CUBEN is the name of a series of poster art designs I am currently creating. Anyone following my flickr photostream will know that I recently have been starting some work on designing some original and unique poster designs which I am aiming to sell on this site soon. Currently I am working on getting the right print platform setup and the right print process.

My plan this year design wise is to come up with 6 unique art styles or designs and sell 100 of each of them (infact I am planning at some point to give some away in a competition too).

CUBEN is the first of the 6 unique art designs. The idea for it came about when I realised that if you remove the sides from a 3D cube you get a hexagon. From an outlined hexagon it is very difficult to fool the eye to think it is actually a 3D cube. However if you stack a number of them on top of each other with varying sizes, colours, gradients, blends and opacity in a certain way you get an effect which gives the eye just enough to be fooled into seeing 3D cubes.

I currently have 5 designs in the series which I have done in the CUBEN range and I have another 3 or 4 planned over the next 2 weeks. From the responses from this post and on flickr I will pick out the top 3 for printing which you will be able to order for around £25 including postage (They will be 20 inches x 30 inches in size).

Design Inspiration

The design inspiration came about from a presentation I saw by Josh Davis on computational design. A lot of his work is created from randomised scripts in Flash which he programmes and then exports to Illustrator and then Photoshop to finalise. He generally takes 8 days programming and creating assets followed by the long process of re-running the alogorithm until it outputs something which he is happy with. He says he can render over 9,000 designs and only come up with 1 from that which is “dope” (a word I seem to be using far too much recently).

Here is a design from Josh Davis in Flash called Hello

My design intergrates to some extent this randomised approach and although this is a great way to work as you spend time doing something different (i.e. preparing the programming and assets) it takes a lot of patience to waiting for the prefect combination of colours and sizes that makes the lightbulb above your head light up.

The CUBEN design in relation to some of Josh’s work are simpler in their structure and has put a fair bit of strain on my workstation with Illustrator, particularly when saving files. I have one set which bangs out 11,000 cubes and man does it like to hang with that bad boy – let alone the hassle of exporting it in to Photoshop for more tweaking after that (It is a shame Photoshop won’t open up AI files – exporting with maximum edit-ability really drains hard disk space for the creation – that’s when it has enough RAM, anyone with any tips on this I have my ears open, albeit this is a great excuse to upgrade to a new workstation running Vista 64bit with something like 16GB of RAM as I’m itching to see what sort of complexity I can create).

Anyway I hope you like the designs and stayed tuned for more and the launch of my poster store. Be sure to let me know which of the design you like the best either in the comments below or on the flickr pages linked to the images below.

CUBEN Poster Designs

Design 1 was the initial design that I came up with a couple of days ago. I really like the contrast of the grey gradient fills with the random colour outline. Out of all of them this is the one I would like to tackle as an animation (watch this space).

Design 2 is more of a progressive design which to some extent has the feel of bubbles the way it goes from large hexagons up to tiny star line ones.

Design 3 was more of an experimental piece which has only red as a colour and tries to incorporate more movement. The lack of colour in this one means the cube shapes aren’t as prominent.

Design 4 is currently my favourite design and once I get the next batch of posters I will take a shot of it as it looks great on a wall.

Design 5 for the people that don’t want white (along with a variation in the scaling of the hexagons / cubes).

Design 6 – Called “square root” this is a start of new trend of construction and destruction of the cube in thee cuben series – less colour more depth.