Inside spreads

Three samples of how the inside spreads of the magazine look.

Each double page is based on the same grid structure and equal column widths.

The black bars above blocks of text indicate the beginning of an article or a new section within an article. Each type of article is colour coded and featured in the top left of the spread.

The body text is set in 11pt Adobe Garamond Pro, and the image references are in 8pt of the same face.

The finished article

My final magazine photographed alone and next to 'competitors'.

I am extremely happy with the quality of the outcome and the professional look of the whole project.

The Consumer

A short slideshow detailing my consumer project.

A grand day out [analysis and advertisement]

Above are the two flyer style advertisements we designed to promote our chosen event which was to be a day trip to the 'Tropical butterfly house & gardens' near Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

Due to the age range of the target audience I feel our chosen day out suits their interests perfectly. Combining beautiful scenery and photography opportunities with a relaxed atmosphere provided a wonderful experience.

We took the time to test our day by visiting the butterfly house ourselves, this tested both the price target (less than £10) and whether or not it would be suitable/enjoyable.

As for the design side of the project, which is the main aspect, we wanted to project a clean, simple, yet engaging look and feel for both the presentation and advertisement. The use of the ever popular 'Didot' typeface was chosen specifically for this job and even from the first look provides all aspects we were looking for.

The colour scheme was equally important due to it creating the most impact and so we decided to reflect the natural feel of the butterfly house, keeping with a green that wasn't too harsh but not quite into the pastel tones. The colour interacts well with the white text to create a powerful presentation base.

Imagery is always important and due to the target audience we decided on the use of mainly photographic images as they are easy to relate to and tell the story much more effectively than other images like illustrations.

It is for this reason that the second flyer above is much more powerful, it shows the venue in its essence, getting up close with the inhabitants of the butterfly house and creating an immediate interest for the viewer.

A grand day out

As an initial 'kick-start' brief for the new academic year we were asked to work in groups to arrange and promote a 'Grand day out' for a selected age group.

This project gave

a great opportunity to meet and work with new people and provide a base for the main module project entitled 'The consumer'.

Over 50's was our target audience for this mini project and below are a few stills from our power point presentation used to promote our ch

osen event. This project was briefed and completed within a week.

Composing the poster

The idea was to keep every aspect of the poster handmade, including all the typography used. Initially I looked into hand producing letters that resembled typed words, however after stepping back and taking a real look at how it came out I decided it didn't really tie in with the project. The letter forms were supposed to resemble the building and the style it had be drawn in and so after more thought I adapted a much more earthy and rough style of lettering which really brought out the life in the drawing.

I used very soft, very thick graphite sticks and holding them by the tip was able to create strokes that were both heavy, yet still concentrated and controlled, creating a style of type that could fit snugly into my drawing.

After constructing the type I would use in the poster, I set about cropping my main image so that it would fully emphasise my idea and attract the attention of the public. I decided on a view which contained only a small but detailed portion of the drawing to really throw itself into the onlooker's eye.

I scanned the letter forms I'd drawn and using photoshop cut them to fit and adjusted the colour to greyscale to match the rest of the image.

Here is my first poster outcome, however not my final choice.

The reason i decided not to use this as my final image was that the letting crowds the rest of the image and allows it no room to breathe, it feels cluttered and rushed.

So as a solution to this problem I added a lot of white space around the image and used this space to arrange some of the letting as shown:

The Sinclair Building

A project titled 'Observation and Communication' which brought together a culmination of powerful techniques and processes, which would mesh together to form an incredibly in depth body of work working towards and producing a poster advertising/creating awareness of a chosen building in Sheffield.

I took to the streets in search of a structure I personally found interesting both aesthetically and historically, which took a good while before I found what I believed was the perfect subject. A business that had grown over 30 years getting larger through filling a block of terraced properties, which then was renovated into a sleek modern facility for both the Sinclair China and Glass shop, and four stories of luxury apartments. The Sinclair Building on Sheffield's Glossop Road stands out from the surrounding buildings mainly due to its night black colour but also its ora of elegance and sophistication. What could be better to explore graphically than a subject with multiple personalities and a history of architectural traits?!

Above is an example of some initial sketches I took whilst standing outside the building on the street, this was in fact something I had never done before in a busy city so in itself was a big experience. To have so many people walk past and try to take a glimpse of what you are doing, you create interest in every passer by which can be both daunting and exciting at the same time.

Dry Point Etching

A technique which I was very familiar with due to having produced several pieces during my Fine Art A-level course. Dry point etching and printing is without a shadow of a doubt one of my favourite ways to create drawings and prints. It has all the abilities of producing an outcome of great detail similar to using a very fine tipped pen.

Detail is very important to me and even in very simple looking pieces I always look to create depth and emotion within the work, always looking at how I can make it exciting. Etching really gives me an opportunity to fully explore depth and detail due to the fine-ness of the marks made and how they are positioned, for example in the piece below you can see how I have cross-hatched the shadow and left the majority on the light areas unmarked.

Cross hatching allows you to show different tones by increasing or decreasing the amount of lines used in the hatch rather than blocking or smudging as you would with pencils or pastels.

Sketching and creating images of our chosen building and its surroundings was the main focus of this project, the poster had to have a hand made feel, although it would all be composed and finished using photoshop and my scanned images later on.

After much drawing and experimenting with different techniques in doing this, looking at colour, monochrome, tinted drawings, I came to a decision of which of my pieces to use for the final outcome. It is an A1 charcoal piece which to me really explores the black of the buildings bricks, but at the same time adds a richness and incredible rush of emotion and excitement, perfect for the nature of the architecture.

Convulse and screen printing

At the time this project took place I had never even seen screen printing take place before, but now I love it. What really appeals to me about it is the sheer accuracy and sharpness you can get from your images. Below is an example produced by a small group of us when exploring screen printing.

As can be seen here the lettering comes out very fine, especially considering the small spaces and shapes within it.

Now for the brief, to design and create a book which has both image and text based around a single word, this word was to be picked at random from a dictionary to add an extra element of individuality and excitement to the project. When i say create a book, this could include books, fold-outs (like a map), pdf books, leaflets. However I felt a book format suited the brief best and it has a much more hand made feel.

As you may or may not have guessed from the title, the word I ended up with was 'Convulse' which to me at first was rather hard to generate ideas for and in the end I went for its meaning 'to convulse with laughter' meaning to be suddenly overcome with laughter and happiness.

Layout played a very big part in this particular project as I wanted to reflect my chosen word not only through image and text but the way each element was displayed and arranged. I went about this my adapting a classic layout style but making the images and copy used interact with each other in a way that I feel emphasises the atmosphere of the book.

After the screen print sessions I was eager to try out my newly learned skills and apply them to a finished piece of work and so I incorporated this method of printing into the centre pages of my book. Using a graphics tablet on my mac I hand scribbled a Charlie Chaplin quote in black on white and printed it at A4, then rubbing the print with vegetable oil to make the white parts transparent I exposed it to the light in the screen printing machine and experimented with my idea.

The printing was a success in terms of quality and precision, however looking back I feel it lacked in excitement and depth.

In fact I feel quite strongly about this for the whole project, although the outcome was very polished and professional looking, parts of it came off to look a bit, well, lacking in creativity. I mean it was still a fantastic outcome to me, but it just lacked that little something special, that extra push which takes it from being fantastic to one of a kind.

But you always learn from your mistakes so I shall take all that I learned onboard and will use it to better myself in the future.

Buy Nothing Day 2008

The project I am going to talk about now was based heavily, if not entirely on typography and layout and the power of type within graphic design.

For me typography plays a very important role in my design style, I am a very big fan of using type itself as the imagery and focus of a piece of work. Not in the sense that you just spell out your message but in an artistic manner which uses the forms of the letters rather than just using them to construct words.

By positioning them to work with each other you can produce a fantastic piece of work which not only contains all the relevant information but attracts the eye of the viewer by being inventive and experimental.

The Buy Nothing Day project involved working

with type alone to work towards and produce a poster advertising either FOR or AGAINST Buy Nothing Day (an event organised by AdBusters, www.adbusters.org).

To begin with, as in any project, I sketched out letter forms and experimented with all sorts of ideas such as cutting and pasting them to create new forms, tracing and over-laying and looking at ways in which letters interact with one another.

Before I could get anywhere near to creating a poster, I had to research the event and AdBusters to get a feel for their brand name and what they aim to do. I found most all of their a

dvertising material used bright colours which unfortunately I could not use as this project had to have a black and white outcome.

However this made the outcome fresh especially for their usual methods of design.

The brief explained how the poster had to be fully typographic with no images used which gave the project a new angle as I'd never worked purely with type before. This gave me an opportunity as mentioned before to create imagery out of the type itself.

I explored ideas using different angles and positioning, different sizes and weights of letters to design and put together something fresh and slightly out of the ordinary.

I established a hierarchy of elements and put them in order of importance, I then used the sizes of the words to indicate this order to draw attention from the viewer in a particular way as you can see in my final outcome below.

Femme Fatal

Right, well I didn't post as often as I would have liked these last few weeks, but this is party due to my mac having to be sent away to be repaired. All done now though so its time for the rest of the work to be exhibited.

This project involved as I have mentioned before, taking two existing companies and merging them to create a new hybrid for which we had to design appropriate material for.

The companies given to our particular group was the 'Magic Circle' (the UK's biggest magic society) and 'Agent Provocateur' (a very high class lingerie boutique).

We began to brainstorm initially creating mood boards, basically clipping and drawings and anything else we could find relating to our given and similar companies or areas. Our idea ended up being a store that would sell sexy outfits and clothing specifically for the entertainment business, i.e magicians assistants etc.

The main focus as with any new company was the logo. Logo's are essential when creating a branding for a company and will always be what sticks in the minds of the clients/customers. We went through a huge variety of hand drawn ideas before moving into illustrator and through a rather long process we came up with something which was both simple and elegantly appealing at the same time.

With the logo finished we moved onto product branding and looking at ideas for packaging designs and advertising material. I arranged a photo shoot with a friend to be used as a model for advertisement that would feature in magazine spreads, like you would see in Vogue etc.

As for packaging we designed and produces wraps for boxes and an example carrier bag in the classic brown bag style.

The one thing I myself found difficult in this project was working as part of a team. Ofcourse it had its advantages, like more interesting ideas and getting an idea of how others around you worked and their styles. But our particular group seemed to have more people who would put in considerably less effort, this may have been to do with them thinking they couldn't do it as good, I don't know, but it made it harder for the couple of us who put in all the effort to make the project successful. But I guess as they say, 'if you want to do something right, do it yourself'.

The rest of the roll

This is the second instalment of my tape project posts which will talk about a couple of other pieces including what was used as the final outcome, which in my opinion could have been much improved.

Below is another version of the piece last shown in my prior post, however this blue version is making use of the negative space around the letters leaving the lettering itself to become negative in the sense of colour.

This is my personal favourite of the two as I am a big fan of white typography on colour or black backgrounds.

Here is my example of a little project we did which involved using the tape as a material in which to wrap an object. As you can see below I went down the ironic and somewhat childish route of taping up... you guessed it, a roll of tape! In fact I found this a lot of fun and I think the irony adds a huge amount to the piece. Although the shape is a bit boring and there is little skill involved in producing it, the idea as a whole comes off as a success and even evokes some humour, which I always love.

The final example in this post is my final piece for this project. Going back to the theme of equality I explored the equality of colour and black and negative space within a piece of work.

Looking at the work of Piet Mondrian greatly inspired this work, however I think i have too closely resembled my work to his which is why I feel it is not a very powerful piece.

In the future when first looking at examples of work by other artists I'll see how I can try to incorporate their style without almost copying it completely. Other than that as my main criticism I feel the piece reflects the rest of my body of work, it just needs a bit more thought on the composition and overall outcome.

In my next post I'll be talking about a group project involving creating and re-branding a hybrid company to suit new ideas and practises. This involved creation of all sorts of things from a corporate logo to advertising material and packaging examples. See you soon!

Tape and more tape

I'd like to share with you the first project I underwent at Uni, which as you may have guessed from the title... involves tape, and lots of it.

Throughout my own personal exploration of the project I looked at the word 'equality' and used numerous techniques which incorporated this theme in anything from layout, to subject matter.

The piece below was one of my first experiments with tape and exploring how it can be used considering its properties, for example it's easiest to apply in clean cut straight lines. This piece is also looking at the interaction of colour and pattern and how both work together. The angled lines, especially the red and black are very similar to that of many posters designed by the Russian Constructivists which always gave a sense of direction and purpose.

Here I have continued the theme of black and red using very bold straight lines trying to harmonise the way they interact with one another, this piece reminded me very much of Piet Mondrians work, the black lines making squares that encase the red within. This could symbolise the inequality between the black and the red, although the red dominates in terms of size, the black is still the controlling element.

This experiment involved using the tape as more of a material now rather than an influence. Parts of this were difficult as the tape is naturally straight edged, but for this instance I needed to create curved forms so I had to carefully pleat the edges to follow the curves of the letters. Which you may have already guessed make up the word 'eqaulity'. This piece I find most aesthetically pleasing of the 3 as it makes good use of both the positive and negative space and could be seen as an abstract as well as a structured piece of design.

That is all I have to share with you today, but I will continue this project in my next post. As I mentioned before it was my first on of the year and so is not as strong as my later work, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.