Atanas Laskov

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Surrealist City

November 9, 2023 11:12 GMT

Here’s my concept of a surrealist modern city. The “surrealism” is in the way that buildings stack on top of each other, the way architecture plunges into the ocean area. It is also in the tipsy and melted shape of things.

SimCity models an industrial economy so it organises the buildings into Transport, Housing, Education, Industry, Power, Water, Commercial, Entertainment and Safety. That’s good for a realistic city. Surrealism models the subconsciousness, so I plan to organize the buildings for my city into Fancies, Fears, and Desires. So for example a hospital will be in Fears and a nightclub in Desires.

Recently I watched Star Trek: Picard and really like the surrealistic dreams in it. Not cities in particular, but the psychological Freudian idea of fixations in our psycho-somatic development. In other words, everyone is stuck somewhere in their past, and we’re all stuck in different ways. Picard was fixated on something particularly traumatic in his childhood. One of the other characters, I think it was a Vulcan, told him ‘You humans are like pinned butterflies, you can flap your wings but can never move on’. I really love that.

I want to amp up the surrealism even more. The task is unleashing my subconsciousness, this art movement is all about freedom in my opinion; It’s helping you release whatever it is that you have inside you.

Surrealist City Sketch

City Editor Wireframes

October 11, 2023 15:32 BST

For my honours project at Abertay University, I will design a web-app for making city maps. The art part of this project will be the UI and UX, the creation of icons for various building types. I plan to use React or Angular for prototyping the editor. Alternatively, I might just prototype it in Figma, instead of fully implementing it in a web framework.

Today I designed some wireframes. They show different possible layouts for the building palette and toolbars. I think they all have very traditional “editor” look. Next, I will experiment with more funky layouts, to try to escape that look. I’m taking inspirations from games in the Sim City franchise, as well as various tile-based map editors. The app is intended to be a casual toy which allows you to design a city.

City Editor UI WireframesMore Editor UI Wireframes

Summer Vibes

September 5, 2023 12:31 BST

Here are some flowers photographs that I did with my Fujifilm X-E3. I was aiming for the bokeh effect and shallow focus, which is somewhat hard to achieve with my lens, but I think the results are nice.

Single pink flowerWhite camomile photo

© 2023 Atanas Laskov

Atanas Laskov