Elements & Principles of Design - Subway Series

The link below is my Photobucket album submission for the elements & principles of design project:

Elements & Principles of Design - Subway Series

I decided that I was going to have conceptual unity in my work by doing all of the photos at the Subway sandwich shop I work with.  This came because of a pun - they do call me a "sandwich artist" after all.

"Space" is the lobby of my restaurant.  The most important part of a restaurant, and the part that requires the most space, is the lobby.  I figured it would be an appropriate picture.

"Unity" was not just a conceptual concept.  To literally represent it, I took a photo of a complete sub - all the ingredients unified into a coherent whole.

"Pattern" was constructed using sandwich materials.  Many of my subs require patterning of some sort so I thought using the food to create a pattern would be clever.

"Proportion" was a little difficult, but I finally decided I was going to show proportion via a salad.  I over-portioned part of it to make the theme of the picture more obvious.

"Value" is shown by a bread gradient.  There are various shades of lightness & darkness that can be found in Subway bread, and I illustrated it by putting them side by side and allowing optical mixing to show a gradient.

"Texture" is a close-up photo - in this case of green peppers, but lettuce and tuna were thought about.  A close-up of this nature allows you to see the different textures present in the vegetable, and also makes the composition seem like texture in and of itself.

"Shapes" is the employee bulletin board, cobbled together entirely of squares.  While it is not very varied in shape, it is a good example of flat, 2-dimensional shape.

"Contrast" is supposed to be showing one full and one empty sauce bottle, with the contrast being between full and empty.  The more I think about it, the better I could have done with this one; it is probably the one photo I could retake, because I could add contrasting color as well and show what I wanted even more.

"Forms" is a set-up of the recyclable boxes right before they went to the dumpster.  Again, there isn't much variety in form where I work, but I thought that the set up showed 3-dimensional form very well.

"Balance" is another sort of a pun.  I set up the food scale - a balance of itself - on the central axis and symmetrically balanced the rest of the objects around it.

"Emphasis" was a picture of one of my chip racks.  In particular, it is supposed to show the big thing we get for promotional chips.  Promotion is a kind of emphasis of itself - another pun on my part - and the holder we get for those chips certainly helped to emphasize them in the photo.

"Movement" was originally going to be of a busy stream of customers, but my shop was rather quiet over the weekend (also why there were no people in my lobby picture).  So instead, to represent movement, I took a photo of my mop bucket being filled.  I could photograph both the water flowing out of the faucet, but also the movement of the water in the bucket.

"Line" my be my favorite, as it was one of the thoughts that set up my theme.  The photo is one of my "line" - what we call the area we work out of when making subs.  It really contains all the essential elements of "line" - it's called a line, it's set up in a way that a work will move down it in a straight line, it's made up almost entirely of lines... I took the photo at somewhat of an angle because diagonal lines are dynamic and make one think of movement.

"Color" was one of the easiest.  The picture is of my large chip rack, because when I think of color in a Subway, nothing pops like the myriad of colors present in a chip rack.