I love the ways that ideas take shape. A month ago, I never would have thought about making a design like this. There was absolutely nothing in my surrounding or internal environment that would have led me to work with images like a magnifying glass, a mustache, and a peculiar hat. But then one day my friend sends me a message saying that he wants to use a Sir Conan Arthur Doyle quote in our line of T-shirts and suddenly the process of creation has begun.
For me, occasionally an idea will come to mind instantly, a complete illustration or a graphic that is just right for the words that I am working with. But in this instance, I couldn’t think of anything, so rather than contemplate the quote in its entirety, I decided to focus on some key words.
I began with deception, a powerful and interesting word, but I struggled to identify an image that I thought would quickly and easily communicate this concept to a viewer, so I moved on to facts, specifically the idea of obvious facts.
Most likely because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the author of Sherlock Holmes, I found myself thinking of detectives. And once I started thinking about communicating the idea of a detective with an image, I thought of using a magnifying glass, which is something that makes images appear larger, and as a result, more obvious. This seemed like a perfect fit to me.
Once I settled on the idea of using a magnifying glass, it wasn’t long before I decided that I wanted to make more references to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, hence the long mustache that Doyle sported throughout most of his life, and the peculiar hat that Sherlock Holmes is often depicted as wearing.
As designers and artists, sometimes we work with styles and images that communicate moods and concepts on their own, but other times we use styles and images as a way of pointing to, or paying tribute to, other things that do the work for us.
In this case, I’ve chosen these three images to connect the viewer to the idea of detectives and the search for evidence, Sherlock Holmes and his infallible logic, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, the man at the heart of it all.
