I was commissioned to illustrate a vinyl wall decal for Bespoke Coworking’s nap room. The team was inspired by the Language of the Birds art installation in North Beach, San Francisco, and hoped to create a similar atmosphere in their Library, where the nap pods are located.
I worked with the management team over a few iterations of design, from rough sketches and low-fidelity illustrations up to the full-size illustration that was finally installed a couple weeks later.
Filmed with iPhone X and GoPro Hero5. Edited with After Effects.
After kicking off the project with a brief outline, including the project coordinator’s enthrallment with the Language of the Birds installation in North Beach, San Francisco, I brainstormed a few different ways that the books-on-wires concept could take flight.
One concept features a single vanishing point in the center of the wall, another features lines running laterally with two vanishing points far beyond the edges of the wall, a third used telephone poles to create a great field of depth, and the fourth eschewed the usual rules of perspective and instead featured books spiraling down a golden ratio in an almost surreal style.
I consolidated the feedback on my sketches into a single concept, illustrating the books from scratch using a combination of freeform pen-tooling and Illustrator’s blend tool to create my books. One limitation of using the blend tool to create my shapes was that it required additional work to smooth out the jagged lines that gave the edges a raster-based appearance to them. At a smaller scale this would have been imperceptible, but on a wall of this size, it was a necessary fix.