What did one ocean say to the other?

Nothing, it just waved.

Done.

I knew it was a good idea to start on the postcards early. Having the stress of 100 collages to do on my mind with all the work that seemed to pile on top of me from this GDF project would not have been good (this was also the reason for a missing blog post...oops!) Well, anyway finally the PDF is finished. After meticulously editing and editing, I've reached an outcome that I'm satisfied with, it's not perfect but I can always change it after the assessment. Here's the first page of the PDF and the final idea I produced from the project.

PDF front page work in progress

Final outcome - 'Be Greener' Tote Bag

Although the design of the Tote Bag is only something I quickly mocked up, I really like the concept behind it. My target audience was 15 to 20 year olds, so a tote bag is appropriate due to the fact that many people this age love shopping. The message I am trying to promote is 'Be Greener' so a tote bag does this as it is meant to replace plastic bags, as it is more hard-wearing you can reuse the bag again and again. What makes the idea a little different is that you collect vouchers from selected shops every time you use your tote bag when shopping. These tokens allow you to upgrade your tote bag from the first one you purchase (first in image) to the last, full colour bag - I think this could become a craze or a collectible item, which could also easily have a range of products. The clients brand would be discreetly placed somewhere on the tote bag, so people can see that the brand, Clearasil in this case, are doing something good for the environment.

Now that this is over, I'm feeling a little more relaxed, and as I have been to see a few galleries since my last post I shall update the details soon. :)

Vernacular Typography

Paul set us the task a little while back to take some snaps of interesting type you see when wondering around London. After seeing quite a variety of printed, handwritten type and signage, I finally remembered to take my camera out with me and so I shall upload some of my findings. I'm going to carry on looking though, so it's a post in progress...

InDesign

Since working in InDesign isn't yet totally familiar, I thought I would have another go at it.
Yes, I'm procrastinating.

 

Good Design

Studio On Fire

One of the first companies I came across whilst looking for examples of design I really liked was Studio On Fire. As a company who dabble in both design services and letterpress printing, they compare themselves to 'having cream and sugar in your coffee. We bring a keen synergy of design sensitivity and production knowledge to our projects. We are backed by full, in-house modern letterpress printing capabilities.' Once I actually looked at their portfolio, I was spoiled for choice as to what example I should choose to put on here, they pretty much all inspired me. In the end I chose this simple CD cover design for Eric Brandt.

Erik Brandt "Sometimes" CD- Studio On Fire

The design uses illustration, watercolour and letterpress to create a simple yet for me, timeless piece of packaging. The title of the album 'Sometimes' blows in the wind around a tree that is a suitable choice of illustration, that makes you think and daydream a little. I also really like the use of colour of the splash of blue against the otherwise monochrome image, as everything works with each other and so the piece feels well balanced. Another thing I enjoy about this design is the texture, you can see it even on a computer screen, and it really makes you want to reach out and feel the product.

MyORB

MyORB or MyORangeBox are an art and design based company, located in New York City who have the aim of being curious, intriguing and playful in their work. I stumbled across their page by accident really, just by clicking away at random links on a design website, however I'm glad I did. The design I chose to share on here is a page taken from a beautiful book 'Tramnesia - Hotels', which is a collection of photographs showcasing the similarities and differences of a home away from home.

'Tramnesia-Hotels - MyORB'

 What I find so striking about this image is the simplicity of the content and the layout. I really liked the mirrored spherical photographic images, as this makes the pair work together, as a set. The white space around the centrally placed images makes the photographs stand out well, and gives it a good quality feel to the design. The colours used are quite subdued and don't jump out too much and I think this also adds to the quality of the image, and is used quite appropriately with the sleepy feel to the page.

 Sawdust

Sawdust is a London based company run by award-winning Rob Gonzalez and Jonathan Quainton who love to work 'with type and image across all platforms, and enjoy collaborating with other image-makers and people working in specialist areas.' One of the pieces of work I really enjoyed off their portfolio was their collaboration with Sam Green, promoting his illustration studio.

Sam Green- Limited edition A3 mail out- Sawdust

One of the main reasons I particularly admired this piece of work for was the layout of the image and the relationship between the image and the text. The basic colour scheme is matched well by the minimal text on the front cover, and I like that Sam Green's name hasn't been over-complicated to more than his initials. Even though this work would be folded in to a booklet, I think it works perfectly as a spread, like is shown above.

Inka Järvinen

I have chosen to share a piece of design by Inka Järvinen, who is actually part of the Finnish Graphic Design company 'Weklig.' However, this piece was designed solely by Inka, it is an EP cover for the artist Viisi.

Vieraalla Maalla-Viisi EP-Inka Järvinen

 The style of the CD cover is what drew my attention to this particular design. I think the earthy colours create an organic feel. I feel like the method Inka Järvinen has used also adds to this organic feel, by incorporating an antique look in to often modern collage work. The text is well-styled and just big enough for the information to be read easily, but does not detract from the artwork, which is of key importance in the promotion of a CD.

Hort

Hort is a creative design company from Berlin, in Germany. From looking at their website, you can sense their own fun, personal style, which seems very 'trendy', although navigating round their site was trickier than most. Hort often design more than one project for each client, as they come back to the design team for more merchandising. One of Hort's clients that I liked the design work for is 'Booka Shade', international stars of house and techno. Below is their record sleeve to their LP 'Movements.'

Movements-Booka Shade-Hort

The simplicity of this LP cover really works well as a design, as again, often music sleeves shouldn't distract from the information or the style of the music. The image really reflects the title of the LP too, 'Movement', as the tangled wires and the moving legs look like they are in a running action. I like the collage and cut-and-paste effect that the design uses too, it reminds me of the workshop we had with Darren (and the 100 postcards we had to complete.) Finally, I think the layout is very well thought out, and the text balances out the image perfectly.

Ideas & Industry

Tuesday was split in to two parts, where we took part in two entirely different activities. The morning session was our first group tutorial with Darren. To be honest, it was not at all what I expected, and speaking to other students, I realise a lot of people feel the same. The main point in the session was idea generation, using the technique we learnt in the idea workshop. This was helpful, especially talking to the other students in my group and gaining feedback from our ideas, however I had already put a lot of work in to my research and I though it would be more focused on showing what we had actually come up with.

In the afternoon, we had PPD with Catherine, where we learnt a bit about the industry and how to go about applying for internships and work placements. Our first task was to name as many design agencies as we could, and it was astonishing how few the whole class as a collective came up with. Obviously every group wrote down Pentagram. So, to widen our knowledge of perhaps less well know agencies, we were given the website www.designweek.co.uk , and the task to find three pieces of design we liked from three design agencies we had not heard of before.

Our group found these three images from 'Pearlfisher Designs', 'The Partners' and 'Purpose.'

Pearlfisher designed this for Jamie Olivers range of products. The unusual contrast of colours stood out to me, as well as the simplicity of the design and the simple but effective layout of the 'Jme' logo in the middle. Also, the layout of the three deisgns is clever, as it is how you would see cutlery set out on a table.

 

The Partners designed this piece for a hotel, and what is really effective is the image and colour use, as white gloves symbolise cleanliness, which is what you look for in a hotel. The simplicity and white-on-white use is also very eye-catching.

This magazine layout by 'Purpose' design caught my eye, because of the flowing layout, spreading the image over a number of pages. The quality and colour of the image next to the small block of text also made the magazine layout successful in my eyes.

After evaluating and talking about everyone else's work we managed to build up quite a collection of new design agencies including; Hulger, ImageNow, Font Fabric, N1, Lava, Paradise, Poke, OnedotZero, Nexush, Paula Troxler, G2Works, Rudd Studios, Proud Creative and 999. This will be helpful for our new task, as Catherine gave us the task to find 5 more images from design agencies we hadn't heard of to look at in our spare time. I shall blog my findings soon!

F U T U R E S H O R T S

Last night, we went to the screening of Future Shorts One, which is the next generation film festival, at Village Underground in Shoreditch. One of the interesting things about it was that it connected 12 countries and 50 cities in one night, and this also meant the variety of short films shown was excellent. The theme of the night was made to feel like we were on an aeroplane, and the attention to detail was fantastic. The staff team were all dressed up as air stewards (with a bit of a dodgy American accent) and pilots, paper planes were also flying everywhere.

 The films shown actually really inspired me, I thought they were well thought out and really captured the viewers interest, often resulting in a large amount of clapping and whooping at the end of the clips. The line up from the night can be seen on the website, but there were three videos that I really liked and wanted to share on here. The first was Temper Trap's new music video for their single 'Love Lost', directed by Dougal Wilson/2010/UK. The video features some boys cross-country running, and for such a simple idea, it's very effective. Here's the video..

The next video I also found very captivating, also it being hugely different to the 'Love Lost' Video made it stand out even more. It is an animated film using design and logos, typography and minimalism. What seems like quite a simple video is actually incredibly complicated, and I can only begin to imagine how long it took to animate the whole video. I really liked the music chosen to link the animation together also.

Although I really liked all the videos shown on the night, the final video I shall share is one called 'Words'  directed  by Everynone/2010/USA. This video really reminded me of the Narrative workshop we did with David, as the video links from frame to frame by the choice of sequences that we had when making our narrative image sequences. Enjoyyyy.

Take that

Postcards. 100 done and dusted origggggggght.

I LIKE

BLOGGING.

It provides the perfect oppurtunity to share crazy rediscovered music found on my ipod whilst playing cards with my flatmates. Good video too. 

Typography

What is typography? Well, out of the choices given to us, I personally liked the definition that typography is the management of letters. However, given other ways of describing the word also made me think more about what typography was. New ideas were further explored by questions given to us by Paul, which we had to try and answer in the first task of the morning. For example, we were asked: do we need spaces between words and do we need punctuation? After attempting the first task, we then had to analyse a variety of letterforms by choosing one to then scale, invert, section, layer, outline, deconstruct and then recompose.

'Recompose'

Later on, we then had to write our names by tracing on to the baseline as carefully as possible, this took me longer than most(!) As this was done on tracing paper, I decided to take a photo of my work with a pattern behind it, which I then retouched a little in Photoshop.

After lunch we were given a worksheet and the task to explore type by rendering or tracing the words. from the typographic specimen. Out of the list of words, I chose the word 'soft' to experiment with. I thought the outcomes were satisfactory and fulfilled the brief, however they weren't the most dynamic or exciting looking. I think this was to do with the choice of word, as the type had to match the meaning. If I were to do the task again, I would perhaps choose 'Hard' or 'Down' to explore instead.The end of the day was a chance to have a look at everyones work, which I always really enjoy doing, and sum up what we had seen and learnt with Paul. I think there was a lot to be taken out of this workshop, and I will definitely use some of the techniques used in other work.
 

'Composition'

'Repetition'

 

Layout//Out&About

L A Y O U T

In the morning, we had a Layout workshop led by Jo Spencer who is actually a working Graphic Designer who teaches on the side. Jo basically gave us all a tutorial in the program 'InDesign', which was really useful as although I have worked in InDesign a little before, I never had tutoring in it and am definitely still a novice! As well as learning the basics, we were guided through how to make a page layout and how to convert it in to a PDF file, something that we will have to master to be able to progress in the course. Below is my experimentation in InDesign, oh and the text doesn't mean anything so no need to try and make sense of it!

O U T  &  A B O U T

The afternoon session was led by Paul, who took us to the 'Museum of Everything', located on the
corner of Regents Park Road and Sharpleshall Street. As soon as we got there, we were a little disappointed to find out there was no photography allowed whatsoever. In fact, there were warnings of £1000 fines and DEATH inside the museum, so I safely obeyed the rules.

I did however take a few photos on the way to and outside the museum...

'Make tea, not war', Souvenir from the M.O.E, Outside the M.O.E

Once inside the Museum, we wandered around Peter Blake's exhibition, which featured collections he had started from the age of 14, something I think I should perhaps get started on, if I ever want to present a collection as impressive as his. There were a variety of things on show such as circus memorabilia, dolls, mirrors, rocking horses, taxidermy (the list goes on..), which was a really unusual collection and not something you ordinarily come across. I copied down a quote from Peter Blake that I thought was quite representative of the exhibition and summed it up well, he said, 'Exhibition 3 is as much about the emotions and memories hidden in each object, as it is about the objects themselves.'

I M A G E

I'm working a little backwards here...

We actually took part in the image workshop with Darren last week, however due to the untidy state of my room, the misplacement of the camera hindered the blog updating. Anyway, camera found I am now able to upload some of the things we were taught and what I took away from the workshop. As well as learning to draw (again!) and mapping, collage was the main focus of the day, and the most enjoyable for me as I have worked quite a bit with collage before out of choice. 

Darren also casually mentioned that we would need to complete a further 100 postcard sized colleges in our spare time, how kind of him. Below are a few examples of my work in progress.

Narrative workshop

To start off the day in David's workshop, we first completed a task to do with cropping images. The aim was to choose 9 images and then, working in groups, crop them to produce different effects, for example cropping to enhance the emotional impact, cropping to define etc.

We then had to work individually to produce two narrative sequences consisting of three images found in the newspaper we had to bring along with us. I found this quite hard, as my chosen newspaper 'The Times' didn't have a lot of choice concerning suitable images. However, I think that my narrative sequence did fulfill the brief and looks quite successful.

The final task of the day, was in my opinion the best part of the workshop. We had to cut out all the images, headings and sub-headings left in our newspapers and then apply the headings randomly to selected pictures, giving different meanings to the images. After everyone stuck them up on the wall, it was fun to see what everyone had come up with, and evident that humour was the most popular thing considered whilst making the collages.

These were two of my preferred outcomes from the final task of the workshop.

I Wonder

Last night, I was fortunate enough to be able to go and see a talk by Marian Bantjes at St Bride Library, a designer who I have respected since discovering whilst researching my first ever design project. Although primarily talking about the launch of her new book, 'I wonder', Marian also discussed her life as a designer and some of her views on the industry.

 

 

 

Something Marian Bantjes said that interested me was about her approach to her design methods. Bantjes mentioned that she enjoyed work with organic, flowing forms, however she enjoyed visual alignment and balanced work, as 'structure and order are calming'. Another intriguing comment made was that graphics is now too used to simplicity, therefore complicity is a wonder.

Something to bare in mind, perhaps?

Oh yes, before I forget, who was I to meet at this talk but the editor of Eye Magazine, John L. Walters. Cue stumbling over words. Oh dear.

Hello!

As a dedicated blog reader, I have always wanted to set up my own, however it seems something important always managed to get in the way, (magazine reading, TV, eating..). Now, however, it seems like I have no excuse but to write down all the stuff in my head on to this blog and I personally see this as a good thing as everyones head need de-cluttering once in a while. In this blog I hope to document my journey through the course, but also to find out who I am as a designer through other artists work and various exhibitions. Ahh here it goes...