Studio brief 2 - Research

I have gathered some research into postcards where they came from and also the penny post as the postcards in my collection cost one penny to send. I have also researched into one of the artists Donald Mcgill who had made a few of the postcards in my collection. I have found this quite interesting as I found that a number of his postcards had been banned as they were thought to be obscene. 

I have struggled to find statistics related to postcards and have looked at some articles about letter writing and how it is becoming a dying art so have gathered a few statistics to do with this. 

When looking at these articles I found this video of people's opinions on letter writing filmed for Letter live which is an event that was held at the Southbank centre. I think I will use this video for 20 opinions as I have found them really intersting. 

 'Inspired by To the Letter by Simon Garfield and Letters of Note by Shaun Usher, LETTERS LIVE is a dynamic performance event that celebrates the enduring power of literary correspondence.'

 

Edible Type

For this brief we had to make something edible in the shape of a typeface. This could be a word, a letter or a glyph. 

When discussing the brief with our group we decided that we wanted to make something festive. We chose the word Noel as it fitted in with our festive theme. We decided that we wanted to make a cookie and found a recipe for sugar cookies, we chose yo alter the recipe slightly to make it more festive and decided that we would add orange flavouring and zest as well as winter spice. We chose the recipe we did because when reading about it, it said it would hold its shape well while cooking,we thought this would be ideal so that when our cookies had cooked they would hold the shape of the letter. 

Studio Brief 2 - Research

I have started to go through book of postcards and have scanned the ones that have been written on as as there are a number of postcards that have not been written on and I personally find the ones with messages on a lot more interesting. I would like to scan all of them but there are too many and it would be very time consuming.

Some of the postcards are not dated as they have no stamp on them but the earliest one I have found is from 1910 and I think the latest is around 1934.

I have taken some images of some of the pages of the book with some of the different postcard/birthday cards and images as I think it would be nice to include some of these images in the layout that they had been put together by the person who has collected these.

Studio Brief 2 - Initial ideas & Interim Crit

For this brief we have to produce a body of work that investigates the term/concept/value/number 100 by collecting, recording, documenting and categorising. Then we have to prepare a 2 minute presentation on this body of work. 

We have to collect 20 facts, opinions, words, statistics and photographs. 

I have been stuggling to come up with ideas for this brief as it is pretty vague and I'm not entirely sure where to start. I don’t particularly collect anything myself so have started thinking about things my family/friends collect. 

My cousin used to collect beanie babies and I know she still has a very large collection of these so this is one initial idea. Another idea I have had to begin with is takeaway menus as there are a collection of these scattered across the hallway in my flat but I'm not too sure where I could go with this idea. 

After some thought I've remembered  a collection of old postcards, photographs and birthday cards that my Mum and I found when going through a cupboard at my Grandparent’s house. It belonged to a relative of my Nan’s and she had held onto it.  I really like this idea as when we found this old book of postcards and photographs I found it really interesting reading through them and looking at the handwriting and the dates they were posted and as it had been a couple of years since I have looked through the book I know I will enjoy looking back at it again. 

After discussing this idea in the interim crit the group agreed that this would be really interesting but that I should choose to focus on one area of the collection, photographs, postcards or birthday cards.

I think I will chose to focus my research on the postcards as when looking through the collection I have found these the most interesting and it was nice to read through the messages although some of the handwriting is a little hard to read.

Studio Brief 1 - Final Designs

After experimenting with my designs I decided to remove some of the smaller triangles and replace them with a larger triangle in a block colour and have the text in white over the top. I think this works well as you can see the text a lot more clearly. I chose a light sans serif typeface as I felt this fitted in with the modern style of my design. 

Studio Brief 1 - Development

I have decided to develop on my geometric shape designs. I have decided to use images within my designs as this is a photoshop brief. I have chosen these images below after looking through the art work on sale at Urban Outfitters and finding some wall art by photographer and designer Leah Flores who take photos on her travels and adds different quotes about travel, I feel these style of images would suit the Urban Outfitters demographic as I think the type of people that shop there are interested in travel and they sell a lot of travel related books. 

Studio Brief 1 - Initial Ideas

I have decided to aim my photo frame backing papers at the Urban Outfitters/Paperchase demographic,  teens and young adults. I have a number of ideas but am not quite sure which direction to go in so have started experimenting with some of these ideas. 

One idea I have had is to use images of different types of cameras as Urban Outfitters sell a variety of different lomo and polaroid cameras. I have collected a number of images of different styles of cameras and as this is a photoshop brief I have experimented using different filters in photoshop. I like the effect given with the filter I have chosen. 

I have tried mocking this design up in one of Urban Outfitters' frames but I don't feel this idea works that well as a backing paper design as I had first imagined and think it looks more like a poster/wall art design. 

Studio Brief 1 - Research

Ikea
The designs used in Ikea photo frames are very basic and they use similar designs through out their range of photo frames. This reflects the pricing of the frames as they start from £1 and go up to £25 for a larger or more decorative frame.

Module Evaluation

I have found this module challenging and it has been a huge learning curve for me going back into education after 5 years, I have found that it has took me a little while to adjust to this change but feel I am settling into it now. I found the alphabet soup brief enjoyable once I got started and it gave me chance to experiment. Initially I found the vector type brief a little daunting as it seemed like a huge task to design a whole typeface in Illustrator but I learnt some new things in the Illustrator workshops which definitely helped with this task

Studio Brief 4 - Final Designs

After some debate I decided that the message I was going to communicate in my posters was 'Don't waste food'

This is my final type & image poster. The idea behind it is that we are bombarded with special offers constantly when food shopping, often buy things that we didn't intend to buy before going shopping just because it is on special offer and also buy things we don't really need because it is on offer. I originally used yellow and red in this design as these are colours used a lot in supermarkets to advertise their offers but I remembered that we could only use 2 colours plus the stock so I went with red and white because these are also colours used together often to advertise sales. I used a black background because I felt that this would make it stand out more.

Studio Brief 4 - Initial Ideas

I have quite a few ideas of which direction I could go in with my posters and am not 100% sure which one to choose. 

One idea I have thought about is consumption, as in the article I chose for my research there was an argument that our consumption is the issue and not our procreation. 

With this in mind I have thought about creating posters with the message of ‘save water’ or ‘don’t waste food’. I have also thought about combining the two messages with the direction of ‘save water, don’t waste food’ as when doing some research I have learnt about how much water goes into producing different kinds of food and some of it I found suprising. 

Studio Brief 2 - Finished Typeface

Studio Brief 4 - Research

Design Principles - Study Task 4

Emergency Exit

In this session we had a look at the difference between icons and symbols.
We were then given the task of redesigning the emergency exit sign. 

Studio Brief 3 - Research

Message & Delivery - Research

For this brief we have to create a body of research in response to a news story, issue or theme found in the national press.

I picked up a few different newspapers to have a look at including The Guardian, The Mirror and The Daily Mail. After reading through the newspapers I chose a story in The Guardian headlined, 'How to save the planet? Stop having children.' 

Design Principles - Colour Theory

Colour Theory

For this session we were asked to bring in five items of a certain colour, my groups colour was blue. The first task was to order the colour of the items from light to dark.

Study Task 02 - Grids

Grids

A grid system is a rigid framework that is meant to help graphic designers in the meaningful, logical and consistent organisation of information on a page. Versions of grid systems have existed since the medieval times but a group of designers inspired in ideas from typographical literature started buildinfga more rigid and coherent system for page layout. The core of these ideas were first presented in the book Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller Brockmann.

Grid Terminology

Format
The format is the area in which the design sits. In a book it is the page or on a website it is the browser window.

Margins 
Margins are the negative space between the edge of the format and the outer edge of the content.The proportions of the margin help to establish the overall tension or lack of tension in a composition. The smaller the margin the more tension is created.

Design Principles - 3D Type

In today's design practice session we had to build a 3D letter out of cardboard using 4 different planes. Our group chose a Helvetica B. We cut it into 4 sections, the stem, cross bar and 2 bowls. We had to hang each part so that they aligned to make the letter. We also had to make a viewfinder to look through to see the letter when it is aligned as from other angles it just looked like random hanging shapes.

Studio Brief 2 - Vector Type

I have chosen to base my typeface on this letterform as I feel it reflects my word the best out of all of my letterforms and it received the best feedback in the crit. 

I have created a grid for Futura which I found quite difficult at first when I started doing it by hand as it started getting very complicated pretty quickly. I decided to have a go at producing a grid for Futura in Illustrator and found this much easier than doing it by hand. I tried to keep it as simple as possible to make it easier to work with. 

Design Principles - Lonely Hearts

Lonely Hearts

For this session we had to bring 3 different typefaces, I chose Avenir, Baskerville and Brush Script Std as these are three very different typefaces. In groups we had to pick one of our typefaces each so we had a collection of different typefaces, I chose Brush Script standard as it was quite different to the other typefaces chosen. We then had to pick one letterform from our typeface and describe why we chose it. I chose the C from Brush Script Std because it's a simple brush stroke and is quite informal but easier to read than some of the letterforms that make up this typeface.  We then had to create a lonely hearts style advert for our letterform describing it and what it is looking for in another letterform. 

Studio Brief 1 - Final Designs

Studio Brief 1 - Initial Ideas & Interim Crit

To begin with I wanted to design a letterform that still somewhat resembled my chosen typeface (Futura) and to make small changes to it but so it reflected my word (aggressive). So I decided to cut off the cross bar to make it look sharp. I was also bearing in mind that we will have to eventually create the whole alphabet in this style so I wanted to keep it simple to begin with. The feedback I received about this letterform in the interim crit was that people liked it because it reflected my word effectively in a simple way. 

Studio Brief 1 - Research

Alphabet Soup

For this brief we have chosen a word from the randomiser and have to produce a set of 10 letterforms which explore and communicate our interpretation of the word using the typeface we chose from Vignelli's 6 basic typefaces in study task 1 as a starting point.

I chose Futura and the word I have selected from the randomiser is aggressive.

aggressive
adjective
ready or likely to attack or confront; characterised by or resulting from aggression: he's very uncooperative and aggressive.
behaving or done in a determined and forceful way: we needed more growth to pursue our aggressive acquisition strategy.

To make a start I have created a mind map of words and things that I think of when I think about the word aggressive.

OUGD403 Study Task 1

What's My Type?

For this study task we had to look into the six type faces that Massimo Vignelli refers to in 'The Vignelli Canon'. According to Vignelli to create good graphic design you only need to use six typefaces throughout your career.

These six typefaces are Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Futura, Times Roman and Helvetica.