What is 'GOOD' Brief..

I'm currently doing a new project at the moment entitled 'What is good?' for which I have to chose a subject which can be personal or literally anything that I perceive to be 'good.' This was quite a challenge as I could come up with 101 things that I thought were good and yet I kept coming back to one thing - the pub. However I have chosen Alto saxophones. As I play the Alto sax and personally find them well good ;) I'm currently researching them and trying to find out as much as possible about them for Thursdays crit, which I am not looking forward to...

Poster designs...

My friend Alex has just started his own radio show with a mate, Louis and asked me if I would design the shows poster for them to go on the radio website and to put up around Leeds College of Music.
The show is called 'THE SOUL SOLUTION' on www.LSRFM.com (Leeds Student Radio) and is on every Tuesday 11pm-1am.
You can listen live by going on the above website and then clicking on the 'listen live' icon on the top right hand side.
They also have their own facebook group:
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29454936475&ref=mf
They play a mixture of funky grooves, soulful vibes, hip-hop and the latest news from the Leeds music scene. Check them out!

Here are the final poster designs... I hope you enjoy!

Books books books..

Bought a couple of new books yesterday. Dead proud of myself. Had 20% off all books in Borders. Amazing. I got 'Latin American Graphic Design' by Taschen and another on vectored images all of musical instruments. I'll post the name of the 2nd later. I definately recommend! I came across a graphic designer that I found very inspirational in The Latin American one called MASA.
www.masa.com.ve
Check it out.

Jack Wills clothing..

I posted this video for the beginning of it really however its quite short...but I love the way the illustration at the beginning is encorperated into the video and animation. I've been trying to find out who it is that does the illustration for the Jack Wills seasonal catalogues but havent been able to yet. It's really bugging me because i really like them! Here's the link to their website, which features a lot of it on there.

http://www.jackwills.com/Default.aspx

Things to do..

Back into the swing of things.. good or bad??
Either way I'm being given briefs left right and centre. Started a new module in 2nd year called 'Enterprize and Innovation,' this being the business side of it all, time and finance management. What to look out for in invoicing and sending statements etc.
For which we need to give a presentation on around Christmas.
The next is our on going PPD, for which we need to prepare a presentation for later in the year and develop our print side of our portfolios. Later I'll have to start developing a digital one too. Fun.
I have also returned to 2nd year Critical studies which I don't enjoy. At the moment I am looking to find an academic write for which I can write a critical and analytic response to for our essay. That'll be great..
And for the rest of the course I've also got my other on going core modules such as the 'Colour4print' brief and a new one 'What is good?' for which I need to research into something I perceive to be good. Im still slightly unsure about what I'm going to do but have a sneaky feeling it might be music inspired!
So yeah other than that I just need to keep going with this blog malarky and keep my eyes peeled for placements.

Busy Busy!!

Don't Panic competition..

This week i was set a one day brief, to design a poster for the 'Don't Panic' pack using the word 'machine' as my theme. I decided that I wanted to try and do something in an illustrative style. A style more like the type that I am interested in myself and inspired by. I came up with a couple of final designs and had difficulty chosing which one to enter. I chose the cogs pattern in the end, however still liked my juke box idea. The juke box idea came about by trying to think of machinery that played music as i wanted to encorperate music into it somehow as that is a big inspiration of mine. I chose the juke box just to be different and have the slightly retro feel that would contrast with the vibrant CMYK colours. I chose to do the CMYK colours to keep it simple and limit my pallet. It made it easier for me to use them and also was inkeeping with my other current project, 'Colour4print.' Here is my final design..
Cant seem to get the juke box one to upload now so will try again tomorrow, but for the mean time - enjoy :)



I stumbled across some problems with printing my final design however, this being that you cant print out the 'over print' effect on a 4 colour CMYK printer. Something I hadn't taken into consideration when i produced it. I thought I was being successful in working with a limited colour pallet and experimenting with effects in the CMYK mode only to find that the effect would only show up in RGB on screen. Oh well. All part of the learning process!

PS VOTE FOR ME! x

TV ads...

I've seen a few tv ads recently that I really like and have found really interesting. Here are a few of them which I have found on YouTube..
This first one is from The Carphone Warehouse which I stumbled across at the weekened while my mum was watching XFactor! It's the advert that comes on at the beginning and end of every break to say that they are sponsors of the show. I like the way in which the illustration is manipulated and transformed into animation..



I also quite like this guinness ad thats on at the moment which features the music machine..



And finally an old ad which I saw again the other day. It completely fascinates me as to how someone could have thought to produce something like it and how they did it. It is made by the brilliance of SONY which advertises the Sony Bravia LCD tv. I also found it quite fitting to what I am currently looking at now at college - Colour..

Colour systems..

At the moment I'm learning about colour systems and print processes. These are a few definitions for the different terminologies.

CMYK (cyan/magenta/yellow/key black – 4 col process)
This is used in the most common printed process called litho or offset litho.



RGB (red/green/blue – screen based)



Greyscale (Black and white continuous tone, any shade of grey such as a black and white photograph)



Duotone (when a continuous tone image is printed in 2 or more spot colours – this
term is also generally used when describing tri and quadtones.

Spot colour (one or more specially mixed colours as opposed as a result of a CMYK or RGB mix)




Mono (one colour only plus the colour of the material it’s printed on)

Summer Project.. TAXONOMY

Over the summer i was set a brief to develop a set of visual journals that document/record and catagorise my summer through an investigation of colour, type and/or image. I had to select a colour and its appropriate complementary. These 2 colours were the chromatic focus of my visual investigation. I had to use at least 4 methods of recording e.g drawing/photography/collage/3D and it could only be documented in a set of A6 or A5 notebooks (no bigger).. So i set about collecting image and type in the colours yellow and blue. The majority of my collection was done through photography, however i also did rubbings and colleted found material, such as flyers, menus and clothes tags. The main focus of the brief was 'TAXONOMY.'
Definition:
‘Taxonomy – the science or technique of classification.’

France et graffitti fest..

Also while i was in France I was amazed to see graffitti was as popular as it was, on walls and shutters etc around the city and out of town. Some of it was amazing. Ive taken a real interest into it and found myself getting excited everytime i found a new piece! (i must be getting sad) but its completely different to the work that ive seen in america..I guess there must just be a slightly different European style to it. I photographed lots of pieces but these are just a few of them. I hope you enjoy looking at them a much as I did!

France..

My next adventure was to Montpellier in France last week where I also found myself snapping away, so heres a few pics from france :)

Switzerland..

Over the summer I visited the summer camp in Switzerland where i worked last year and as ever i took a million photographs while i was there. Here are a few.. enjoy :)

ive recently been out and about in Bridlington with a friend and took the ole cam with me (as usual) and snapped a few shots here and there. Im still tring to work out how to do more moving lights shots.. i havent really worked it out on my camera, but none the less i gave it a whirl and these are a couple that i did..

New finds..

I was recently chatting to a friend about placements and the like and bits and bobs about graphic design when i came across a name i recognised but didnt know anything about...SAGMEISTER. A graphic design company in New York. This is a link to their amazing website:
http://www.sagmeister.com/index.html
I found myself browsing and reading on there for ages. Finding out more and more about their company, other designers and answering alot of questions i had myself about graphic design as a whole. It has a lot of information on it for students and budding designers, all of which i have found quite an eye opener! chek it.

Summer..

Sooo it's summer jollies and ive kinda neglected my blog for a while now.. thinking i should really do some work as I'm begginning to lull into lazing around all the time and forgetting im actually a graphic design student - opps

So here's some pictures I took the other day whilst feeling arty - dispite the summer i'm still snappy happy..

My find..

I found this illustration by my dad recently when I moved my stuff home for the summer. I love it. It includes all the thigs about illustration I like. Using the outlines of objects and adding shade by using different thicknesses of pens. Overlapping images and playing around with frame. I havent found the final piece he used it for but I believe he produced it as a design for a brochure advertsing the different types of transport in York. I think I might have to go in search for some more!

What IS graphic design???

The way I feel about my blog today...

Vids n Pics..

The last video is quite a long one. It was a real eye opener for me when I first watched it. It's the kind of thing that really makes me tick and to have someone explain how they illustrate and then manipulate their work using a computer was like woah I want to do that! Really helpful. Maybe eventually I might be able to do that kind of stuff! ...Maybe.

Photography mixed with a smidgin of other things I like...

There's just so much stuff that I'm drawn to, whether it's typography, illustration or photography, but when they're incorporated all into one together this is when it really stops me in my tracks. Some of the stuff above is what I enjoy. Perhaps something to aspire to in my 2nd year. I'm sure I could achieve it, just need to be pointed in the right direction and be able to incorporate it into the briefs I get set. This is what I struggle with...being able to produce things I like to do and not just produce resolutions that I feel are fitted to the briefs I'm doing. Does that make sense? hmmm well I know what I mean. I don't feel like I've managed to produce one thing I'm proud of this year. Nothing that stands out and makes me wanna go woah I did that! unless you count my photography, I think some of the images I took were ok..nowt spesh tho. Perhaps now I'm just rambling...and seem to have an obsession with doing dot dot dots on the end of all my sentences...