OUGD405 Studio Brief 01 - Frame - Interim Crit

Today we had our interim crit for Studio Brief 1. I was pleased with the ideas I was putting forward and looking forward to seeing the feedback that I would receive. My first idea was images of people that were made to look as if they were trapped behind the glass in the frame. The second Idea was to show Iconic locations and put silhouettes made of mirrors into these locations so the customers would be able to see themselves in the frame. I also had the idea of poking fun at the stereotypical imagery we always see in backing paper by creating a repeated pattern of illustrations showing cliche images such as the eiffel tower and flowers.

We were told to ask 4 questions to help people to specify their feedback. I asked, 'Does idea 3 make it obvious it is meant to be stereotypical imagery?' 'Any ideas for Locations for Idea 2?' 'Colour or B&W for idea 1?' and 'Any other suggestions?'

I got some really useful feedback, the majority of people seemed to like Idea 1 the best but I was told on numerous occasions that it was a bit too creepy. I decided this was something that could be easily rectified. People said that Idea 3 was stereotypical in itself and wouldn't be obvious that it was trying to poke fun at this style of imagery. 

There wasn't many comments about Idea 2, people seemed to like it but no one was particularly enthused by it. I decided that Idea 1 was my strongest idea but I would make some changes that were suggested to me, the main one would be making sure the imagery was a bit more light hearted than I had originally thought. People said that it would work better in black and white than in colour and I agreed with this but it was nice to have my ideas reinforced. 

Photoshop Induction 28/11/13

Today we had an Induction on Photoshop. We started the session by talking about the differences between Illustrator and Photoshop. We spoke about the way that Photoshop uses pixels instead of vector graphics and we looked into resolution. We also talked about optical mixing and looked at examples of this. Shown below is one of the examples we looked at.

As you can see, as the bars of colour get thinner and closer together the way we perceive the colours changes and the two colours start to merge into one. This is used within print however in print dots of colour are used instead of bars. 

When working with images from a camera it is important to ensure that the resample image box isn't ticked. This means that no information from the photograph will be destroyed and there will be no information created. This stops the image from losing quality. We can then change the size and resolution without losing quality. Sometimes resampling has to be used to achieve the size that is needed but it is best to avoid it. This allows us to get the best quality image possible.

We looked at the settings that are available when starting a new document. We looked at the presets available and the colour modes you can choose. We also looked at spot colours. This is when you want to use a colour that can't be made using RGB or CMYK, for example fluorescent inks or certain pantone colours.

We looked further into the difference between RGB and CMYK. RGB is used for work on screen and CMYK is used for print. 

We looked at colour gamuts, this is a term I have never heard before but it essentially shows the range of colours that can be used. This diagram shows the difference in the range of colours available with CMYK and RGB. As you can see with RGB we can get a much larger range of colour than with CMYK. 

Show above is the colour picker box. As you can see you can change the percentages of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black and also the amount of Red Green and Blue. To the left of the cancel button there are two icons available. The icon at the top only appears when the colour that has been chosen isn't available with a CMYK colour gamut. If you click the box of colour below the icon it automatically chooses the closest colour that is print safe. The icon below shows that the colour isn't web safe and again when you click the box of colour below it it will change the colour to the closest match that is safe for web. 

At the bottom of the box we can see a hash with a box with some highlighted characters next to it. This is a computer code that is used for colour in web design. It's called the hex code.

We also looked at the colour libraries menu. This allows us to choose Pantone colours and lets us be more specific with the colour we intend to use. 

We looked at the difference between RGB and CMYK by changing the colour mode and using cmd&Z to switch between the two modes. This allowed us to see the difference clearly as it is fairly subtle. In CMYK the colour is less vibrant, this is most visible in the green block.  

Throughout this session I feel I have learnt about the colour modes in more depth than I ever have before. I had an understanding of colour but I have learnt some vocabulary and some photoshop functions that I did not know prior to this session.

Photography Induction

Today I had a photography induction. In this session we were taught how to use a DSLR camera properly. We looked at aperture, shutter speed, white balance and ISO. I have done a photography A Level so none of these things were completely new to me. I still found the induction useful though as I have not used a DSLR in a while. We were shown the huge range of cameras and camera accessories we are able to rent out. I intend to use photography for the current brief so I will no doubt be using the cameras from college. Shown below are a few photographs that I took during the induction which I thought were successful. I have experimented with depth of field, lighting conditions and shutter speed.

OUGD405 - Studio Brief 01 - Frame

Today we were briefed on the first project within the new module. We have been asked to design backing paper for photo frames. There are some rigid specifications about the size of the image and the programmes that we use to create the graphics. However it is still a very open brief, we have to use image but other than that we are able to resolve the brief however we like. I really like working within Photoshop so I am looking forward to this element of the brief. I already have a few initial ideas and am looking forward to developing these further.

OUGD403 - Evaluation

This module consisted of 5 studio briefs. I felt that each one improved me as a designer in some way or form. I feel I have improved my technical skills over the course of the module and have gained a lot of knowledge. 

One of the main focuses of this module was typography. We have had 3 out of 5 briefs that were solely based on type. Completing this work, along with the lessons from Fred, has increased my knowledge of typographic rules and terminology and has made me feel much more comfortable working with type. I especially enjoyed manipulating type during Studio Brief 3. I am really pleased with the typeface I designed for my partner and I enjoyed every stage of the design process. 

It was interesting to look at manipulating type by hand, however I feel that Studio Brief 1 was my least successful project. I don't think the work looks particularly professional as a whole, however there are some elements that I am proud of. 

I have learnt to be more thorough with my research during this module. I have done more in depth research for the majority of the projects than I ever have done in the past. I feel this has given me more interesting ideas and more of them. I still feel that my research could be more thorough however and on the next module I intend to make in depth research a priority.

Experimenting with two colour screen printing has been a highlight of the module for me. Coating and exposing my own screens is something I have done before but I have never had such good facilities. It has been good to see how easy it can be with the proper equipment. I have never printed two layer screens before and for Studio Brief 5 I experimented with this process. I was really pleased with the outcome and have submitted some screen prints as my final pieces.

One thing I struggled with during the module was documentation of my design process. Although I have been blogging and I have tried to cover most of the things that I have done on my blog, I feel it could have been more thorough. I intend to be more organised with my blogging next module.

Overall I have really enjoyed this module, every brief has challenged me and I have learnt a huge amount considering the timescale. 

Screen Printing

I was pleased with the outcome of my poster designs and thought it might be interesting to screen print them. I had not had my screen print induction but was allowed to go and prepare the screens so after my induction I could print them. I have experience screen printing so it wasn't completely new to me. In fact the process was easier than I was used to as the facilities were much better. I have never done multiple layer screen printing before however and I found this fairly challenging getting it to line up properly. I only printed two designs due to lack of time and the cost. I was really happy with the outcome although they were not as clean and crisp as they could have been. I quite liked the textured outcome of the images, it worked better than as a completely flat design.

Studio Brief 5 - Message and Delivery: Delivery

For the second part of the message and delivery brief we were asked to design 3 high impact posters to deliver a message derived from our research.

I didn't know what message I wanted to put across from my initial research as there was a fairly broad range of stories and I wasn't sure which one to focus on. I spent some time looking at some of the stories that I had collected and thinking about which ones i would be able to develop effective visual outcomes for. I looked online at stories linking to some of the articles i had in my initial research. The one which I felt was the most interesting and also had the most content online was the story about climate change being a possible reason for the bush fires and Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister, completely dismissing these claims.

I again collected together research based around this and displayed it in the same way as I did for my previous brief. 

The PDF with this research on can be seen here.

I started thinking about ways that I could convey these issues visually. I looked at various different poster designs and different artists online for inspiration. This research can be seen here on my design context blog.

After looking at other artists I started thinking about the actual content of my poster designs. I wanted to use imagery that would catch peoples eye, be easily recognisable and not too abstract but at the same time look interesting and unique. 

I noted down some of the key bits of information and some quotes that jumped out at me.

I wanted my posters to have some humour behind them and after narrowing down the vast amount of information I had I immediately got one idea. One of Abbotts quotes was 'Christina Figueres is talking through her hat.' Figueres is one of the leading minds behind 25 years of research that reinforce the theory that the increase in bush fires is due to climate change. This was just one of a number of ignorant and just plain stupid comments from the Australian Prime Minister and I wanted to make a joke of this.

I came up with this for a typographic poster. I used Arvo, experimenting with different weights and point sizes, eventually resolving this. This was just an initial design and thats why there is no colour. I looked at some of Abbotts other quotes and also statistics based around the fires and climate change. This information along with artist research allowed me to come up with some ideas. Some initial sketches and designs are shown below.

I drew out some of the ideas that were just in my sketchbook on A3 sheets to show during the crit as I have had quite poor feedback in previous crits when I have showed my ideas in my sketchbook as it is difficult for people to find the work to evaluate. 

The feedback i received from the crits helped massively. The main points that I took from it were positive. People seemed to like my ideas but numerous people also told me that some of my posters were quite ambiguous. I wanted to make sure the message was clear so thought about changing the copy on the numbers poster as this was the one that people seemed to have the most trouble understanding.

I started developing my posters on Illustrator further. I had quite a lot of difficulties along the way and i experimented with some tools that I was not that familiar with such as the scatter brush. I also had to utilise guides during the design process quite a lot, especially with the type only poster. 

I decided to use orange and black as my colours for the posters. I feel these will help to make the posters high impact as they are both very bold colours and the orange is very bright. this contrast of dark and light should work well. Also the colour orange gives off connotations of heat and fire which fits with the subject matter.

I hit a brick wall when it came to designing the trees on illustrator. It was too difficult to get an effective design using only the pen tool. I decided instead to draw out the trees by hand and then scan them in and render them further digitally.

I experimented with a few different typefaces and also looked at editing the type on illustrator to make it look smoke damaged and imperfect but I decided that the clean flat type worked better with the imagery. I decided upon Gotham Black as this is an incredibly simple legible and bold font which will catch peoples eyes immediately. I didn't want to use a decorative typeface as I felt this would distract away from the graphics. 

I am really happy with the outcomes of the posters. I feel the message is communicated clearly without being too literal. The posters have a sarcastic humorous feel to them which I really like. I feel it will make the designs more memorable. I also like how ell the designs work as a set. I have displayed the final designs below but I intend to screen print them before hand in. 

Studio Brief 2 - Alphabet Soup - Illustrator

For this brief we were asked to create an alphabet based on one of the designs from the first Alphabet Soup brief. We were told to develop our letterforms further utilising Adobe Illustrator to produce our outcomes.

 

I started by looking at my original letterforms and trying to pick out one that would be feasible to base a whole typeface on and one that would look effective. The 3 letterforms that I liked the most were the 'e' the 't' and the 'm.' I decided that the 'm' would probably be the best to design a whole typeface on. At this point I wanted to design type that was readable and subtle and could possibly be used as body copy. I thought that basing my design on this 'm' I may produce a unique condensed typeface. 

I started developing it by doing some quick sketches of what I wanted some of the letterforms to look like. This was important as there were some letters that were difficult to manipulate in this way and it made me think in more depth about how I was going to go about it and overcome problems that I came across.

I started developing the type using the divided tool on the pathfinder menu. I used a grid to ensure that the letters were uniform. I started developing both upper case and lower case as the last typeface we designed I only produced lower case and I felt that the type seemed to be missing something. It also made it difficult to actually use practically. 

After producing a few of the letters I decided that I didn't like the type. It was a purely aesthetic decision, I felt that the letterforms still communicated the concept of closeness and confinement. I decided there was no point pushing forward with they type if it wasn't working aesthetically.

I decided that I may be able to do something more interesting if I based the type on a different original letterform. I decided to abandon the idea of making type that would be suitable for body copy. After reading the brief again I decided that I wanted to experiment with opacity. This would probably restrict the letters to being used for titles and headers only but I was happy to go down that route.

I really liked the shadows that were produced by the letter 't' that I created and decided that I wanted to look further into using these shadows. I wanted to make them cleaner and the availability of Illustrator allowed this. I did a couple of quick sketches just to see if it would work effectively but I didn't spend long sketching as I knew that the outcomes would be produced much faster if I used Illustrator.

I experimented with quite extreme manipulations as I wasn't worrying about making this readable for body copy. I decided that some problems may arise when trying to write out words with type like this so decided to experiment with making them subtler. I used the colour palette and used an 80% opacity of black and a 50% opacity along with 100% . I felt the different shades gave the impression of shadows being cast from multiple light sources. 

The manipulations I decided on in the end were really subtle. I felt that this would make the type more usable. I also felt that it fitted the concept of closeness better. I wanted the letters to look raised from the paper but only slightly to put across the closeness concept and using shadows that were really offset doesn't give off this impression. The subtlety actually makes the letters look as if they are hovering slightly. I decided that I wanted something more to this project, both to make it more visually interesting and to communicate the concept of closeness further. I experimented with using the condensed type I had started making and combining this with the shadows idea. 

I didn't like the outcome of this experiment. I decided that it was too messy and didn't work before I had even applied the colours. I did like the idea of the letterform being split into two and the two parts being close to one another though. 

I decided that using a diagonal line to divide the letters and moving the two halves away from one another rather than together would work better than moving the letters together. There would still be a small gap and this would communicate the closeness concept but it wouldn't make the letters look squashed and messy. 

I was really happy with the outcome of this experiment and decided i wanted to use this. I applied it to all of my letterforms to produce the final alphabet.

Overall I was happy with the outcome of my typeface for this brief. I felt it was aesthetically pleasing and communicated the concept well. Despite not liking the word I was originally given to base this type on (domestic) I am happy with how it has turned out.