Top Gear

This is the final title sequence, bumpers and credits for the animation brief i had been working on for the past 3 weeks with Amy, i really enjoyed working on this brief as i learnt new things and enjoyed working in a team. I think enjoying the work you do is essential in this degree.

Lecture from Fudge

A member of the Graphic design company fudge had come in to talk to us today. Out of all the lectures i had experienced this was by far one of my favorites. The person who had come in to talk to us went about the lecture in a completely different way to all the others i have seen. 

Instead of coming in showing us all the successful pieces of work he had brought along his sketch books, containing sketch after sketch after sketch. His book looked very much like ours that we get all of our ideas down. This made me realize that what we do in our lessons we will more than likely be doing when we get in to the industry. He went through one particular project from start to finish. 

This made me realize that just because you like an idea doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else will like it too. There will be knock backs on the way. After showing us his sketches he shown us how they were developed. 

The main thing that i got out of this lecture was how he explained how he had done the powerpoint presentation that he presented to clients, and why he had done them like he did. Instead of presenting his favorite idea he had developed a hand full, and shown them in different ways. I think when pitching to clients this is essential. 

Spin Design

I came across Spin Design when looking on different blogs, I was interested by the Editorial designs and layout. Spin were founded in 1992, there work coveres print, tv and interactive design. Their clients range from the small and local to the large and international.

Below is an example of a piece of work they designed, Haunch of venison, Mythologies Exhibition Poster.

Liverpool

We all spent a long day in Liverpool doing a variety of different things and visiting different places. We got there early and the first thing we did was visit the Tate Gallery for the Biennial made up international exhibition 'O8 that Thoughtful had influenced, James who is part of the design company shown us around the tate and then continued to show us other parts of Liverpool where people from all over the world come to visit. The picture below shows a huge metal spider on a web attached between two buildings. I thought this was great.


Another great peice of work was this video below, its an old unused building where some one had removed part of the building and then made it rotate. We saw people walking past in a amazement.



After walking around Liverpool we then made our way to the Liverpool Design Symposium at St George's Hall, where we heard a variety of lectures begining with The Emotional Type, from international typographer Bruno Magg founder of Dalton Mag. I enjoyed this lecture has he was very interested and gave is tips.

Typography and Animation

We have had to chose 2 electives this year, the two i have chosen are typography and animation.

In typography we have to experiment using exsisting typefaces and then eventually has to create our own. My Typeface idea was called "magnify" it was using an excisting bold typeface and enlarging one part of it so it was still elegable but had a different interesting look. We had to chose to either design lowercase and numbers of uppercase and numbers. I chose to do uppercase....

In animation we have been put into pairs and have to design and make a new title sequence for our chosen program, the program Amy and I have chosen is Top Gear. This week we began using After Effects to see if we can get the look we want. We have made our beginning a

nd end.

This is what we have planned for the beginning, the quality isn't amazing at the moment tho..

This is the end of the title sequence, we may also use these as the bumpers too...

This is a variation we have tried out for the ending of the Title sequence...

First Year

Typography Design

In the first year of my degree the main project we focused on was a typography poster. We we are given different typefaces to research, my typeface was Gill Sans. The brief explained we could only use our font, we could also use the font families. No images or colour were allowed to be used in the poster.

Magazine brief

This is the first brief I was presented with when I returned back to Univerisity
from the Summer Break. We were presented with 3 different magazines with articles from each one and we had to chose one that we thought we would
enjoy working on. I chose New Scientist, the article was about how the brain works, what each side of the brain doesand disorders that can affect the brain ie schizophrenia. I experimented using Jelly as the form of the brain, i created different types by using different colours and setting things into it. This is my front cover, I really enjoyed this brief as i enjoyed thinking of new and different ways of showing something.

Editorial Designs

I was looking at the Editorial work on Form Fifty Five and found this work by DesignBranch,
I think it really effective as it does like 3D as if the image is coming out of the page. This doesn't really help me design my magazine as I am currently trying to have a look at different grid structures, but this did catch my eye.




This work above is by Jonas Williamsson, I have looked at this to give me some influence on my editorial design. The text on the middle page is split up into separate paragraphs and although there is an obvious rid structure it as also been altered slightly which I like.

Truth

A desgin company called "truth" came in to talk to us today. They are a small company, just made up of two people who used to work for McCann Erickson which is a major world wide Advertising company.  Darren from Truth was very much into designing typography, over the years he designed quite a wide range of fonts, one which was infact used in the mast head for the loaded magazine. Some of these fonts are Berliner, Sodium, Mechanic Gothic, Amplifier.

When lecturers come in to speak to us i find most people are more interested when work is shown that we see in our everyday life. This was definitely aparent in their work. They had done work for the likes of  

•  Allsports- they changed the ididenty to the one we know today, black and white.
• Sony - they designed the textured sony credit card
• First advice (manchester City sponsor)- this was all designed in a day as they logo needed to go on the Man City shirts the next day
• Durex- they designed the packaging for things for Durex which were more discreet.

The Truth obviously needed other people to join then in doing their work as they were such a small company. They said though that this was a good thing as they were always in control and could choose who they liked to do the work. As they were such a small company they had alot of stuff to do in a small space of time. They would have to speak to the client about their work and the reasons why they had done it,  just like all agencies, they explained that its difficult to just hand something to a client and expect them to like it without you explaining it to them, for example he said you could hand something to a client which was blue and he could just look at it and say i don't like blue..change it, but there is usually a reason for the choice of colour so for them to get the full effect you need to explain.

I enjoyed this lecture as they shown that if you try and you believe in yourself aims are reachable, they left their easy job where they had people around to do things for them to be on their own where they had to do every little thing them self.