended for this web site. The hand with the pen was deliberately juxtaposed with a non-calligraphic font, but the result was weak and went unused. It’s an interesting exercise to look back on things that went wrong and work out how you might improve on them.

Here is a quick study made with a drawing programme to see how a particular effect can best be carried out. What I learned is that there are considerable problems if you use anything simpler than the simplest of rings – which is not what it says on the tin… There are, of course, programmes designed specifically to make this effect more readily. I also find the lack of a proper perspective slightly disturbing.

These two illustrations are of a draftsman on a traditional drawing board, and a study of an Egyptian door panel. Elsewhere I have used a study of the geometry behind this particular door. It is from Egypt and is representative of the carved panel work found there and elsewhere in the Islamic world. The panel is based on ten-point geometry, which relates it to the geometry of the Golden Section. I’ve written more about this geometry here.

Here are two drawings of a traditional Arabic house. The top drawing is a standard way of exploring and demonstrating the construction of a house showing it cut away to permit us to see the elements of the contruction. It is not a technical drawing in the sense that it is not an accurate, scaled representation of an existing building, but it has an accuracy which implies it is. However, it’s purely illustrative. The original was A4 size and a slightly larger version than the one above can be found on the Gulf architecture page.

The sketch to the right explores a different character of the construction of the same kind of traditional building. In a sense it looks more realistic due to the use of shadows though I can see now that I have too many roofing poles projecting from the building. The infill panels are deliberately left out, and the sketch looks at the way light falls across this traditional construction. Like the sketch above, this drawing is also reduced from its original A4 size. The purpose of this kind of drawing is to explore the way light falls on the building, compared with that above which examines its construction.

For a long time I have had an interest in the history of housing in the Arabian Gulf. It has been relatively easy to produce simple diagrams which, while not necessarily accurate, give a flavour of the accompanying discussion. Here a traditional Bedu tent is divided into the main, men’s area, and the women’s to the left. It might have been better to add the guy ropes and poles to give a more realistic appearance, but with the illustrations intended to be relatively small, they were omitted.

To the right is a notional illustration of a desert development which has developed over a period of time. The sketch is one of a series starting with the Bedu encampment above it and ending with this illustration demonstrating notional change over time. Again, the illustration is very much stylised, with a lot of detail omitted, the concentration being on the massing of spaces and their development from tent to stone and mortar construction, and the view selected to show optimal detail. I should add that neither this nor that above were drawn with specialist software.

The drawing was made in an illustrating programme, the perspective being set up on a separate layer to help establish a reasonable view of the compound. For simple drawings I like this kind of programme though there is at least one application which makes sketching in perspective relatively easy. It was used in the illustration above that shows shadows cast on the face of the building.

I have always been fascinated in the relationship between two- and three-dimensional forms and that has developed my interest in origami. Though this piece to the right is not origami as such, it is composed from squares each folded from a single white square of paper. The work is a study for a larger piece – actually the same sized squares of about 3¨ each – but to be eight by thirteen in arrangement based on a development of Fibonacci. It developed from the work on Islamic geometric patterning and the reflective effect is has on the viewer. I find that even this simple study has a soothing effect when looked at, and it’s only a lack of wall space which has stopped me completing it.

There are a number of really interesting studies based on origami tessellation which are much more interesting than this type of work. Anybody with an interest in geometrical studies would be well advised to seek them out, research and study them.