After the ignominious demise of the 2006 Wall Calendar (see entry below), I did not want to get too far down the road on design without being very sure of where the concept was going and that all the appropriate management was on board. I also decided not to get too avant-garde in the layout.
Initially this one also was slated to have green theme, and I worked out a couple of different concepts to mock up and submit. Somewhere after that the eco thing got shelved, and I was asked instead to produce a calendar design that would utilize existent carpet photography of each of the company's "big five" clients, all commercial carpet mills, each to receive a different calendar using their own carpet. But make sure to choose current carpet styles. Oh and let's have a different person's name on each calendar printed for the specific individual that will receive the calendar.
I don't know about you, but I do not consider even the best carpet photography to be very interesting at all. Although I understood the reasoning behind the concept, remember, the point of the whole exercise is to get these things on the wall so that the company name is kept visible. And If I spent all my waking hours in the design, manufacture, and marketing of carpet – even if I really loved my job – the last thing in the world I would want to look at on my wall at work would be pictures of carpet. So I considered this project a significant challenge to pull off.
Once again I turned to Photoshop. And some techniques from the past.
If you look at the Pour CD Cover (see entry below), behind the Rising Sun there's an image with symmetrical, fibrous, organic looking something-or-other. The something-or-other is actually pine straw. It had occurred to me that a scanner full of pine straw might be a really neat background. Unfortunately, I was rather wrong. It gave the whole cover a very "Hee Haw" kind of look. But as I was searching for a way to guide and salvage the feel of my original idea, I stumbled upon the idea of mirroring the pine straw vertically and horizontally. Made it look a bit like a very ornately woven basket or something. Very cool. So I thought I would try that technique on the carpet shots.
But as you can see, the calendar for each customer would require fitting in several mirrored carpet shots (five different styles are present in the close up above). To manage putting all of that together as a seamless whole would require more creative thought. Looking deep into the recesses, and back in time, I remembered using paint splatters on Cross (see below), and thought that I might make use of a similar technique (though in a very different way it turned out).
These I eventually mirrored also, but at angles to produce five or six turns, using them as masks to show other carpet styles through. The effect on this particular one turned out to produce a sort of five pointed star, but others looked very floral, or I-don't-know-what.
In the end I did manage to bring them together to produce six seamless pieces of wall art (one customer had been added in the hopes of generating more sales) made up of each mill's own carpet styles. Each calendar produced quite varied and kaleidoscopic effects, for which reason I dubbed them "Kalendoscopes."
What do you want reflected into the world?
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