Designer Spotlight: An Update on Joaquin Baldwin - Shapeways Blog

Designer Spotlight: An Update on Joaquin Baldwin

October 26, 2015

This week, we caught up with long-time Shapeways community member, Joaquin Baldwin. We’ve featured Joaquin before, but wanted to highlight the amazing work he did with our newest Porcelain material. With two amazing collections specifically designed for Porcelain, Joaquin really embraces the beauty of the material by designing for glazes, and we wanted to hear about his inspiration and process.

What was it like designing for porcelain, did you need to approach your designs differently?

I approached the designs based on function and specific glazing color options. The colors are vibrant and very specific, so I wanted to make objects that played with all of those unique combinations. For function, they are all planters, but with very small spaces so they can only carry tiny plants. The size limitations were tough to deal with, and so was the minimum thickness for walls, but luckily the material cost is calculated by surface and not volume, so making things thick and heavy is not a problem, but making them too detailed can be troublesome.

What inspired you to make 2 related series of products this time rather than the more eclectic array of designs you’ve done previously?

It’s a brand new approach I’m taking for these and a couple of other series I’m working on. I’m planning on selling items in gallery shows and local stores and wanted them to be presentable as sets, with an artist statement and more solid conceptual roots. I have a lot of inexpensive designs in my shop already, but I was missing more higher-end home decor items, and since I’ve been having fun decorating my home recently, I thought this was something worth investing in.

I created two series, the Samsara Series (based on organic shapes that act as fossilized vessels for new life), and the Geometric Series (based on a synthesis of polygonal shapes that naturally occur in minerals as well as in plants), thinking that having a contrast between organic and polygonal shapes would be the best way to explore the limits of the porcelain material.

The photographs you take are consistently top notch, what’s your process for taking them?

I have a very cheap lightbox with very cheap lights. Sometimes I let sunlight from a window hit the lightbox instead of turning on my crappy lights, or use a super strong flashlight and move it around until it looks right. Terrible process, really, but I do have a good macro lens (Canon 100mm), a good tripod, and lots of experience with Photoshop to clean up the pics. I try to overexpose the background to have a pure white with just a hint of a shadow or reflection below, and have some fill light from both left and right, and try not to use too much frontal lighting. Sometimes my exposures are up to 4 seconds long since I use a macro lens up close or natural light indoors, so the tripod is a must. Balancing the lights and shadows in Photoshop is really important, and also trying to not abuse contrast and saturation, so that the materials look like the real thing and not exaggerated.

I always take a main pic in pure white, and then take some more natural ones, which vary depending on the model and concept. The white keeps the storefront consistent, that’s always my main goal, to look professional. I’ve seen some do it with black, that looks sleek as hell too, but I would need better lighting equipment to deal with black backgrounds.

I had some amazing floral design work done by Birch & Bone which really helps bring the photos to life, it makes them stand out with great color palettes, and it also showcases the potential of each planter.

WHAT WE LOVE ABOUT THIS SHOP:

Thank you so much, Joaquin, for taking the time to update us on your designing adventures. Congratulations on such a beautiful Porcelain launch collection! We can’t wait to see what else you create to really show off this amazing material. Make sure to check out Joaquin’s shop (not just Porcelain!), Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and his website!