power to the people

Regular readers will remember me mentioning a design brief that my company Hyde Definition fulfilled last summer. It was to reduce the visual impact of a domestic wind turbine erected on private property in the UK, and the client wanted to be able to apply the design himself, in situ. Our website has recently been updated to include photographs of the turbine’s camouflage scheme, kindly supplied by our client.

Realising that it is practically impossibly to conceal an object as large and obvious as a wind turbine against the constantly changing skyscape behind it, we chose to  break up the shape and use different tones that will blend in some, but not all, conditions.

The bespoke design uses two shades of grey, plus white, applied over the black polycarbonate gearbox nacelle and triangular fin in a pixellated quadrilateral symmetry-axis disruption pattern. In plain speak, picture a flat image of the turbine head, with a line running along the centre of the nacelle, and a line running down the middle of the fin. Imagine that lines also extend inward from all the corners and join the central lines near their ends. These are the axes of internal symmetry, which is not a name for the next James Bond film, but is the central mass that needs to be broken up in order to deceive the eye, which we achieved by using square and rectangular serrated shapes in different sizes and orientations.