This module has been a great learning curve for me and my practice, competing in live briefs whilst also collaborating with someone else was an experience that I can take a lot from as well as designing for web, something I never thought I'd enjoy or even understand.
Skills Acquired/developed//
The Ycn brief helped me to improve my communication and collaborative skills and has encouraged me to collaborate more with people which I did do. (I collaborated with a 3rd year fashion student to design and print hand-made t-shirts in the college pop-up shop) It has made me realise that I in my professional practice I want to incorporate collaborations and utilise other designers skills that I don't have whilst applying my own skills. With the final brief of the module (P/R/D) I discovered that I was confident with the solutions I was producing with the branding aspect of the project and developed this further by creating two logos for the main company and one for their publication. A skill that I'm slowly developing is type and layout, it's something that I thought came easy and I was a bit naive to think this and it wasn't until my tutorial with Fred, where he in not so many words told me I didn't know what I was doing that I realised that i didn't have the basic knowledge of layout. It sounds a lot harsher than it was but this was a huge turning point and a realisation that I can't just pick things up quickly but I was determined to learn the fundamentals of layout and I still am, it's definitely something that I'm going to work on i through the summer. Web design is a completely new skill that I've picked up and after only being introduced to the basics of web design several weeks ago understand the principles of that area of design, theres till a great deal to learn but I feel that I'm at the right stage to experiment and explore this discipline in design.
Strengths//
The first brief (YCN) was a chance to finally collaborate, I'd been looking forward to this for the whole year. I really excel when it comes to idea generation, bouncing ideas of one another and building strong concepts and ideas from different people. It was also interesting to work with someone that I hadn't really talked to before and even know I had seen Meryems work and liked it, I hadn't a clue how it was going to be to work with her. However it turned out we had a few things in common and that helped to generate ideas for the brief which we had chosen because of our interest in Fedrigoni and specialist papers. I also did well with been allocated specific roles in the design process and enjoyed managing type and layout which gave me a chance to explore that area of design more thoroughly and creatively. I found that in the Product/range/distribution that I could confidently design the identity to a company and feel that this is something that I should explore and improve this summer as well as type and layout.
Weaknesses//
Even though it is vastly improving my time-management is still a concern and something that I'm going to have to discipline. I felt that after designing for a live brief and collaborating with someone else that I wasn't as motivated in the Product/range/distribution brief and in hindsight I wish I had of written the brief so that it was a live brief and contacted real companies/people/organisations to give it a more realistic dimension so not be designing for a fictional company with fictional ethos. This is something that I hope to achieve in the 3rd year and hope to involve my practice in the 'real world'.
Progression//
Theres a good deal that I want to do in the summer and in my final year, I intend to learn/experiment/develop the following skills and processes in the following months;
Type and layout
Web design
Branding
Design for Print/publication
Typography
Time-management
How I would grade myself on the following areas:
5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance 4
Punctuality 4
Motivation 3
Commitment 4
Quantity of work produced 3
Quality of work produced 3
Contribution to the group 4
Friday, 27 May 2011
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Monday, 23 May 2011
letterhead development
With the letterhead I wanted to have the logo feature as an individual graphic and not be attached to the contact details. So I made a conscious design decision to place the detail at the bottom of the layout experimenting with alignment and positioning.
Business card visual exploration
The finalised version of the front of the business card using the typefaces 'aller' (main copy) and 'aller light' (contact details)
I designed this layout from my sketches and I stuck with it from the beginning after getting good feedback. If it's not broke don't fix it kind of thing. but I did explore the effect of colour example above and came to the conclusion that the use of the green logo and green copy strengthened the brands identity and pushed it further.
A simple centre aligned logo. I felt this was too simple and quite weak and as the logo appeared on the front of the business card there was no need to repeat it on the back.
These are tests of the idea I had where I cropped and enlarged the green pages element from the Hescott and Kroener logo. The results aren't very interesting so I pushed the idea further (below)
I went on to experiment with the green pages idea, visualising what would be a birds eye view of an open book on its end. Visually it could be improved but looks good, but personally I don't think it's strong enough to be used.
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Saturday, 21 May 2011
colour palette
Being inspired by the photographic proofs of print plates that brought about the name for the publication I decided to use cyan as a main colour as well as a strong fair blue to compliment it. Using a spot and cyan and their tones keeps the colour scheme aesthetically simple.
I chose this colour to be the official companies colour throughout its design so to appeal to the modern reader connoting a healthy contemporary company not just with the environment in mind but the conservation of printed literature.
Thursday, 19 May 2011
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