PROJAQK Staff
Designer: Farid.
Instagram: @faridofisiel
WHO IS FARID?
I’m a boy who thinks his age should be a secret. I live in a tropical rainforests country called Malaysia, we just celebrated our 63rd independence day or “merdeka” in Malay on the last August 31st. I’m quite an intricate person at mind and heart and minimal one in general.
I’m just another weirdo that has his passion for art.
All types of art. I love everything that relates to art. I love graphic design, I love writing, I love drawing, and many more. I do adore all local talents and I’m freaking excited about what these amazing creatives have in store for Malaysia’s future in art, graphic design especially.
I don’t have the skills that it takes to do all those aforementioned interests, but I won’t stop doing them, I just love them all, unconditionally. I could be a perfectionist but that really depends on the time, my mood, and the machine I’m working on that is basically the indicator of my perfectionism.
I’m now doing my very best to sharpen my skills up so that one fine freaky day, I could eventually get lost in my own work instead of losing my jaws seeing people’s. Till then, yes… I got no skills, but burning passions. Be… prepared.
When I was first asked by PROJAQK to show my best projects, I was like… damn, what do I do?
I have literally nothing amazing to flex but of course, I do have several works of art that is close to my heart, those that I love most even though they aren’t the public’s favorite.
I, too, do have a few other projects from the old catalog but they’re old things, like really old, from a long time ago so I don’t want to bring them back because it’s not their era. But to show my gratitude to PROJAQK for seeing my work as what they’re seeing, for wanting to feature my tiny humble work on their blog, let me take out these two recent projects that are close to my heart.
FRÉID
First of all, I’m presenting you with this minimal intricate graphic.
What do I like about this mini project is, the intricate elements that I’m trying to portray with the minimal approach because that’s me. I have always wanted to keep things both more and less. This is everyone’s least favorite but it is somehow my most favorite at the moment. I love it when I get to mix the best of both worlds.
Complicated stuff with a minimal approach.
Not that I’m saying this work is complex enough but I love the small portion of intricacy that it has to offer. Well, I’m still new with this type of art you know.
I started doing this when I first saw Hudson Playing Cards designed by Dan Gretta for Theory11 on Pinterest and it was like love at first sight and I was like, damn! I gotta do that.
I normally start a project with some basic sketches, by hand, obviously, conventionally.
But for this one, I went straight to Adobe Photoshop and started playing with the pen tool until I get the ornaments kinda look that I desire. It took me quite a few long hours because it is hard to please my heart, my eyes, my brain as it was first meant for an Instagram post (see, it’s just for one-day-fun, lol) to commemorate Eid festivity since I’m a Muslim.
To keep it minimal, I only played with the colors, the effects without overdoing it, without trying to make it avant-garde and you can see the results as follow.
I then decided that this is an official graphic for every occasion that relates to my spiritual.
You can see there are two looks for this design, one with the super basic all-white, minimal look which is the base of the design, and the second one (in red), which is somehow one of the most double-tapped post on IG. I guess people do like my work, it’s just that they want some colors.
The process was quite long but not that complicated as much as I tried to make the design look. I think we’re done with the first design that I called… FRÉID, simply stands FARID’s EID.
FLASS
Moving on to the second one, I think it’s not too much for me to say that this is the most commented work of mine on IG, since that’s the only platform at the moment. So I shall crown it as one of my best projects.
What inspires me to create this type of art is the graphic from Microsoft Design on Instagram. They’re fun, cheerful, and very intriguing. There’s a few types of graphic there that have caught my attention.
The ones that look like glass, the translucent plastic. I think I should come out with something like them but of course with my own style, minimal, again. So the concept is simple, minimal see-through graphic with glasses effect.
This design has the frosted glass texture that I’m so invested in. It gives me the luxury feeling. Except for the head and the headgear part, because sometimes it’s nice to have some contrast to your work.
So the first step of this work was the shapes (I also did this on Adobe Photoshop, my ultimate go-to port for designing).
For your record, this artwork is inspired by the original photo of Malaysia-born singer-songwriter, Yuna (her Rouge album cover).
So I first started out by creating the irregular shapes that I want out of the photo (her body figure) using the pen tool before I proceeded to Filter > Filter Gallery > Distort > Glass and set the amounts I desire for the distortion, the smoothness, and the scaling. I chose ‘frosted’ for the texture. I then rasterized the photo so I can cut out parts of it using the shapes I created earlier.
The next step was applying the effects to every shape to give them the realistic frosted glass, with different ‘condition’ each.
Back to business, for the next step… I was just doing trial and error to find the best set of effects. Tweaking on the shadows, gradients, colors, blending and so much more, you know, the basic photoshop style effects.
And those were the process that I took to achieve the frosted glass artwork that I called FLASS (I simply changed the letter G to F because I’m obnoxious, everything has to start with F). I’m making this as a series, so more is coming your way. Stay tuned.
That is all for my design journey for both projects.
