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.

More detailed blog post to come.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

That’s because 26 is the number of designs/prototypes that I need to come up with by Christmas. One design for every letter of the alphabet.

So far, it’s been tricky. I’ve spent a lot of fruitless hours sitting down trying to come up with ideas – we’ve been given a list of words for every letter which we are to develop, and there are two ways of doing this: one way is to come up with an idea, develop it, and then try and find a word to fit it to. The other is to develop an idea from the word up.

Both ways are proving difficult, so I’ll have to mix up my idea generation methods.

But there are some ideas that have come into fruition. Here’s one, for ‘Knowledge’:

Any type nuts in the audience will recognise exactly what this is. As for me, it was a great project to try and learn about type, and after making a whole bunch of these I’ve managed to remember a lot of the letter terms pretty well. Joy.

So now – where do I take this?

The project guidelines were to design an A5 flyer to be handed out to advertise a ‘funday’ being held at a nearby estate in London. The flyer definitely needed the time, date and location of the event, but also some ideas of what was being done on the day and a general reflection within the design of its ‘fun-ness’.

I headed back into Illustration, as I was now pretty comfortable with it and wanted to continue to experiment with vector design and improve my skills in that direction. With a vague idea in my head of what I wanted, I made text boxes that included the important information, and then started to design around this.

I limited myself to a green, blue and white 3-colour palette, which were bright and would print well, and which also hopefully reflected a ‘happy’ look to the flyer. I used the blend tool to make a diagonal-striped background, and then created a half-shield shape, reflected it and merged the two together to create a solid background for the text that would sit on the stripes and effectively frame the important information.

Then I added stripes around the shield’s edge, added the text, and repeated the stripe frames in the ‘Funday’ text.

Next, I added some various baubles and a ribbon to add some motion and ‘fun-ness’ to the image, still in keeping with the colour palette and the green-blue-white striping I used in the shield’s frame.

Finally I added various ‘advertisement’ text – the various activities available on the day – at the bottom, changing angles and continuing to add motion to the design. I wasn’t entirely happy with their placement and design, but after spending hours trying to right it I eventually had to call it a day due to time.

All in all it was a fantastic experiment, and one that thankfully worked well. I’m still wondering why I did certain things and added certain elements, because I had (for once) not tried to base it upon a design style that I knew worked well, but started completely from scratch, no particular inspiration in mind whatsoever. Hopefully this sort of thing will happen more often, but for now I will have to keep practising to see that!

So I realised over the summer that masses of practise through a continuous stream of voluntary projects has lifted my skills tremendously.

The first that I worked on was for a musician called Andy Kyte, who was going to play at an event called NewDay and wanted to have a CD recorded, designed and printed in time for it. I had about three weeks to design a 4-page booklet, back cover and tray sheet.

I had no specific direction, just a selection of possible album names and song titles. While I had experience of his music and the general ‘look’ of his stuff, it took me a while to try and find a comfortable design style to best reflect it.

After a few days working on this I felt no joy with it and eventually canned the idea.

The first idea was a cover made to look like a sort of grunge paper patchwork quilt, and I spent a while working with the idea, experimenting with colours and positioning of various squares in Photoshop. Andy Kyte stipulated that he wanted his logo, created by another graphic designer, to be included to promote some unity across his various musical ventures, and I couldn’t find a way to easily incorporate it into the design. I soon ditched the idea and started again, this time moving into Illustrator to try my hand at vector designs.

The second idea was a massive improvement in terms of trying to reflect Andy’s music visually. Working on his promotions team I knew that he wanted to try and get his music across to the 14-21 year-olds, and so I sketched a lot of the things I associated with teenagers and then started finding photographs of these objects and spent hours (literally) creating small vector versions of them.

I spent about 4 hours every night for a week working on this cover idea, but eventually realised along with Andy that the album, while perfectly aimed at his target audience, easily alienated anyone else who might be interested. So, second time around, I dropped the idea and started from scratch again.

By this time I had pretty much no time left – about 2 days to produce a final, viable design before the deadline. I was also working 9-5 every day, and had a friend visiting I wanted to spend time with in the little spare time I had left, so it was late nights and little sleep as I worked on a new design idea after bedtime. (Thankfully my friend was hugely forgiving and gracious and let me spend our last day together in front of my laptop!)

Again I was back to the sketchbook, but this time I had a look at one of my older ideas and, after discussing it with Andy, decided to pursue it. Instead of the blue I’d used in the previous draft, one that matched the blue in Andy’s logo, EP and his website, I went for a vivid green – to grab attention, to reflect ‘nature’ and also to create some diversity amongst his CDs. I created a vector chair by tracing over a photograph with the pen tool in Illustrator, and then made a tree and hillside based upon my own original drawing. I originally wanted a more photo-real look, and thought about stock images and the like, but the cost and complication of copyright and such found me experimenting with alternatives, so I returned back to the vector look.

Once I’d drawn them, I changed the lines to a more chalk-look, but the solid green background was just plain ugly. I dragged in various texture overlays, before settling on the paper texture (again). I also gave the chalk outline treatment to Andy’s logo and the album title text.

With little time left I assembled all the song lyrics, with two columns on each page. I de-capitalised the text too, putting capitals for particular words only.

The idea of a chair on a hillside was one that reflected this vague idea in my head of meeting with God in creation – and as the music was Christian worship music, this had tenuous connections with the genre but weren’t so overt as to be cliché. Andy asked me later what it actually meant, but beyond that simple explanation I still couldn’t put it into words. Andy, however, was satisfied with sending people my way if they wanted clarification!

Once finished, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. I wished I’d had more time to be able to work on the finer details and play around more with the song lyrics on the inside of the booklet, but unfortunately it just didn’t work out that way. I was, however, quite happy that the first draft never made it this far (it’s sooo ugly!) and hopefully, with the experience gained, the next album design projects will keep coming and each one will keep improving!

What I Learned

One of the things I was most nervous about was producing a project document with all the printer’s marks, dimensions, etc that were needed. Fortunately, the printers Andy chose had a huge set of resources on their websites with PDF templates and information for dimensions, bleeds, etc for each kind of software, so I was pretty well-prepared. And with my friend there to help me read through everything before sending it off, she was able to provide fresh eyes and point out some text errors I wouldn’t have seen myself! Always good to have another pair of eyes.

I will never regret a single hour spent on an unused design. Every single time I sat at the computer and worked and developed the idea, I found my familiarity with the various tools increasing, my eye for placement much better, a general improvement in the time it took me to do particular things, and I found myself far more able to transfer what was in my head onto paper and finally into the software itself. Which will all be hugely useful for me!

Final Outcome

As soon as I get my hands on the final printed CD I’ll get some pictures up!