A bit of typography...

I made this for my parents, it's the lyrics to their 'special' song. Hahah. It's not technically great, I don't think. I don't know enough about type to make it spot on but I think to the unknowing eye (my parents) it was good enough. I quite like it, and I guess it's proof of my growing interest in type. If anyone would like to give me some pointers to glaring errors then go ahead...

I had it printed A2 size on some very nice heavy weight matt paper that made all the black look sort of velvety. I found a perfect light wood frame for it too so it looked quite sweet in the end.

The Animal Journals

Some hand made notebooks/sketchbooks I made. I made two sizes, the small notebooks are 14.5 cm x 18 cm and the larger books are 30 cm x 36 cm. Each book has a hand collaged cover on 180gsm cartridge, pages are either cartridge paper, blue graph paper, off white sugar paper or newsprint.

They are hand bound with coloured stitching.

 End of Module Evaluation

At the start of this year, I felt as though I had my rationale down perfectly, all the aspects I wanted to cover were in the briefs I had in mind, all the skills I wanted to work with were included and most importantly I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to be at the end of the year. In hindsight I had probably been a bit over confident.

There are many parts of my original rationale that I haven't seen through or acted upon, which is frustrating but entirely my own fault. The biggest regret is not working with print finishes. Every year, every term I pin point this as something I want to learn about, my knowledge about finishing techniques in minimal, if not non existent. I was determined this term to finally get on with it and I was looking forward to using my new found knowledge in my work. The second problem I had encountered during this module was as ever, self discipline and time management combined with some other things. To begin with I was intent on completing six full briefs and four smaller briefs. I wanted to have my portfolio done by now and I wanted it to be something I could be proud of. In reality I have done four small briefs and can't bring myself to even look at my work let alone put a portfolio together. To say I'm disappointed and angry with myself is a severe understatement. But this happens every time and I say I will turn it around, and sometimes I do for a few weeks or a month then it's back to square one.

The few positives I have gained from the module are brilliant. A summer project which was quite different from what I was used to made me try my hand at a different style of design which I decided to bring into the third year. I'm really glad I did because I like some of the work that I'm producing as a result of that (branding, identity – a lot more digital based work). I had some really great briefs written that I never did which would have helped me develop those skills even more. I still plan to do them, when I don't know.

The four briefs I completed were a good mixture for me to work with all of my preferred skills. Two branding & identity briefs, two illustration/book making/live briefs. I do wish I had made time for one of my packaging briefs, it is something I have a real passion for but don't practice it as a designer. I think in some way I have done many of the things I wanted to do in my original rationale. I have opened up quite a few of the skill areas I intended to, I have three final resolutions which I like and I have had some good experience being involved in two book fairs, making contacts with potential employees, making relationships with a few young designers around the world and setting up my own website.

I have accomplished almost everything I set out to – I've just not done enough of it, and I mean that in every way possible.

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Final stationary & proposed web design...

 In the end I went for the pale blue/green combination. It was between that and the brown/mint green.

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 Putting it all together - colour decisions...

Type...

As you can see I'm really into these classic sans serif looking typefaces at the minute (with the exception of Adelle but it's always too nice to resist).

I have chosen these specifically because I think with the right colour palette, surrounding motifs/shapes they can look feminine but strong all at once. I think because Esther's blog revolves around the kitchen and cooking this is a good aspect to push through the design. The 'woman in the kitchen' role is played by the decoration, the frills but fundamentally underneath is a strong matriarchal figure. We've all known those women who stand in their kitchens, slaving over the stove- in tv, films, real life. And I think because thats quite a old fashioned way of looking at a woman who likes to cook, that sort of fits in with the kitsch retro feel of the design I am aiming for. That might not make sense but I hope you can understand what I'm getting at.

As a side note, I was in two minds about branding the blog or Esther as a blogger. Esther Walker Vs Recipe Rifle if you like. I think it's safer to go for Esther herself, but promote the blog within that.

Shape Making

After looking at some of the trends in retro style modern design, I set about making some shapes myself. 

I really like the banners, I think they are quite versatile. I'm quite conscious that these sort of motifs, shapes etc can been seen as a bit of a design cliche but it fits with what I'm doing and I like it.

Type next then it will all be pieced together....

Esther Walker - Background

Brief No. 3 is my second branding & Identity brief. This brief was a lot shorter than my first as I only proposed a website design instead of actually making it. 

Esther Walker is a journalist with a restaurant critic for a husband. She gave up her job working for a newspaper to become freelance (or as she calls it 'unemployed'). In light of her 'unemployment' Esther fills her time with cooking. She admits she's no Nigella hence why her blog is titled 'Getting recipes wrong so you don't have to'. With her foul mouth, cooking conunderums and brilliant sense of humor, Esther's food blog Recipe Rifle has become quite popular since it started in 2009. 

Esther hadn't asked me to design anything for her - but as a fan of her blog and her in general I decided to ask her permission to use her name etc. Luckily for me she said yes.

At the minute Esther's blog is hosted by blogger and (I'm sure she won't mind me saying) looks quite naff. Have a look;

Food blogging has quickly become popular over the past couple if years, a good example is smitten kitchen, run by Deb Perelman, a New York journalist who turned to food blogging when hit by the recession. Smitten Kitchen is wildly popular, and it's design shows that. Of course it helps that Deb is quite into CSS and is a part time professional photographer. 

I asked Esther why she hadn't made her blog a little swisher (without sounding too rude about what is despite it's hideous interface is actually a witty, well written brilliant blog). She told me thagt her blog had to match her personality - in her own words "part of my schtick is bring a bit shite and disorganised and if I suddenly had this flashy professional logo it would all fall apart like a house of cards..." Fair enough, and indeed it hasn't seemed to stop people flocking to her blog to read her most recent cookery escapades. 

So with Esther's approval I got designing...
Have a look on my context blog to see my proposed design direction

Updated four briefs:

Show & Tell

My questions were:

1) I find it hard to fit in time for development work on quick turn around briefs, how should I manage my time more effectively?

2) I'm not a type expert but I think I'm doing okay. Can you type people spot any glaring problems with what I'm doing? (Thomas Howes branding brief)

(I had three more questions about my work but no one answered these)

Answers/comments:

- Purple into triangles (envelope pattern) otherwise love this

- (Q1) Time table it and stick to it. But make it realistic)

- (Q2) Type is nice - monospacing - love it

- Put +(44)... on phone number

- Leading?

- Kerning on the word 'illustration' only works when placed underneath 'Thomas Howes' like on the business card

- Legibility of details?

- increase leading slightly on back of business card

- (Q1) Time tables, work till 9pm

- Purple triangles are great, although I think the simplistic look works well

- Like these (Animal Journals) How will they be commercially produced?

- Do more packaging, branding you are good at it

- (Q1) Key is to document each stage. Print screen as you go along process/photograph. Annotate later, but the work and research will show for itself.

Thank you for the nice comments and good constructive feedback!

Manchester Book Fair - Original drawings

Evaluating my first branding & identity brief...

Part one; The brand.

As I've said before, I was quite excited about doing branding and identity for the first time, working to create the kind of identities I see and think 'ooh thats good, why don't I do that'. I'd always been a bit wary of using type or doing anything that wasn't drawing/collage but starting this brief I wasn't worried at all, mainly because I know my client well and I knew what he wanted would be something I would like too. To prepare myself for working with type I looked at lots of logos etc and talked to Tom about what he wanted his brand to say about him and his work. I thought about using some of this illustration work within the identity/logo but decided that because of the nature of his work there wasn't a single piece that could nessecarily define him as an illustrator. We decided on type only for his identity, this acts as a direction to his work instead of distracting away from it. I hope that makes sense...

Creating the brand was quite simple, I probably didn't challenge myself enough but the overall design looks good and both me and Tom are really pleased with how it turned out. I kept thinking of ways to teak and change it, sometimes scrapping the whole design and starting again. Nothing worked as well as the original idea. Because of the nature of the design, the type only 'logo' etc it was quite easy to translate this into a running brand across his website...

In terms of my skill development, I know the type isn't perfect. I do wish I has pulled it together and talked to Graham about it. My overall crit feedback was really positive and in a rush to move on to the next brief, that idea got pushed to the side. It has given me much more confidence to work with type, and learning how to put type and image together. I now feel much happier working with type, which is what I wanted to get out of this. 


One thing I did want to develop through this brief was my print skills. However because of the low budget for re-producing business cards etc. Tom felt it would be pointless as these finishes would never be fully re produced. I do agree, it doesn't make sense to use spot varnish on the protoype knowing full well that this isn't within the client's budget, however I could have experimented just for personal skill development.




Part two; The website.

When it came to designing the web presence my client knew exactly what he wanted. this was great in a way because I could just get on with it but bad in another because I felt I didn't have much of a creative input. Having said that there were a few things I did have a say on so I wasn't completley at a loss.

Although I never intended to add web design to my CV, I did love doing it. I don't think it will become a main feature in my practice as a designer but it's really good to know I have that little bit of knowledge and I am capable of doing it if I want to.

The work involved was quite tedious, especially because of my client's huge back catalogue of work which needed to be included in the website. It's a very simple design, easy to navigate and view images which is exactly what he wanted. I did really enjoy the coding and making sure every little detail was perfect.

A variation on the original business card I did for Tom.

I used the pattern from the inside of the envelope. In a crit someone said that I should try putting purple triangles in the empty spaces (the purple ones are white on the envelope) so I gave that a go. I like it, but Tom prefers the solid purple of the original card. 

Book fair! Sat 6th Nov 2010 - Manchester School of Art.

This was quite exciting, I've only been to a handful of artists book fairs before and this was quite a good one.

Have a look at some photos (by Vickie)

CATS!

Originally I intended to make a book of cat and dog drawings - purely illustration and quite an expensive, high quality coffee table book. In one of the crits (before I had started making my books) Lorenzo mentioned that although the book was illustration based and quite whimsical, it did need a better direction. I decided to just draw cats but then had to find a subject for the cats to be based around. on the list of possibilities were;

Ninja cats, cats who look like their owners, bad cats, cats of the world, superhero cats, cats dressed as famous people, cats in clothes, cat stories, cat instruction manuals...

Eventually I plunged for cats dressed as famous people.

I wanted to do some context work for it all first before I got stuk in with the making but in the end I couldn't find anything that was relevant so just got on with the drawings. (I found a good load of context stuff eventually though!)

Here are my famous felines in all their coloured glory... (front and back covers)

Once I had drew all the cats (watercolour pencils) I scanned and laid out the book to be A5 format. I had decided to have the book as a collection of postcards more than a traditionally bound book, thus saving time and money. I had a bit of a disaster when it came to printing them, originally I wanted them on off white card, colour printed. I hadn't realised the mac suites don't allow any old paper anymore and the digital dungeon was fully booked so I thought I wouldn't be able to do them at all. Luckily Amber let me photocopy all of my books which although it wasn't ideal because they had to be in black and white, at least I could have them on the stock I wanted. In the end they looked quite sweet and more DIY handmade zine type books instead of the polished, expensive looking illustration book I had envisaged. Oh well.

I was a bit upset about how they turned out, in my tutorial Lorenzo said they didn't look like the work of a thrid year graphics student which put me down a bit but I understand where he's coming from - I hadn't designed them to turn out like that but instead did what I could with the resources available.

Annnnnyway, I thought if people are going to buy this then it needs to be a bit more special - again I did what I could do with the available resources and decided to make some stickers, some large colour cat stickers to give away with the books (3 free stickers per book!) and a set of smaller stickers with my name on to seal the brown paper bags I had brought.

 

I brought some big white elastic bands to bind the books with, I think they look nice for what they are. Anyway, I still have all the illustrations and one day when I have more time and money I might actually get around to making the books I wanted to in the first place! 

Development bits and bobs for Tom Howes -

The first thing to work on after deciding on the basic layout Tom wanted for his wesbite was to decide what typeface to use. Lucikly for me there is minimal type on his website because the content is mainly image based. We decided to use a running banner type thing across the whole site which acts more like a logo than anything else, all it had to say was 'Thomas Howes Illustration'. The rest of the dialogue on the site neeed to be a web safe typeface, we deided to go with courier because it's simple, classic and not too contempoary, something Tom wanted his whole site to echo.

Anyway, the main 'logo/banner' feature had to be something masculine, assertive but classy all rolled into one. I found a typeface called roadway which fitted this role perfectly. We talked about using roadway and another typeface but none of them seemed to fit quite right. Adelle Basic was the only real competitor but Tom wasn't keen on it so I ended up using Roadway but altering the kerning and size so it fitted with the larger type but didn't look too out of place.

 I had mocked up some potential business cards for Tom just before I started the work on his website. Tom had told me he wanted his identity and branding to be siple typography but without looking too naff and boring. I toyed with the idea of going against his wishes and mocking up some cards which included his illustrations then decided against it for the following reasons;

1) I suppose it's like walking around with a little portfolio in your pocket, and most people want to rip everything out of their portfolio and start again every few months. To make a new business card every few months would be financially stupid. The design would need to stand the test of time.

2) He has such an enormous cagtalogue of work and although they all follow the same style - finding an image to put on this business card that sort of summed up his entire practice would be too difficult.

I quite liked my first mock ups, I think tom did too. We both knew they wern't quite right - they look a bit too delicate and feminine. Back to the drawing board - 

I decided on using the same typeface for the cards as I did for the website - I think this gives his branding a bit more continuity and a good flow. I decided to cut out a load of decorative bits, the additional typefaces and anything else and keep it clean, bold and simple with plenty of 'doodle space'. I presented Tom with a range of possible colours, we felt as the front of the card is so simple and black and white it would be a good contrast to have the back in a really deep but bold colour. The two that fitted well were the red and dark purple but neither of us are mad on red so we went with the purple. 

In the crit someone questioned why I had written Tom's email address with an '(at)' rather than a '@'. Although seeral other people said they quite liked this small feature. Honestly, it was put there because ther was no @ symbol in Roadway, but I intened to find a similar typeface to accomodate the @ symbol at a later date. I think I will stick with the (at). Tom likes it and so do I. We talked about having all the olours printed so most people who took one would have a different colour - I really like this idea but imagine it would be expensive. In the future I might look at doing a different colour every year or six months etc. 

I printed a few off in the mac room for my crit - I was a bit worried because the printer ink didn't stick to the paper properly  which made them look a bit worn and tatty. In the crit everyone said they liked that quality and said it made them look screen printed! Yesss.

Please exuse the rubbish photos! I'm doing the photography workshop on Thursday so hopefully will get some good ones then...

Also ignore any missing 'c' letters my keyboard is going mad....

The Brief for Tom's website and branding...

Finished branding & stationery for Thomas Howes Illustration. I'll post some development for it all tomorrow, until then, goodbye!

Finished! Well not quite, there are a few problems with the screen resolution which I'm going to sort out tomorrow. Considering I don't like web design it's becoming quite a habit...

Anyway, have a look at the finished(ish) product...    thomashowesillustration.com

Brief no. 1

Cats and dogs. (Manchester Book Fair)

(brief is several posts below)

My first brief is to create 50 whimsical illustrations of cats and dogs which I will them collate into book form and sell at Manchester book Fair on Sat 6th November. So far I have been collecting images of the animals to draw from and creating rules for the illustrations to help give them some sort of continuity. This is a fairly small brief in terms of design, the real time/money boundaries will come with it's time to bind the books. I know I want them to be hard bound, and I know I want to create 11 books (ten to sell, one to keep). I have only produced books on a personal scale before so I'm not sure how much this will cost. Expensive I imagine. Expensive is not good. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I have set a bit on money aside, other than that I will play the whole binding thing by ear. 

I have started drawing the animals, and have come up with several 'styles' to use. One is purley pencils and chalk, some are charcoal and pencil with almost no colour and another is part collage. I will scan them in soon and then decide which one to go with or whether to just use all of the styles (it might look good or terrible). 

For now, have a look at my context blog and see some other good animal drawings....

http://k-dyer0811-dc.blogspot.com/

have a look at my design context post on some bits of nice design...

http://k-dyer0811-dc.blogspot.com/

My presentation from last week....

More business cards. This time not for me. 

He has also set me the task of making a website to house his vast portfolio of illustrations, it's going to take a while but it's nice to get my teeth stuck into a bit of web design for someone other than myself. 

I asked some people via the inter web what colour they liked from the below selection. The lilac and olive green seemed to be the favourites and I threw the teal in there for good measure. I'm leaning towards the green for now. We shall see....

I don't like my business card anymore. It's terrible. So I am on the quest for a new one which I will like for at least a couple of months.

I want a portrait one now too. Because they are nicer. Anyway, I have a few ideas and I'm doing them one by one then I'll decide which one I like the most (hey, I'm finally getting the idea of this design thing now).

Here is the first idea and a range of colours.

 





Business card.When it's printed and I think it will look much nicer than on screen. It looks a bit clunky and fuzzy on blogger. 

Anyway. I'm going to post more about my 'inspiration' for this one on my context blog. I have done a version with a border, and some different colour versions. But they looked either too cold, too fussy or too girly. I wanted something that reflects my design practice on a whole. I think the pattern works well. And I wanted to information to be minimal (as any good business card should be) I think the type looks a bit too thin or small on screen but I think the proof is in the print. I shall see. 

The back of the card is just the plain pattern. Feedback appreciated, anyone...

I spent yesterday evening on Illustrator! 

I made a logo. A terrible one, it took me all evening but I did it! I am going to try and go on illustrator every day because although I've been scared of it/too stubborn to learn how to use it before. I seem to have grown up a bit over the summer and have realised 1) it's easy 2) I'm stupid for not doing this earlier.

This afternoon I was given some questions from people in my group in response  to my umbrella statement and my 5 wants and 5 don't wants. 

The questions are as follows;

- Which print processes do I want to look at/use?

- How can I make the best of both of my styles?

- What can I do to learn more about print? 

- How can I keep myself motivated to work hard?

In addition, less of a question but more a bit of advice I got was to just go with both of my styles of illustration and not limit myself too much. Lindsey re assured me that all my work fitted together well and didn't look like the work of a few different designers as I had thought. I'm not sure if she said this because she knows me. I think I need some outside feedback on this one.

The umbrella.

Oh yes. Today was the day everything became about 90% clearer. My statement might not be perfect yet but I can work on it. And most importantly, I now have something to say to people when they ask what I do instead of just mumbling I can now quite confidently say...

Illustration for packaging design, promotional material, advertising for print. Created for independent companies.

I am going to write more about this soon!