Gardens of the future

Above is a development zoning plan for my Soluna site. This is where my site plan began. Very loosely and not to scale. In order to get my head around spacing and sizing of elements I roughly drew up this master plan in coloured pencil. I feel like there is still a lot of work needed as the planting is currently in very isolated pockets as opposed to being intgrated within the wider site.  I really liked the softness of this colour scheme but I felt the colours did not match the life and energy that Soluna has. This masterplan felt too calm and muted.  I made this master plan on photoshop using the bucket fill tool and brushes. I did really like the style of this master plan but felt it was not right for the energy of this site. It was too bold and blocky. This masterplan was definitley working towards what I wanted, but felt really washed out and the colours felt muddy and not compatible. This is what my final master plan looked like. Of all of my renditions I think this one ...

 For my visual narrative portfolio I wanted to create a visual of a runway. However, I wanted this visual to vary from the rest and be a biro drawing. In order to do this I first made this very quick concept collage and in order to create the correct scaling and give me something to reference. I then recreated this in biro. 

 Above is a submission I handed in as part of my design project. This movie aimed to present the atmopshere of my festival site, conveying the key principles and visitor experience.  I felt it was not important to include all of the site bases, background inspiration, logo development etc. as these have all been mentioned in my A3 portfolio document that would be handed to a client alongside this. Instead I felt it was important to convey what written words cannot - true emotion.

These sketches were quick and intended to map out key areas of the site. This allowed me to visualise the cohesivity of varying elements and decide where I wanted to place them. This was also extremely helpful when it came time for me making visualisations, as I already knew how things would look, I just needed to collage the elements over these drawings.   

  As a way of exploring the genius loci of this site, I decided to create a tactile collage, produced using found materials collected directly from the site. This included: leaves, soil rubbings and fragments of sticks. This allows the character of Alney Island to be explored through texture, weight and material contrast, rather than purely visual representation. Organic elements included in this collage, such as the leaves, reflect the living, seasonal and adaptive elements of the floodplain. While sticks represent the infrastructural elements of the site that cause site-wide fragmentation. The way that these elements are layered over each other aims to portray how the varying layers of this site combine, contrast and co-exist. Drawings of key site elements and on-site photography allow the collage to sit between direct observation, providing context and ensuring interpretation is based on real site conditions and materiality.

 In terms of logo creation for Soluna, I struggled with ways to keep the logo natural but also classy as it would need to be used for festival merchandising as well. I considered the fluidity of the river. I also considered natural elements like the sun, soil, planting etc. I then considered more of my branding strategy and felt that it would be inkeeping with the site to have a logo that could be lino printed or embossed into paper, as a way of reducing environmental impact. This is how I landed on my final logo. I felt this logo would also look ver chic as a wax seal on festival invites.