The latest design contest at Spoonflower is all about geometrics, and creating the design using only two colors (RGB #a7bb7d and #724b64) plus white.  I like geometrics, so I thought this would be a fun design to work on, though I never would have picked these two colors on my own.

To get started thinking beyond the basic circles and squares, I looked up Geometric Shapes in Wikipedia, and discovered a bunch of fun shapes, like the Bankoff Circle, the Arbelos and the Asteroid…if they covered these in my High School Geometry class, I must have been asleep that day. 

I played around with these shapes in Illustrator and came up with this design:

I didn’t like this design (and who picked these colors?).  I decided to go back to simple shapes and work some white into the design.  Here’s another option based on circles:

I liked this one better, but it didn’t seem very original.  Playing with more circles, I came up with this design:

I modified it a bit, and then cropped it to make this repeating unit:

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And here is the design in repeat:

I modified it a bit to add some white to the design to create this repeat unit:

And here is the final version in repeat, Not Boxed In:

However, I like it a lot better in different colors…this one reminds me of stormy seas:

And here’s a bunch of roses:

You can see all the geometric designs, and vote for your favorites, here.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
–Claude Debussy

In terms of individuals who actually inspired me, very few of the academic people that I had access to had that power over me. Maybe it’s simply because I wasn’t that committed to geometry.
–Twyla Tharp