Post-Critique

I've just went through and evaluated my feedback from the crit today, the format was where the groups were split in 2, and we walked around the room and left written feedback for each other. Also, we were told to leave 3 questions for the assessor to have an idea of what to write, mine were:

Q1. The photograph of stationary is intended to be 'life size', do you think customers would benefit from getting a good idea of size when buying?'

Q2. Do you think the Red Minimal Design could benefit from some kind of embossing or de-bossing effect on the type?

Q3. Is the vector artwork design effective at all? (I'm not convinced).

Again, I've found this process useful, when lots of other peoples individual opinions start building up, you know you need to react to it. I'll quickly go through the bits I've found particularly helpful:

Most people generally found the vector design confusing and a little hard to distinguish, I agree with them. However others said they quite liked it, one person even said it was their favourite. If I'm honest I'll probably not take that one any further.

A lot of people agreed that any kind of embossing effect on the red designs would ruin it, and the simplicity of it would be forfeited, also that it would be a wasted process as the paper is under glass, therefore making It unnecessarily expensive.

An interesting point that I found was that somebody commented about Ion's newest work on Behancé, relating it to my vector design and how there were elements of it with my work. This was were I got my original inspiration from so it's quite interesting to come full circle.

Many people liked the idea of the life-sized stationary as a size reference, however they thought the stationary itself was dull. I did originally plan to use other things, perhaps food? Others thought it was a nice touch but unnecessary, people generally are aware of what size frame they want when they are looking for one.

Regarding the red minimal designs, a strong majority of people believed it to be the most visually strong, and again I agree. This is probably the one I will develop, but I also want to experiment with photography first. Someone had a nice idea of perhaps overlaying a photograph in low opacity or with a layer blend over the design, this is something I will definitely try.

All in all a successful critique I think.

Preparation for This Morning's Critique

This morning we have a group critique to see how we're getting on with our frame backing paper design brief. We're expected to have around 3 ideas by today. I've got a set of 3 mocked up concepts, and I'm pretty sure I want to try some other routes too. We'll see after today what route my piers think is the most promising.

Life-size Photograph Design Idea

I've had another idea on how I could make the frame backing paper design.

I've taken some photo's with pieces of stationary inside a frame size of 12cm x 17cm, that's 3cm less than the paper size of 12cm x 17cm (8ins x 6ins) providing a margin, in this margin I'm going to place arrows showing the dimensions of the frame. The idea is, the photograph will be printed at 100% scale actual size, so that the customer can get an idea of the relation of the frame size to everyday objects, if done in a sophisticated manner it could look great too. I've also measured the objects and I'm going to attach arrows depicting the size of these objects too. Here's the photo's I've taken:

Backing Paper Design Sheets

Today I've been cracking on with my physical worksheets for brief 1 of module 2 where we have to design the backing paper for photo frames:

Firstly I go through the important parts in the project, I write down the limitations, the deliverables for the deadline, initial thoughts and ideas etc. 

There were a couple of things I had in mind after doing my market research yesterday in the shops, avenues of design style. One way I want to look at it is with photography, black & white if possible so as to not distract from the frame itself. Another style of design I've considered is utilising vector graphics to compliment the feel of the frame, I've made a note to myself to remember that this design should not be too flashy. Lastly, another initial idea I had was my original one to simply get the dimensions of the frame across in a minimal, simple yet stylish way. At the moment this is looking like my preferred method, I've already had a couple of ideas on how I could achieve this.

These final 2 images show another idea I had later on, where I could photographs objects and compare them to the size of the frame. I'm going to blog about this idea in more detail next.

Vector Graphic Backing Paper Design

It's relevant to mention that I seen some work I liked on Behance that I like, and tried to apply a similar effect to some work of my own. Here is a backing paper design that uses vector artwork from Illustrator, I'll be honest I'm not too pleased with how it's turned out, it doesn't look as good as I thought. Probably because of the quality of dissected sections, or perhaps the effect just looked good in the media (Typography) for a reason.

Below is a link to the blog post I did regarding the work I seen on Behance:

http://d-bell1316-dc.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/displaced-by-ion.html

Minimal Frame Designs

Here's a quick post of a couple of mock-ups I've designed for Brief 1 of Module 2 where we are to design the backing papers for a set of 3 frames. I've mentioned on my design context blog that one of the angles I wanted to go down was from a real minimalistic point of view, and here's what I've came up with for the answer to that avenue: The colour scheme is absolutely gorgeous, I just hope it looks as good printed. I'll be honest I've nicked it from a corporate identity brand I blogged about a couple of weeks ago; I just think that the red sits perfectly with the grey. In terms of type I've gone for white Futura with extra wide tracking, because it emits an essence of neutrality and clarity, whilst also being classy. 

Hierarchy in Newspaper Design

I've been experimenting with the layout & hierarchy of a newspaper, to better understand the principles of editorial design and get to grips with grid systems more. I've taken a note of the items within the spreads that I feel are most prominent, taking into consideration: Type, Image, Colour etc.

The Quick Brown Fox Task

Todays task seen us bring a collection of Typefaces, all spelling the well known Typographers pangram: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. I'm familiar with pangram's, I based a project around them last year. Their purpose is to showcase all the glyphs from A-Z in a Typeface.

The purpose of the exercise was to understand the difference in legibility of Type, and how that relates to the readability of it. We were instructed to bring difference styles of type with us: Grotesk, Roman, Script and Block. I chose Avenir, Trajan and Futura ExtraBold Condensed; respectively some of my favourites from each category.

The interesting part is when you start to read certain words in the wrong order depending on their style and the order, which was intentional. It was also strange to see how this reading order altered too depending on your personal distance away from the sentences.

I've learned that there's more to Type than just choosing it because of the content. It has to be readable and legible too, as well as well informed in regard to the arena it will be viewed in.

Portfolio Labels

Here's the design of some A4 labels I've made for the module submission on Friday. Futura with really wide kerning, classy. It's the little details in design that excite me, and these little organisation tools make me feel better about my work.

Microsoft 365 Competition Entry

Here's a couple of posters/adverts I designed as a personal competition entry for a new program Microsoft launched called "Office 365", an online documents processor with the theme and tagline "Work from anywhere". I'm really chuffed with how they've turned out, the vignette and colour scheme is something I'm especially proud of.

Studio Brief 2 Final Typeface

Later on today my group has an induction into the Digital Print resource here at college. It's been programmed in this week so that it's relevant to what we're doing at the moment by giving us the opportunity to print before our deadline.

Here's my final Typeface. Derived from my original hand rendered drawings, and with artistic inspiration from the word 'street' I decided to go down the route of skyline. Here I've highlighted the changes I've made from the original Typeface I was randomly aligned to (Century) by overlaying the two in Photoshop. I'll be honest, this project's been difficult for me, for the reason that I'm not a big fan of Century so it's been hard for me to pass judgement on my Type.

Baldness Infographic Poster

Here's an infographic poster I designed in order to display the statistics and facts in found whilst researching baldness for studio brief 4.

Final Partner Typeface

Today we had the final group critique for the Typeface's we've designed for our partners. The deliverables of the brief entailed that our final Typeface had to be presented in a 4x8 grid on A2 tracing paper, with 6 glyphs included in the alphabet. As well as this, I've designed this A3 poster to emphasise the subtle yet effective differences I've made to Verdana. I've mentioned before that this adaptation of Verdana is mainly based on Katie's handwriting, and I'm pleased in that sense because there is a resemblance. I'm particularly pleased that I developed my own style of 'y', in order to match Katie's handwriting even more.

I've also made a note of the colour scheme I've used as I quite like it:

Blue = R:18 G:227 B:219

Magenta = R:219 G:0 B:18