G’day Everyone,
I’m Zac, nice to meet you. I used to study architecture a long time ago but haven’t had much to do with design since then and recently thought I might try my hand at something a bit different.
When considering the prompt of ‘an era or style’ I was immediately drawn to the idea of something involving Art Nouveau. This, of course, required some consideration of how organic forms could be introduced, and I thought a bird would be ideal.
When looking at the shape of the area we could design in it seemed to be a perfect fit for a toucan. This kind of reminds me of a classic kids show we had in Australia called Mr Squiggle; he’s this puppet with a pencil for a nose that would draw using random lines as prompts. So designing this way is very nostalgic and feels like recapturing some childhood imagination.
Once I had the subject matter in mind, I realised something; Art Nouveau is a beautiful aesthetic in its own right, but I felt it wasn’t really a good fit for the Nothing Phone design style. Sometimes things that are good separately simply don’t meld as well as you might like them to.
Nothing is more industrial and modern, much like another style from the early 20th century, Art Deco. This just made much more sense and that’s before I knew we were coming up to the centennial anniversary of that movement.
So this is what I came up with to combine these thoughts and elements, with some inspiration below as a sample. The one thing I still had to figure out was which kind of toucan to incorporate; there’s quite a few species but it’s only really the Toco and Keel-Billed that have the distinctive beak in question; I ended up sticking with the Toco Toucan because it has a clean look due to the stark contrast of the black and white plumage. Also with jungle-inspired decorations in mind I thought a splash of orange-red would complement the design better than more green.
The patterns and motifs included in the final product were either fair use or AI generated but I just used them as a resource to edit into the shape and application I had in mind.
Which brings me to the reason I am posting this now. I really gave it my all to get this in on time, and as it was I did submit the following: https://community-edition.nothing.tech/gallery/991285/240785/747741850
Unfortunately as I have damage in my wrists I couldn’t complete everything in time and even so have pushed myself too much at this point. Voting is done and that’s fine but I wanted to finish and am hoping this updated version could be considered by the internal jury as it gives a clearer idea of my vision. @Rob ⚡️
