Thread by @Lowtwait

How to give story to a location through details.

Let's look closer at this background from #BigCityGreens.

A thread:

As a base, let's look at the storyboard. What are the broad story strokes?

Trailer park.
Rural.
Tight quarters.
Weathered and worn.
Littered.
Ironic name.

I built the location with those things in mind, never veering from them and only enhancing them.

This is the rough I drew over the storyboard.

The final cleaned up design pushes the details of those story points even further - a cramped trailer park built with high hopes of which time and circumstances have not been kind.

Design a culture.

I imagined that residents like to sit out front their trailers enjoying barbecue and bonfires on warm summer evenings, chatting with each other as a community.

The implication gives the ratty trailer park a sense of charm, that people still like it there.

Also notice the BBQ tool stuck in the ground. Just a bit of humor.

The dead plants in the pink trailer's planter are another example of lofty ideals unable to grow to fruition.

- A worn railing of mismatched parts.
- A bucket sitting within easy reach from the door.
- A light fixture with an exposed bulb.
- Scrap wood kept for some reason.

What does this say about who lives here, the way they live their life, keep their home?

Those questions don't have to be answered in the design or anywhere else.

But part of giving story to a design is in the asking of questions.

Doesn't matter why the bucket is there, just that it's there asking why.

Story.

Typography matters.

A happy soft typeface of "Sunny Days" contrasts the standard looking seriousness of "Estates" in all-caps, neither of which reflect the reality of the trailer park.

The warm yellow is worn away to reveal the cold blue beneath.

Behind the sign is a propane tank.
Propane tanks need to be refilled periodically.
The cap on the tank has to be removed for this.
Someone has to walk past this sun sticking out.
After years of this, the outermost sun ray is broken and worn.

Story.

I imagined someone no longer wanted this headboard and put it out front for someone else's use. But one too many bends kept it abandoned. Perhaps bored local teens beat it even further. So there it sits rusting away because everyone got used to it being there.

Story.

Color:

The pastels and warm hues give the place an overall happy mood. It's charming.

But the details in the color - the dirt, the rust, the sun-bleached fading, the evidence of human wear - all tell the same story as the design details.

Painted by @spookybri.

Also, it's fun to draw creepy faces on the sun.

Another thing that showed up in my research of trailer parks was the satellite dishes.

One company would supply satellite TV to each home so they'd all have matching dishes mounted outside facing the same direction.

This was on screen for just over 2 seconds.

All that thought and work for a couple seconds.

Thing is, your brain picks up on all the visual cues way quicker than that.

That’s why the effort is worth it.