Welcome to guidebook design 9 of 10 – Montreal!

When I think of Montreal I think of Canada and Canadian moose’s, Mounty’s and all things stereotypical!

Brushing my naive knowledge of Canada to one side I decided to do the usual search on Pinterest to get ideas and inspiration for this one!

What appeared and grabbed my attention more than most was the Habitat 67 development. This housing complex is abstract in itself! It met the brief and it seemed like the perfect choice to feature on my cover!

In March 2012, Habitat 67 won an online Lego Architecture poll and is a candidate to be added to the list of famous buildings that inspire a special replica Lego set. Lego bricks were actually used in the initial planning. Initial models of the project were built using Lego bricks and subsequent iterations were also built with Lego bricks.

I didn’t actually do a lot of sketching for this one because I knew I just wanted it to be comprised of blocks of colour to represent Habitat 67. I knew that I could develop it as I went along in Illustrator.

I started from the bottom of the design and added a pop of green for the accent colour which represents the tree at the bottom of the complex. I then wanted to work my way from the bottom left to the top right so that the eye flows naturally ad comfortably up and across the design. I wanted negative space so kept the bottom right free for this. I created several blocks of squares and rectangles with overlapping colours to best represent Habitat 67. I think this is the most abstract design in the 10 that I have done, it works put quite nicely because this is the city in my eyes with the most abstract landscape. I used different weights in the blocks and line to create a contrast. There is repetition in my design, I tried to replicate the appearance of each apartment of Habitat 67 as they appear in reality.

This is the final mock up!