I have chose the Kitten-Flakes wrapping paper to help me discuss formstorming and modularity. When first glancing at this wrapping paper, I immediately noticed the constraints and modularity that were implied. Since Marian Bantjes was designing a wrapping paper, she had to incorporate a winter theme somehow. So, instead of designing a very generic wrapping paper with a blue and white snowflake pattern, she created the “snowflakes” from stock images of kittens.

If Marian Bantjes were to have just arranged the kittens in a circular pattern, it would have been hard to identify that the design was meant to be a holiday wrapping paper. However, by using the kaleidoscope effect to duplicate the kittens, she was able to create an accurate representation of a snowflake without actually using snow.

As you can see, the final design looks much more like a snowflake wrapping paper when examined closely (apologies for the poor quality photo). Due to the surplus of cat and kitten photos on the internet, Marian Bantjes most likely had many options to pick from when designing the tile. This would have led to many different variations and iterations of the pattern, giving her options an ideas to play around with and eventually landing on the final tile. Like she discusses in her TED talk, she applied her interests in visual structure and her ability to figure things out to combine and manipulate a variety of kitten images that allowed her to structure each “snowflake” into a holiday wrapping paper. Bantjes also had to factor in the use of color to properly structure this design. She chose cats of lighter colors with a few darker ones to create contrast across the tile. Additionally, using lighter colors was a constraint due to the nature of holiday wrapping paper, but using too many light colored kittens would have lowered the contrast and reduced the visual structure of the pattern