Studio Brief 1 - Secret 7" Development

I really liked this image that was created from using photoshop filters on my light drawing.
I played with the colours and then began to experiment with the image by overlaying it , rotating it and changing the opacity and came up with the designs below. 

Studio Brief 1 - Secret 7" Initial Ideas

After watching the video for Born Slippy, it reminded me of a light drawing I had previously made using car headlights when driving on the motorway, I decided to experiment with this image in photoshop to see what different effects I could produce with it. This is the original image. 

I started by experimenting making shapes with parts of the light drawing in photoshop and produced the images below. I am pleased with how these have resulted as I think they reflect the song well as it is very abstract and they fit in well with the aesthetic of the video. 

I then began experimenting with some different filters in photoshop to see what kind of results could be produced with these and came up with the designs below. 

OUGD404 - What is a book? Research

For this brief I have decided to make book of recipes for cakes and desserts. I have done some research to try and get some inspiration for my recipe book and an idea of the tone of voice and demographic I am going to aim for with my book. 

I really like these images from the Ikea recipe book shot by Carl Kleiner. I have never seen this style of photography within a recipe book before and think it is a really interesting way of showing the ingredients. 

This recipe book has displayed the ingredients in a similar way to the Ikea recipe book, I really like the idea of showing the ingredients visually as I think it makes it easier when baking rather than having to keep reading the ingredients. I also like images showing different steps and the playful fun style of photography used. 

I like the binding method used within this book as it allows you to take out pages and to add your own recipes which is a nice idea. I had thought about binding my book in a way that allows you to take out pages of the book to make it easier when following a recipe so this is a binding method I could perhaps use for my book to achieve this.  It is also water resistant so if you spill anything on it when cooking you can wipe it clean. 

I really like the style of illustrations used within this recipe book although I think it may be a little difficult for me to achieve something like this in the time we have for this brief. I also like the style of photography and the step by step images as I think this is really useful to know what it should look like through each step if you've never baked that recipe before. 

Studio Brief 1 - Secret 7" Research

http://secret-7.com/

For this brief we to have to design a 7" record sleeve for one of the following songs

The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be
The Supremes - Reflections
The Maccabees - Go 
Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer 
The Rolling Stones - Dead Flowers
St Vincent - Digital Witness
Underworld - Born Slippy 

100 designs for each track will be selected, pressed and printed to be exhibited and sold for £50 to raise money for the Nordoff Robbins Charity. Creatives from around the world are invited to interpret the tracks in their own style for every 7”. 

The track that stood out to me most was Underworld's Born Slippy as it was the one I was most familiar with. 

I have found an interview about the song with Karl Hyde the songwriter and voice behind the song. 

OK Karl, tell us how you write your songs. These words are first-take a lot of the time. I fill notebooks with writing, I write every day. And I'll open up some pages in the notebook and I'll see these things, these words in front of me - and I go, 'Yeah, OK, this is this, I want to sing this'. Where do you get the inspiration for your lyrics from, Karl? For me, there is an inherent beauty in the city. I see the city as a very very beautiful place. Even the underside of it. There's a beauty even in the kind of... the forceful presentation of something. As long as it's meant with no malice or anger or violence, there's a beauty in its energy. What is 'Born Slippy' - a dream? A dream come true? Or is it your view of reality? In the simplest form, it's me walking through the streets of Soho trying to get back home to Romford in Essex. I was referring to myself reduced to a piece of meat, due to the fact that I'd drunk too much. The bigger story is that I'm fascinated by the kind of snapshots that one retains when you've had a couple of drinks. These kind of very precisesnapshots one has of a little piece of street, or of a rubbish bin, or of a tape-recorder... I'm talking about being like a hoover, hoovering up all the images and the sounds and the smells of the city. Because after all it's cities that would inspire me. What exactly does the word 'babe' mean here? Not 'a child', it seems... What I'm referring to there is a kind of a male idea of a stereotype. This kind of like, 'Ah, babes, oh, she's a real babe' - meaning a kind of real derogatory term... For a woman, yeah. And that's not having a go at women. That's having a go at men. Why did you choose to use the word 'boy' to describe a man - not 'chap' or 'lad'? Because I think men are boys. Most of us haven't grown up, you know, most of us are still struggling with taking responsibility. It's like, 'I don't want responsibility tonight, tonight I want to lose control' ... And so, it's boy again.In the song, the word lager gets repeated 16 times! Did you mean it to be a 'lager anthem'? The lyrics are quite ironic. At first it was kind of upsetting that it was used like a 'lager anthem', which was the antithesis of the way it was written. It was a piece of irony. But I still believe that cities are beautiful places and that people are essentially good and that's what I'm following at the moment. I've done my time, as far as I'm concerned, underneath the city and I'm looking at other things.

Leif Podhajsky

I have been inspired by Leif Podhajsky's album covers some of his other work, I love the psychadellic feel and also the use of nature within them. They are very abstract and Born slippy is quite an abstract song so I think an abstract cover would work well. 

Born Slippy is featured in the final scene of the film Trainspotting, as Trainspotting focuses on a guy trying to give up his heroin addiction I have thought about this as a possible direction for me when designing my cover.

I found these images below by photographer Sarah Schoenfeld. She squeezes drops of various legal and illegal liquid drug mixtures onto exposed film, blowing them up to large scale prints to reveal incredible shapes and colours. I would like to have a go at creating something similar to these digitally. 

Speed                                                                Opium

Speed & Mephedrone                                      Methylone

LSD                                                                    Ketamine

Heroin                                                               Cocaine


I watched the video and took some screenshots as there are a lot of abstract shapes and type used within the video which is something I could possibly incorporate within my designs. 

Studio Brief 4 - Final Designs

After a lot of playing around in Illustrator with different ideas I have decided to go back to my original idea of just using type with different greetings on the front. I feel this meant the postcards will suit a wider demographic. 

One of the reasons I wanted to experiment with some of the other ideas was that I felt this idea was a bit simple, however after some thought I feel that sometimes keeping it simple it better than to overcomplicate things. 

I chose this typeface because I wanted to use a handwritten style typeface but I also wanted it to be quite bold and I feel this is perfect as it is bold but still very friendly looking. I wanted to use bright colours within my designs but I didn’t want them to be too overpowering. I applied a photoshop filter to the coloured backgrounds called ‘Note paper’ as I liked the textured look it gave and thought it added a little more character to my postcards. 

I am pleased with my final designs and am glad I decided to keep them simple. I feel like they fit the demographic I chose well and could see them being sold somewhere like Urban Outfitters or Paperchase which is what I was aiming for. If I was to do this brief again I think I would stick to my original idea and develop it more as I spent a lot of time trying out different ideas as I felt my original idea was too simple. If I had stuck to my original idea I would have had more time to develop some packaging for my postcards which ideally I would have liked to have done and would have if we had more time on this brief.