Steemstem - Design Battle - 1

I Wanted to Create A Design for SteemSTEM

Lately, I've been thinking to make a design for @steemstem, all the topic about it interest me a lot. Since my friends have told me to make a design something about science, @steemstem crossed my mind which includes Science, technology, math, and engineering.

This came at a very opportune time.

The other day I was talking to @sasha.shade about our daughter and the subject of design came up. He has been doing design professionally for years and I am still very new, at least compared to him. Essentially we got in a bit of an argument as is to be expected and to make a long story short, he challenged me to a graphic battle!

Of course I had to put my wacom tablet where my mouth is so I accepted. He said I could set the rules of the match so i put pen to tablet and got to thinking. How was I going to pop my graphic battle cherry i thought, this was an important decision.

These are the rules that I came up with for our battle:

10 volleys (5 each)
I start with the first image.
Poster size and resolution in case anybody from the steemit community likes the designs and would like to buy a print.
- 300 DPI
- CMYK
- 24" x 36" (Standard Movie Poster Size)
The entire battle would be themed around SteemSTEM
JPEG format sent to one another as standard but .TIF available upon request.

Once i laid out the rules for the battle and he agreed I decided to get to designing and this would be my "serve" and my very first design for @steemstem! I hope you guys like it. Description with some close-ups are below the main image.

The Design

The Concept

Right when I began I knew i wanted to make something that had a grunge-tech aesthetic. I watched the new Blade Runner the other night and the high-tech post-apocolyptic feel of that movie really appealed to me. So I started by creating a nice grungy concrete like background texture.

After that, I felt it was missing a bit of the 'tech' feel, so i created a dotted grid across the entire canvas with an electric glow.

It still wasn't quite right, So I created the shapes that occupy the bulk of the canvas and then I knew i was cooking with butter!

To bump up the tech appeal and REALY make this all about @steemstem i went to steemd and pulled the hash key of every comment, post, upvote, flag, etc. that @steemstem has made lately, i went back 4 or so pages which came out to around 750 transactions. I then put those hashes into the design on the left side. Here is a close up of actual size of the very top left of the image.

Steemit still resizes it down a bit so it's much smaller here than actual, but if you can view source and open the original image of that close-up you will see all the great nitty gritty details there. All those hashes are accurate based on activity from

@steemstem and in order.

After that I decided we had better go ahead and include the "creation block" for the @steemstem account so i created a bit of a sticker of sorts on the bottom right that has all of the details about the account's creation from @anonsteem. You can see a close up of that part here:

Just like the previous image, steemit resizes the image down quite a bit so it's not actually actual size but it's still a nice zoom-in that shows you more detail than otherwise. Actual size you can see all sorts of beautiful crisp detail and nothing is blurry at all.

Of course I had to kick up the science, technology, engineering, and math aspect of the design and so I tried to think what would best incorporate as much about what @steemstem is all about. Eureka! What better than the Physics Standard Model Equation!!! It was perfect for @steemstem! I dropped the equation in and was off to the races, this was really coming together.

To wrap it all up, Of course I had to put @steemstem front and center, so i designed a simple but elegant way of outlining it and their focus.

I hope you guys really like it and stay tuned to see his reply and my subsequent replies until this 10 image battle has concluded!