How does collaboration create communities in art and design? Every individual has different views, experiences and skills. When we collaborate, these aspects come together and allows us to create things we wouldn’t have been able to on our own. Through collaboration, we pass on our own knowledge and skills, while obtaining new knowledge from others. This is how collaboration creates a community, as we form links and a network between those who we work with.
In this illustrative poster, I aimed to show this concept of individual ideas meshing together to form something more complex. I thought of how when you ask a group of people to draw the same subject, chances are they’ll each produce completely different results. So, I asked a few people to draw the first thing they thought of when they heard the word ‘line.’ In a way, the results looked like some sort of psychology test that revealed how each person’s mind thinks differently. One person drew a straight line, while others drew a zig-zag, a spiral or a random squiggle. This was interesting as I would never drawn some of these lines myself, which happens to prove the concept.
I took these lines, overlapped them, and composed them in a way that they interacted and intertwined with each other, like how individual ideas combine. Alone, these lines are just lines, but together they take shape. The added an excerpt from Helen Keller's quote, “Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much”, complements the illustration and sums up the concept. Coincidentally, the letters are connected by the lines much like how links are formed between people through collaboration.
As an extention of the initial poster illustration, I created a frame animation of the line composition, using Photoshop, to portray the concept of the continual cycle and network formed through collaboration.
