Thursday 30 October 2008

30th October 08

Today we were given the latest brief of Vizcom in Context 2. We have been asked be create designs for packaging that will house a new watch designed by Animal. The outcomes have to be innovative, but they should also be clearly indicative of this Animal's branding and aesthetic. RESEARCH IS ESSENTIAL!

As Animal are re-launching their watch collection next year we must create a demand for a product that is currently being superseded by technology. The markets are changing due to the proliferation of technologies such as mobile telephones and MP3 players which all have time-measuring devices included. The task is to convince your audience of why they should buy this particular watch, what is unique or special about it and why they should spend money on this watch rather than other products.

To start off we were put into groups of 6 or 7 to consider the possibilities of the brief and create a base in which we all individually have to move towards. From then on we are asked to develop a 2D representation and maquettes of the packaging always considering how it will fit into an overall campaign. We have to show how we could extend an identity and concept over several types of media.

So in our group today we managed to collect a huge amount of research. We decided to base our projects around the Snowboarding scene as it seems very open to explore and experiment. Our research included Animal's main competition...Billabong, Rip Curl, O'Neill and Quiksilver. We found out about the history of the company, a few designers that have worked alongside Animal and also had a look into different snowboard designers.

Tuesday 28 October 2008

28th October 08

Today has been pretty productive as I've managed to design myself a new logo and brand but also because I have managed to get myself a few clients. The first being a friend of a friend who is an up and coming film producer and editor who wanted a logo and a brief branding for his company 3am Films. I have come up with a couple of ideas yet it is unpaid so far so he said don't take too much time on it at the moment. Here are the design.


The other clients are colleages of my mum. They would like a website done for their property company. There hasn't been a specific brief set and they are willing to wait until after my course in order for me to have the necessary skills to create a decent website. Will keep everyone informed on that. Below is the new logo and branding I've come up with for myself.


PLEASE COMMENT

24th -26th October 08

It was a fairly standard weekend to be honest. Catching up on work. Chilling out. Oh and practising a bit of photography as I haven't picked my camera up in ages. Check it out if you have a spare minute. Jamie Cullen Flickr Photostream

Friday 17 October 2008

17th October 08

OK so we are a week into the project and have had our first critiques. I presented Neil and Claire five of my designs. I got good feedback from four of them yet the fifth one, which was the first design I created they didn't like, which was a mutual agreement as is did look inferior to the others. Even so I will stil post it up for all to see.

As you can see it isn't a very strong design and wouldn't benefit the collection in any way. For the second design I used inspiration from the 60 Million Postcards flyer. I really like this design, and the subtle 'Happy Birthday' in the bottom corner just finishes it off nicely.



Because I am using a black background in all the design in the collection, I am having to portray the Black of the CMYK with a White stroke. Even so, it still looks cool. The third and fourth design are probably my favourites. I was attempting to produce one design and ended up with a completely different one, which is never a bad thing. I like how it all fits together, the colours work the layout works, and the text just adds to it. See what you think.


The last design to be critted was the following. I really don't know how this design popped into my head but I find it came out pretty well. As you can see I've been using all the CMYK colours in the image work and then using a simple White for the text. I find this just brings more of an emphasis to the text over the vibrant other colours.


Neil and Claire both then said now that I've used squares and circles, why not try trianges, so thats exactly what I did. The first design I find isn't as strong as the second, but then again it is completely unique in the collection. The second is the a alteration of the circle design above.


Now that I had done the triangles I thought I would try another shape, using the inspiration of a honeycomb I came up with the following. This is my favourite of the collection. Once completed, Neil pointed out to me that it looked similar to an old D&AD book cover. I have tried finding this yet have had no luck, but will keep searching and if I find it, it will be posted.


PLEASE COMMENT ON ANY ABOVE.

Thursday 9 October 2008

9th October 08

Today went pretty well. We had our final crit for the Look Again / Think Again project. I decided to go for my first idea with the grey squares and got good feedback from everyone. Yet there were aspects of the design my peers suggested needed changing. I have taken their advise into concideration and come up with the following;

The first design change you will notice is that the strap line has been altered to "CAN YOU FIND IT?" instead of "IF IT'S MISSING THEY WILL FIND IT". I have changed this because the majority of my peers believed it to be more of a horror movie slogan rather than an autism awareness slogan. The second suggestion was to change the red square to white and "hide" the missing grey square in another place on the page. This was to show that autistic individuals would be able to find this square extremely quickly yet the average individual make take a while to locate it. I also changed the font to Rockwell as it links better with the image. I am pleased with the outcome and think that the whole poster works well.

Wednesday 8 October 2008

6th October - 8th October 08

Over the weekend and the last three days I have come up with a grand total of five designs! I had a few designs in my minds eye from the get go so just had to transcribe them into visuals. A couple of concepts didn't look too good once put onto paper. Yet I worked and worked at different ideas, manipulating them together, using inspirations from all over the place, and ended up coming up with some cool results.

Every autistic individual had a bit of an "obsession" with certain things. I have had first hand experience with an autistic child and his obsession was papers. He tore us pages out of books into strip, all exactly the same size. No word of a lie he had about 10,000 of them. They were all sorted into different piles, and if one paper was missing, he would know which one it was and would be able to find it. I used that as my starter point for the first design.

Whilst sat watching TV over the weekend I spoke to a couple of my housemates about what they thought of when the heard the word Austism. The majority said repetitive behaviour, OCD related. This gave me the inspiration for the next idea. One thing that popped into my head was a light switch, Tom used to turn it off and on a couple of times before he kept it on entering a
room. There were many different designs before I landed on this one, but this was my favourite.


During the ideas generation crit last Friday, Neil brought up a couple of interesting facts about the hearing of autistic individuals. This led me to do a bit of research on the hearing, which then led to th idea of sound waves. By picking relevant sections of the research I had done, I came up with these two designs.

I do like these designs but it just felt like there was something missing. Recently all my work has been very mono tone and quite dark, so with the idea of soundwaves in my head I came up with the following.


Yet I just stil didn't have what I wanted. I therefore started playing around with a bit of colour, to spice it up a little bit, something completely off the point of autism. This led to the next few designs which I am pretty pleased with. The different colours are just different variations of the design.


Please comment.

Friday 3 October 2008

3rd October 08

Today went pretty well. We had our crit with Neil first thing in the morning and it was good hearing the ideas of others, giving my suggestions when needed and hearing others opinions to help me. I got a good feedback from Neil and the others and I seemed happy to pursue the idea. For the rest of the day I have done research and idea development. Below is the first idea generation.

Thursday 2 October 2008

2nd October 08

We were given our first brief today; Look Again / Think Again. It was given as part of a new unit called Visual Communication in Context 2. The idea behind Look Again / Think Again is to create an A3 poster with one of the two following outcomes;

  • A social issue that in your opinion has been over looked and needs addressing,
OR
  • An object which carries values that go beyond it's intended purpose or everyday use.
After having a mini critique amongst a small group of us I came up with a couple of ideas, ranging from a missing body sense, to the awareness of disabilities. I toyed with the idea of using music, different songs having different meanings to you, certain memories with certain people. Yet in the end I decided to focus on a personal and social subject; Autism. I believe that many, many people don't really have a clue about autism, or if they do, all they know is that it is a disability involving social impairments. Therefore, my aim is to make people more aware of what autism is and the characteristics of the disability. I have had first hand experience with a severely austistic child for over three years as my ex girlfriends brother suffers from it, so I have a fairly good understanding of how the disability works and I think this will benefit me with the task in hand. I have had a few ideas and its now time to develop them.