All-Star Portraits
TED
The primary goal was to create a series of portraits that stylistically align with each other. Each presenter had submitted a photo to represent them for the conference, but they varied in appearance and the conference wanted a way to aesthetically unify them. An additional constraint to this task was that there were only 2 weeks to complete these portraits for 60 presenters.
Objectives
One of the approaches that resonated with the conference was to posterize the image and fill the different values in with a pattern of similar value. Initially starting out vector graphics, I explored using hand drawn lines t for the patterns. This humanized the image in a way that resonated with the conference.
Excellent! Now I just need to do 60 of them, so I got busy. Time was short and this wasn’t a process I could batch process.
BUT — when I started to do them I also decided to watch some of their presentations. This was the 30th anniversary of TED and these were the All-Stars, so they all had at least one video on TED I could watch.
It wasn’t long before the thought to incorporated elements of their stories into the sketched patterns I had created. So the crunch for time just got exponentially harder. Grabbing every computer I had and went to war with every progress bar I encountered. Watching, sketching, scanning and patterning (if that’s a word). I turned my office into a portrait war room.
Results
TED All-Star Portraits. Each presenter/portrait had a unique hand drawn set of patterns used in their final portrait