Why Nature of Form will be a designer’s Best Friend!!

Do you ever find yourself brimming with adept solutions? Like, wonder where you could use that material? How they could’ve used a different font or color or stroke? How the perspective could be so out of proportion?

But also found yourself in a designer’s block when you really needed to get work done? (We did, too.) There’s no need to tell a designer or an artist, how often we face creative blocks, especially when trying to meet the looming deadlines. The biggest Lego under our feet is the task of generating aesthetics. Toss in a few curves? Chamfers and fillets? Maybe angular trims? Get a cup of Nature? Take a stroll amongst the greens, wait for an inspiration to strike at the speed of light? (We tried all of them, the Lego really hurts)

Now What??

A group of multidisciplinary designers, who share the same old hitch of generating “unconventional” aesthetics and face the same old problem of lost inspiration, try to address this problem in a rather unique way.

They selected various elements in Nature. These elements were categorized as fruits, vegetables, insects, etc. Forms, textures, and colors were extracted from these elements. The collection became the book, ‘Nature of Form’.

Make your designs inspired by Nature

The book is a collection of Forms, Colors, and Textures extracted from various elements in nature. It covers 150 elements divided into categories like Fruits, Vegetables, Insects, etc. From these elements, 1454 entities have been derived (432 Forms, 231 Patterns, 791 Colors). The extraction of forms, patterns, and colors was a tedious one but the result was a beautiful book, that has the competence to become any designer’s most valuable asset.

People behind the book

The book ‘Nature of Form’ is a brainchild of three designers Bhagvanji Sonagra, Bhavin Dabhi, and Sushmita Chava, soon to be launched on Kickstarter.

According to Bhavin, one of the co-authors, “We like creating unconventional and unique designs. And many a time, all our creative brainstorming yields either no results or the same repetitive ones. So, how to carve a path to finding something beautiful, and exceptional every time?” And to tackle this very issue, an idea was born. Since the inception of Design, one thing is universally agreed and that is, Nature is the most powerful designer of all. So, imagine the potential when it is used as an inspiration.

Bhagvanji has encompassed the elements of Nature in many of his designs. And he felt that every time he needed to repeat a certain process. He says, “I like to use the patterns or textures from nature. Nature is also home to unimaginable and yet elegant curves and shapes. I wished that this power and strength of the designs in Nature should have more concrete and structural form. That’s what we have tried to achieve in the book, ‘Nature of Form’.

One thing according to Miss Sushmita, that they took care of was not to go for the obvious extractions. She says, “We’ve already studied some of the inspirations from Nature. For example, we know how famous the Leopard print is in the world of fashion. What we tried was to extract forms that comprise the element in its natural habitat during the entire cycle of the day. An insect flying or a whale turned upside down or a Cheetah in full sprint, we tried to obtain entities that were truly modernist.

Why this Product?

Although inspiration knows no concept of time, place or context, we can certainly increase our exposure, to stimulate our artistic side. While you can always take a stroll, or spend hours on the internet it would conclude a more unproductive bustle than a consequential one. Hence, the book, “Nature of Form” which constitutes abstractions of natural elements into Forms, Textures, and Colors.

Finding Inspiration is like skimming stones. You start off at a place, skim across multiple checkpoints till you anchor down to a solid place. An example of the flow of inspiration could be, Furniture for an island resort — -flora & fauna — -tribal diversity — -ancient crafts — -building boats — -shapes of the boats — -curves of the boat. Purely comprised of authentic sources from Nature, the book ‘Nature of Form’ is an extremely relevant checkpoint for you.

Moreover, we are aware of the use of attributes for searching inspirations. Like “Sporty” or “Energetic” or “Delicate”, etc. That is why we tagged each abstract form with at least 3 attributes!

It simply makes your process of inspiration hunt easier.

Nature of Form in use

Let’s consider a Natural element, say ‘Starfish’. The respective page will contain 3 form extractions of Starfish, the top 4 dominant colors found in the Starfish species, and 1–3 textures from the species. As such we have around 10 categories like Flowers, Vegetables, Birds, etc. Each of the categories has around 9–20 elements.

The Book is subjective to the context of its use. To say, if you’re

a textile designer, you may find the naturally coupled color theme and the symmetrical forms of the Starfish to tessellate and create a spread.

a product designer, you may use the forms and textures of the Starfish in creating a grip texture on your products.

a graphic designer, you may find the color schemes and the textures useful in producing good illustrations and compositions.

an automotive designer, you may use the attributes to find the power curves for your next automobile sketch.

a UI UX designer, you can use the color themes to contextually generate a more realistic web experience.

an Engineer/a Modeler, you can feed your creative end by converting the 3D textures into meshwork and derive stress and strength parameters.

The aforementioned users are from our limited source of knowledge. The uniqueness of this product lies in the fact that it is one, but many at the same time. The reader can manifest his/ her/ their own meaning into it.

We would really love to see various perspectives on the application of ‘Nature of Form’.