Illustrator Sketch #5: Convergence

DK’s designing a program for Gnomedex, a super cool Seattle blogger’s conference coming up August 9-11. Anyone interested in what’s news in new media should go. John Edwards keynoted last year.

Through our usual interviews we’ve come to agree with Gnomedex organizers Ponzi and Chris Pirillo on 2007’s theme: Convergence.

In the absence of a more specific context, convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value, as time goes on; or to a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state.–Wikipedia

‘Kay, so how do you illustrate that? Some ideas:

Dots. Like this illustration? Movement and time and stuff. Do you think it looks too much like red blood cells? Or too biotechy. Or just overdone?

Water. Particles of water come together, then diffuse, right? But I don’t want this to look like UK cell phone company O2.

Sexual union. This one’s all about the coming together of beings. Right?

Graph theory. Bear with me. Think about those nodes and lines connecting them all over the place in the universe. I’m not just talking about on graph paper, where you have to figure out how to best plot transportation routes for efficiency or something abstract like that. No. I’m just saying that in general, there are bazillions of opportunities to link points through conduits and circuitry, which even out to the great equilibrium. Beauty. Order. The Universe. Truth. What do you guys think? Too heady? –DK

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5 Responses to “Illustrator Sketch #5: Convergence”

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1 Chris Pirillo Jun 16th, 2007 at 4:08 pm

Oooooooh, I kinda like the red bubble transparency overlay thing.
2 dipika Jun 19th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

Thanks for the comment, Chris!

I just learned that the Impressionists got going on their stuff because they wanted to tackle how to express in visual terms new ideas (optics) with tools at hand (oil on canvas).

I kinda like that new ideas in surprising ways idea.
3 Cheraelynn Jun 21st, 2007 at 11:03 pm

I like the bubbles/dots…but it’s hard to see convergence inside a rectangle. Remember the quarter donation funnels…where you drop a quarter in and it circles round and round in a decreasing radius until it drops in the hole? Good visual of convergence.

On the opposite end there’s fractals…which have always fascinated me. But I don’t know how you could turn them around to show convergence instead of chaos.
4 dipika Jun 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 pm

Thanks for the comments, Cheraelynn! Awesome.

In the places where Mandelbrot and Julia sets go off and do their thing–you know, those spaces so tiny we can’t make them out with our eye–they’re converging, right? Into infinity, inwards.

So maybe the chaos picture IS convergence.

Just for kicks I Wikipediad duality–

Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself. –Wikipedia

I skipped the part about algebraic duals, but you get the point. It’s fixed, I think.

In which case, A=A.
5 Sean Macfarlane illustration Jan 8th, 2009 at 2:47 am

I like it, simple is usually best, and the red brings vibrancy…