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I Speak Fluid Colors By Maria Grønlund

I Speak Fluid Colors By Maria Grønlund

Design Ideas
August 7, 2015
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The ‘I speak fluid colors’ project was a personal project I worked on during my holiday 2013. At the moment, it seemed like an extreme luxury to take two weeks out of the calender to work on a project that wasn’t commissioned. I submitted the project to the site Behance and in 24 hours it got approximately a thousand likes. During the next week, it was featured on various blogs around the world. It was amazing! In 2014, Adobe bought a license to use ‘I speak fluid colors’ for their Adobe Max conference. It must be the most exciting order I’ve ever had!
-Maria Grønlund


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I studied the possibilities of the Blend Tool in Illustrator. For some time, I’d had some ideas in my head that I wanted to try out. So I tried a huge amount of combinations with the Blend Tool until a point where I felt like I’d hit a wall and I couldn’t make further progress. At this point, I almost gave up since my tiny computer was tired and I felt like I ran out of ideas. Then I had the thought ‘What about pasting it into Photoshop..?’ That was a breakthrough. The tweak it has been added in Photoshop really does the trick.
-Maria Grønlund

Maria Grønlund

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The inspiration I have for the digital art I make is often layered and many different urges influence the projects: I’d noticed that many people was particularly fond of the more colorful work I’d made which inspired the color range for ‘I speak fluid color’. It also inspired the naming. Form, shape and the dynamics of nature fascinate me. You can say I’ve been philosophizing over the shapes of fire, clouds, water through the studies of the shapes you’ll find in ‘I speak fluid colors’.
-Maria Grønlund

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My style is colorful, imaginative, happy and positive. It has a very light and ethereal feel despite the vivid colors. I use a great deal of effort to make my work meaningful and relevant on a symbolic level also. The design is so much more than just pretty visuals. I find inspiration in many places. At the moment, it’s not so much who inspires me, but rather what inspires me.

I’ve been studying color physics this summer. Newton, Herschel and Fraunhofer in particular. The Fraunhofer lines that can be read in the light coming from stellar objects fascinate me. Light contains information which can be read in the colors the light contains. Information that goes way back to the beginning of the universe. How fascinating is that?!

I’ve also been studying art history and how we experience art when we look at it. Again—art is closely related to graphic design and there’s much valuable information we can use from art and apply to graphic design.
-Maria Grønlund

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Besides my favorite advice to learn something every day, an advice I’ve noticed works really well for many creative fields is to nurture your unique qualities. It takes some time to get to know yourself as an artist and creative person but paying attention to what you have that nobody else can contribute with is a goldmine. Maybe you have a great sense of colors, you make nice hand-drawings, or you have a unique humor that can be transferred to your graphic design. Use your history, your personality, your background, interests, hobbies to make your work authentic and relevant.
-Maria Grønlund

Maria Grønlund

About Maria Grønlund

Maria Grønlund is —mainly self-taught—graphic designer from Denmark. She started as an apprentice at a commercial agency in 2007 and got her first job as a graphic designer in 2009. The year after she started to work as an independent graphic designer. At the age of 19 (1991) she attended the Music Academy as an organist. A few years later she was accepted at the Music Academy again—now as a classical singer. As a teenager, she found it difficult to choose between art and music. She's very happy for the career change she made in her mid-thirties since graphic design is closely related to art. See more of her art Behance.

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