Rheged - 15th December 2010

On December the 15th me and a few friends from university headed off to rheged for a lovely leasurely stroll around a lake and a load of mountains. Unfortunately my photography skills werent particularly good that day, but alas, there are a couple of decent ones, and it was a good laugh anyway.

 Death By The Lake's Edge

 Framing The Mighty

 Overhang

The White Mountain On Which You Will Die

Winter: The Season Of Beautiful Transformation

If you've had your eyes open in England over the past week or so, you will notice it has gotten really cold and started snowing here and there. Well some nice heavy snow finally hit my town, and i decided to take a nice, long walk in the middle of it all. Of course, I took my camera with me and got some rather beautiful snaps. I love snow myself, its such a simple thing, frozen water, yet it can transform even the most mediocre of things into great beauty.

 Grace

 Just Chillin'

 Left Behind

Lone, Lost In The Mist

 Robin

 Sharp Ice

 Stand Alone

 Welcome Home

Wintry Conditions

Gateway To Nowhere

 Lost

 Mystery

 November's Demise

Typography Poster Design

For this project we had to make a poster based on type, with the main header words being “Design, Culture, Now.” I decided to use the meaning or each of these words in order to create a solution. I asked the basic question of “What is culture?” and came up with many things, including symbols, fashion, architecture, art, language and companies and I decided to create typography out of these elements. Art as a part of culture, language as a part of culture, etc.

The “now” I decided to make really large and bold at the bottom of the page, as a call to action and an anchor to the design.

The “design” i decided to use a simple, well designed typeface of Helvetica. In the white one i gave it a drop shadow to make it stand out from the page and look nicer.

For the rest of the type I aligned it based around the optical centre of the upper 2/3rds of the page, aligning it to the centre and aligning the columns evenly in height to look well together.

I decided to put all the headers in the bottom area of the page to give a lot of white space and also so that the whole header title stayed together and so i could anchor the design as a whole with the word now.

I created 2 final designs for this project, both essentially the same design, but with inverted colour. I personally prefer the black one as i think if you saw that one on a wall it would stick out to you more than the white one with its bigger prescence.

Inspiring

I got shown this old advert by my art history lecturer, it really is inspiring and makes you think differently about things...

Old College Projects, Dug Up...

 I managed to dig up some of my old college projects today. I thought i'd post up some of the ones i still liked on here...

Advertising

These were a set of ads for Butterkist Mcrowaveable Popcorn. I played on the popcorn at the movie idea, and created body copy and sub-headers as if they were reviews of a film. I placed them in situ in relevant places: a billboard near the cinema, a bus shelter in the town center and the back of a bus. As well at that i placed it into Empire magazine, a magazine for film reviews. I really liked this project and i think my ad's were very successful for it.

T-Shirt Design

We were given the brief to choose a current issue we were concerned about, and to create a set of t-shirts to highlight and illustrate that issue, and i chose the rising gas and electricity prices. I went out and dug up some rather shocking research statistics, and thought i would show those on a t-shirt. I also decided on using a more typographic solution to it. The shirts and illustrations themselves are not finished to their best, but i think the ideas are very good in them.

Packaging Design

If I remember rightly, the brief for this task was to create a name, branding and packaging design for a deli. For mine i chose to play on the natural, healthy idea that deli dining can have and i named my deli "Verdure" The definition of verdure is:
ver·dure  (vûrjr)n.

1. 

a. The lush greenness of flourishing vegetation.

b. Vigorous greenery.

2. A fresh or flourishing condition(taken from www.thefreedictionary.com)
So i used that to play on the fresh, green, natural idea, and took that idea and gave the identity a fresh, green, smooth natural looking colour and the typeface a nice smooth rounded feel.
For my packaging design i created an oil bottle label, a herb jar label, a soup cup label, a coffee cup label and a baguette sandwich package (originally designed and made by me.)
I decided to use the fact the ingredients were natural and fresh as the USP for this packaging and thusly, created packaging very simply from the close up ingredients of the product, looking as fresh as it can be, and applying the logo to them.
I think it was quite a successful project and looking at it now i still think it looks very nice.

Poster Design

The final piece I'm going to post up was for a brief to create a set of 5 posters for the Manchester Reporatory Theatre Group On Tour performing monologues from Talking Heads by Alan Bennett at the Lowry. I decided to use a rather collaged and fun look to create this, but to use actual photo's of the more important elements, such as the shoes and the cream cracker, to emphasise them. I think despite not being very cleanly finished these are quite nice and pretty successful and i enjoyed making them.

So yeah, old college projects, dug up.

The Art Of Looking Sideways - Alan Fletcher

3 words: buy this book. Seriously. Do it. Now.

That is all.

Layout Design Project

I was given a project at university to make a page layout for a given target audience. I got to choose from 3:

- 16-24 year old females
- 30-50yr professional city workers
- 60yr+ unisex retired or gap years

I chose 30-50yr professional city workers.

For this project I created both the single page document and a DPS as I thought it would look better on a DPS and I could also fit all of the article on it. I replicated the basic templates for the magazine, such as colour schemes, header and subheader styles and the ID tag, and sourced the body copy from a previous magazine article from a few months ago from the website, found here: http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/Drives/Search-Results/First-drives/VW-Polo-GTI-2010-CAR-review/

For the main body copy type I selected a typeface called Constantia, a serif typeface. I chose this for my target audience (30-50yr old professional city workers) as something that would appeal to their eyes from a few periodicals i’ve seen is a nice, simple yet official looking typeface and i think this typeface pulls it off nicely.

For the header I chose Helvetica, as it is a nice, very simplified, attention grabbing type, that isn’t too in your face, which is also something i noticed about headers from periodicals of this nature. I also used the same typeface for the image caption as it then stands itself away from the body copy in the layout by differing from it.

For the subheader I used an italic version of Constantia, as not only is that a theme that they stick to in this magazine, but it also makes it stand out nicely between the header and the smaller copy underneath (the car’s specifications) which are both in helvetica.

The Folio’s at the top of each page were made to replicate the ones in the actual magazine, which are bold and easy to see, so the magazine is simple to navigate if you are looking for a specific article from the contents.

The column alignment is justified left, which I think makes the layout look really clean, as you can clearly see the identical gutters and spacing between each column.

The pull quote in this article also uses Constantia as a pull quote is essentially a blown up extract from the body copy.

At the end of the article (on both layouts) I created an anchor for each purpose. In the single page document, the article doesnt end, so i created a small arrow anchor to lead onto the next page. However with the DPS, I could fit the whole body of text on nicely, so i created an anchor in the shape of a car wheel, to show where the text finishes, and to fit in keeping with the magazines content.

All images were sourced from the same page as the sourced article, except for one, which was taken from here: http://www.2fastlane.com/showImg.php?id=1719

I enjoyed doing this project because, honestly, i enjoy doing page layout design.

First Blog

Well, not only is this my first use of a blog site but it's my first blog on here. I am using this as a basic online presence for my work in design. I am also going to set up another one for my various musical exploits as well. My first blog is going to start off with this week's major inspiration for me, and it comes in form of a song.
Devin Townsend - Terminal

I think this song is so amazing, and incredibly beautiful. I've had a bad couple of weeks recently with a few things that have happened, and listening to this man has really cheered me up. This song in particular has really touched me. I strongly recommend anybody who reads this listens to that song.

The other day I went to a park for the first time in quite a while and took a Nikon D60 DSLR camera. I took some photographs that i personally think are rather nice, and quite good considering i've only just began using an SLR camera and .RAW editing.

 Autumn

 Forgotten

 Rememberance

Solitary

Vibrance

Well, that is all for this blog until i can be bothered to do another one. Ciao for now.