Experience Cape Range National Park

For this project I focused on the fauna native to the Cape Range National Park area and their relationship with the surrounding landscapes.

I would like for my work to carry a light hearted feeling with animals seen using spaces as humans would, to entice a younger audience to visit the park. Illustrated landscapes will draw on native flora and natural colours of the region. My work will be informed by the concepts of the mainstream and exhibit native fauna mashed with human activities.

For too long, advertising, tourism campaigns and experiences within Australia’s incredibly diverse range of national parkland has been targeted solely at young families and retirees wishing to reconnect with nature, after a long career behind a desk.

The goal of my project, “Experience Cape Range National Park” is to redirect this advertisement towards WA’s thriving cultures of young fishers, campers and surfers who appreciate the unspoilt beauty of such areas of our coastline and the unique experiences they offer. For the younger generation of park users, these trips are about relaxation and making memories in search of adventure.

When we started this project I was eager to get stuck into asset creation and had a fairly good idea of the direction I wanted to go in. I began by finding two images of the striking red rock of Yardie Creek Gorge and the Ningaloo reef coral. From here I spent an extremely long time manually tracing macro colour blocks with the pencil tool and recolouring with the live paint tool. This was a technique we had covered in a class activity and I chose to employ it because it gave me control over how much detail I wanted to include. After completing this I had two separate assets I could easily manipulate and this became the basis of my design work to follow, throughout the project.

Every example of reef or rock exhibited throughout my project are all manipulations of these two base images.

Logo Design

My first logo idea sketch depicted a kangaroo riding a whale shark (left). I chose these animals for my logo because they are both iconic to the area, the kangaroo representing the harsh, rugged terrain of the region, the whale shark the majesty of the Ningaloo reef and the abundance of life it supports. These two animals wouldn't normally be depicted interacting and I felt like this juxtaposition would do well to conceptualise the national park without being to serious a logo. I felt like this logo was the origin point for the comedic feel that runs throughout my project.

I then moved on to mock ups of the logo in illustrator where I experimented with line and shape work, as well as different scale, colours and background options.

From this point I played around with scale and positioning until I had a design that I felt worked well with both light and dark backgrounds, as well as a colour gradient option. My final 3 logos (below) are all exhibited within bounding circles as this shape was best suited to match the curvature of the whale shark and minimised negative space both in and around the logo design.

It was clear early into this process that having the shapes of each animal subject touching was impacting the readability of the logo and this would create problems when the logos were placed on dark/light backgrounds. After this realisation I tried different placement options until I found a design that I felt displayed each subject clearly but maintained harmony between the two. (Below)

Poster design

This rough sketch was my first concept design for the poster, depicting a kangaroo relaxing on a blow up pool toy with the red rocks and coral creating a split screen effect across the poster. Floating down Yardie Creek on pool toys was something I personally experienced on my trip to the the national park in the holidays before this trimester started. So when I began designing posters I had a strong idea for the activities I wanted to replicate.

With this piece being the idea for my main poster, I also wanted to create 2 more to be used as either postcards or to create a poster series. To do this I made quick rough sketches of other animals as well.

Some other poster ideas I had were a surfing emu and four wheel driving dingoes. As I progressed through the trimester I decided the dingoes were an outlier in my project and wouldn't really fit the aesthetic I had developed. The surfing emu was also difficult to pull of and didn't leave me a lot of room to tie it in with other elements in my project, for this reason I decided to depict the emu snorkelling instead.

After completing these rough sketches I transitioned to painting, clarifying my design intentions and pushing for a mix of both digital and traditional mediums throughout my project. I used inks to colour these assets as the watery style they imposed gelled really well with my underwater scenes. This was my first time painting with inks as well as digitally manipulating paintings to fit into a poster design.

I was immediately happy with the results I was getting and through multiple iterations I feel like I have achieved the desired effect.

(Above) My first iterations of the animals I wanted to exhibit in my posters

(Left) This was my first iteration of the main poster. I was happy with the overall result but it was obvious that some things needed tweaking. I felt like I had captured the comedic value I had intended but some feedback I received had made me question aspects of it.

I was told I needed to be careful not to portray the national park in a negative light, I believe this stemmed from the beer drinking overweight kangaroo. In my mind this wasn't a negative portrayal of the area, but I decided to take the feedback on board, given I had planned to redo the kangaroo anyway.

The other feedback I was given, was that the poster had an aura of "blokeyness" and was a poor representation of gender. From the outset of this project I decided to use animals instead of people to act as characters to avoid this issue so I did feel like this might be an isolated response. When redesigning the kangaroo I took extra care to ensure this animal wasn't done in an over the top masculine way.

(Above) Kangaroo attempt #2 with replacement head.

(Below) After a new kangaroo asset (this was not the final asset used) I played around with different background gradients, borders and text placements.

Final Posters and Mockups

Yagan Tower Animation

My goal with the Yagan Tower animation was to push my design into a more fantasy style where I could challenge my image making techniques and create something really beautiful. I wanted this section of the project to focus on the Ningaloo reef and bring the wildlife out of the water. To do this I used my reef PNGs to form towers of coral with an attempt to create a mountainous effect. In doing this I wanted to create a spectacle of colour on the tower with all the micro details of my design.

I came up with a few different styles of this for the initial screen test to see which would work best.

Design #1

I felt was too symmetrical and needed a more interesting background to make the coral colours pop.

Design #2

Was an improvement. The background gradient was inspired by the sunset colours of the region and I felt that the contrast with the coral was closer to what I had envisioned. Unfortunately the coral towers coming down from the top of the screen left no space for my animated assets.

Design #3

For this iteration I flipped the background gradient and did some colour edits on the coral. This was a better layout of coral elements in my opinion but the design felt quit 2D and needed more depth.

Design #4

By warping the coral stacks and dropping opacity on areas I managed to create sections of coral that appeared behind the rest to make a nice feeling of depth in this design. Upon adding the animated clouds and cloud sharks I realised this design approach was the most successful of my initial tests.

Animated assets

My animated designs to incorporate in the Tower project were a couple different cloud shapes of different styles, coral that would move as if underwater and a shark made up of clouds. I decided to shift the placement of the coral stacks to get the thicker stack in a better viewing spot on the tower.

Above are screenshots taken from my 3 minute animation, showing the change in gradient over the course of the animation. By darkening the background I was able to cycle through some different colour values for the coral to make a day/night transition that adds an element of timeline to the piece.

Reflective Presentation

Interdisciplinary Work

For the collaboration portion of this project I wanted to push myself and do some design work for someone else. I got in touch with a film student who needed a poster design for a documentary. The documentary was based around the student, Scott Kunesch, undertaking a short window of boxing training before entering a legitimate fight. Drawing on the cultural concepts of trans-humanism and mainstream, I wanted to create a poster with hints of foreshadowing to illustrate the main challenge faced by Scott, which was more a battle with himself than his opponent.