The end is just the beginning

Wow – long time.

My last year of formal education came to a close at the DGC end of year exhibition, a week-long showing of all our year’s hard work and expertise (also online). Made me realise just what talented people I was surrounded by these past two years – and not just talented, but really friendly, awesome people too.

There was lots of prep before hand. Here we are making 200 booklets (and I mean ‘we’, because after taking the picture I joined the production line.)

There was also a ‘perspective art’ entrance – which required painting and vinyl sticking to make possible. ‘Mexican mint’ was the colour.

From the other side:

Opening night was a fantastic, busy event too. The room was toasty by the end…

We also had live binding and screen printing going on, due to some über-talented and hard working folk.

All in all, it was excellent fun. A great end to a great couple years.

Newspaper Design Project Up!

A newspaper that aims to answer ‘how to survive as a graphic designer in the 21st century?’ with a superhero ‘twist’ and the words of today’s designers. Read it at issuu.com.

More detailed blog post to come.

Meg & Greg Animation Part 2

As promised, I’ve cleaned up and posted the Meg & Greg video on Vimeo! You can watch it below, or watch it directly on Vimeo.

This was such a fun project, seriously. Run by Airside, creative limits non-existent, imagination encouraged. I also got the chance to learn how to use Flash – my last animation was done three years ago in Keynote. (Yes, I kid you not - Apple’s powerpoint equivalent was my animation software!)

You can see a lot of differences between the final one and the first test, namely that it’s a LOT less white. During a tutorial it was mentioned that it was very smooth and flat – my lecturer recommended adding a boiling effect to combat that somewhat… BUT I couldn’t figure out how to do that in Flash so I decided instead to add a ‘boiled’ background, which drastically decreased the whiteness but also added constant motion.

The sound effects were especially fun – every noise was made using something within an arm’s reach on my desk. The tin FatFace cup was especially useful. The pop and clap are obviously just me…

What else? Oh yeah, the music. I don’t have much lyric-less tune-age in my library apart from Caravan Palace (listen on Spotify or iTunes). I love their music, and it had the quirky element I wanted for the movie. So it was an easy choice to make. It was either that or the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack (also amazing!) but you can understand how that just wouldn’t have fit quite so well…

Maybe I’ll do some more animation in the future. It’s pretty time intensive though. Watch this space!

Meg & Greg Animation Part 1

The amazing Airside crew set us a project four weeks ago, where we were to creative a narrative based on 3 random words we picked out of a bag.

My words were: Apple, Bald and High Five.

I had three ideas for a story – one involving hairy peaches and a bald apple – and once I had settled on one, I spent a while on character design then created a story board for it. I knew I wanted to do Flash, since it’s been sitting on my computer unused for about three years, and kept that in mind by keeping things simple.

Here’s the first test rendering I did for Greg&Meg. Enjoy!

The hand-in was yesterday, and I was really pleased with the outcome. I’m ironing out a few bugs before I put it up on Vimeo.

Andy Kyte's Website Design

One of the friendships I’ve made since moving to London is with an über-talented unsigned artist called Andy Kyte – he’s slogging it away in Camden, slowly making a name for himself and turning heads in the music industry. I’m totally in awe of all the hard work he’s been putting into it, and when he asked if I could help him out with some design it wasn’t a difficult decision.

One of my responsibilities was his online presence. I worked on his myspace and twitter pages and set up a facebook page for him. I also went to a couple gigs to get some photos we could use across the internet.

Website

Twitter, facebook and myspace were great for a while, but in preparation for releasing his first single he needed a complete overhaul of his website which had sat dormant for a few years.

Seeing as I hadn’t worked with HTML since my teen years (that would be about 4 years ago, for reference) and CSS was a foreign language, I thought – ‘Why not?’ – as you do.

I designed something in Illustrator, started setting it up in Dreamweaver, skipped out on a whole lot of features I realised would take more coding skills than I could master in the short amount of time, and had it up in about two weeks. Absolute mad times, but fun all the same.

Website Header

Website Content

Even though it’s not a perfect and polished website, it served its purpose and, as my first foray into web design, it wasn’t too bad. I learned a lot along the way, for sure! You can view it in all its glory here.

Newspaper Club

The new projects are here! I’ve not had so much experience at print work, so decided I needed to stretch myself a bit and pick some with that in mind – so since Christmas I have been working on researching and designing a 12-page newspaper exploring  ’What a graphic designer needs to learn and be able to do to successfully function in the 21st Century’.

I wanted to have a bit of fun with this, and decided to explore a ‘Good VS Evil’ theme, so was looking at a putting a superhero edge to it all.

Researching was at first my most dreaded part of the project, but turned out to be a great experience for me – I contact a huge number of graphic designers and over half replied and helped by answering a bunch of questions for me. It’s brilliant to see how generous and awesome design professionals out there are!

The project’s still ongoing; here’s a look at what I’ve done so far:

I wanted a bright eye-catching cover, but I also wanted to experiment with the newspaper medium so I’ve incorporated a secret cut-and-fold flap that reveals a hidden message.

The centre spread is going to feature a ‘design superhero’ battle scene, here’s a small part of it.

Not wanting to limit myself just to computer work, I decided to make some of the titles more ‘hand-made’, by printing them out, cutting out the individual letters and then scanning them back in after crushing and unfolding them. This also features one of my top quotes from my research stage.

Continuing to experiment with the newspaper I had already decided that the last page would feature half a quote on either side, which could only be viewed in full when held up to the light. Even when printed on normal paper it worked quite well – and lined up too, which was my biggest worry!

More to come as it goes on!

Deadlines over and out!

So the last project was a pretty mad one, and the result was a complete withdrawal from blogging and a social life. The upshot was that I got everything done on time, and it turned out pretty well. I wished I had been able to develop some ideas a lot further than I did, but time constraints got in the way.

Here’s a small snapshot of a random few:

I is for Information This is one of the more fun projects I worked on, based on the idea that old information is useless. I soaked about 20 pages of day-old newspaper, then laid it out over a radiator overnight – I then twisted coloured strips of newspaper, wet it and glued it on to the dried mass of paper. I just love how chunky it feels!

 

P is for Pattern I wanted to do a redesign of a Bible dust jacket, because – let’s face it – they can be pretty awful. So I took this simple shape – a triangle with three circles cut out – which represented the trinity, and made a pattern out of it. This is one project I’d love to take further and expand to other books.

This is my most favourite project so far – time-consuming, work-intensive, creativity-draining – and easily the most challenging. I’m looking forward to developing the best ideas into something even better!