You may have noticed the icon on the frontpage of this website:
Why choose that image? Why is that the first thing you see when you visit the site? What's the meaning behind it?
Think about it.
The paint has a distinctly unfinished look. It's like the splash of paint you might put on a wall to test if it's really the color you want. It's clearly a work in progress. A test, a prototype. And yet, despite it being a work in progress, it makes you think of art, and evokes a sense of creativity.
Look across at the name tag. It's unfinished too. It has a handwritten, draft feel to it. The letters haven't been fully filled in. Again - a work in progress. A sketch, a mockup.
And why blue? Why that particular shade of blue? It's reminiscent of the artworks of Yves Klein, the monochrome artist who painted everything in blue. He even created his own unique shade of blue called International Klein Blue that he patented. That color is a reminder of how simple things - even plain monochrome - can become unique and infused with meaning. How you can give meaning to something that has no inherent meaning at all.
A bit like this icon.
See, there is no special meaning. I didn't set out to evoke a particular imagery with deep meaning. I didn't spend a lot of time on it. I just put my photo there, thought it looked plain, and searched iStockPhoto for "grunge textures". The paint is the texture I found. I put it behind the photo and liked how it looked. I tweaked it to that blue color because I like dark blue. And that handwritten font for the name tag? It was a free font called Sketchetik that appeared in a MyFonts search for "sans-serif Light". I could have chosen a different font, but why not use this one? Execute now, iterate quickly. This way, I had my website launched and online. I can always change it later.
Create first. Meaning is a post-processing step.
"Art is anything you can get away with."
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p.132-136.
23 January 2011.
©2011
Kohan Ikin.