Hantastic!

Design Practice Evaluation

2009-06-01T02:16:00.000+01:00

1. What practical skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

I believe that I have definitely improved my time management skills by making full use of the weekly planner timetables and by keeping a 'TO DO' list pinned to my bathroom door. It has definitely helped me keep on track of exactly what I needed to do within the module by the end of the deadline. By using timetables, I managed to allocate myself time for mock ups, and practice final pieces, trying and testing within my projects to ensure that I got the best outcome possible, in my opinion.

I definitely think that I have managed to develop my software skills further, particularly using Adobe Illustrator. The Type and Grid project that we have been doing with Lorenzo has finally allowed me to play around with Adobe InDesign and I believe that I am on the way to learning much more about this piece of software, though I do feel pretty pleased that I have finally started using it.

2. What approaches to/methods of problem solving have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

I feel that I have definitely embraced the idea of using mock ups within my work to properly test whether or not a design will work before going ahead with the final product. As I realised my mistake in the last module with the 'Book of 100' when the final outcome just did not work as I had expected it to, I have really realised the value of testing my ideas and mocking up the final product.
I have also really started to research thoroughly into the outcomes of my product, and research into any ideas that I have before working on the product, whereas before, in previous modules, I have gone with an idea before working backwards and adding the research as an afterthought.
. I really see the benefit of researching first and how that can influence and inspire my ideas.

During the collaborative brief, I worked with Carl and I chose to work with him after designing for him during the first module, that I could learn a lot from his style of working. He and I have worked together on several occasions now, and his and my styles(as much as I hate the word) mesh pretty well, and we learn a lot from each other.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

I feel that a strength of mine is the ability to seek inspiration from the work of those around me. For example, I have recently attempted collage work, especially within the collaborative brief, and also the hand illustrated style which has featured in both the collaborative brief as well as 'Speaking from Experience'.

Both my elective project and the 'Speaking from Experience' brief were based on paper toys, something that I have really gotten into lately and I feel that I have learned quite a bit on the subject already and it is something that I would like to look into in the future and develop further.

I think that a definite strength of mine is not being afraid to try new techniques and outcomes.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?
I feel that a weakness of mine is that I seem to lean more towards the digital side of things whereas I would like to try create more outcomes based on hand drawn and crafting. I really want to develop my illustration skills and this is something I want to work on over the summer as well as in the second year. It's all about stepping out of my comfort zone. Another point is that I come from a very hand crafted background and I really want to get back into it. Before I came to this course I was heavily into realism portraiture and this is something that I would really like to incorporate into my future work.
My annotation and evaluative skills definitely need to be worked upon over the length of this course as I feel that my analytical skills can be much improved. I have never been much of a writer but I still feel that I can become much better at the job at hand. I would really like to be better at analysing my own work and what went right or wrong. I also want to be able to provide better feedback for my classmates during crits.
5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
i) Explore a variety of outcomes before settling and moving forward with a particular idea. This also involves working quicker and developing my research skills.
ii) Learn more skills! I would definitely like to explore methods of printing more, including screen printing and mono printing. I plan to, if I can, take the print elective in the second year so I can learn much more about these methods.
iii) Improve my illustration skills and include these within my projects.
iv) Become much better at analysing my own work and being more critical. I would like to be able to provide better feedback within crits.
v) I have learned a lot from my Recycling and Sustainability elective and I would like to try and apply what I have learned to my work in the years to come, rather than ignoring where my materials have come from and the like.

Coinstar

2009-05-14T12:25:00.003+01:00

Speaking of making things out of money, I recently re-stumbled across these Coinstar adverts by PES film on YouTube.They are really good, and I have tons of 5ps, 2ps and 1ps at home I intend to play around with when I get home...later. Long day today.

Await further updates.

-HJ x

Money Art 2

2009-05-12T12:40:00.000+01:00

In the previous post I looked at images made out of money, in this post I am looking at physical objects made out of money.

So this isn't technically a physical object mad out of money, but I found it interesting either way. It's a bus sop advert to advertise security glass. There's quite a lot of money stowed inside it, real money too, just to show how strong the glass is. Really clever. Mean though in the face of those people desperate for money.

This is the first one I've actualy found that's made out of English money. A cute doggy, n'awh. I cannot find the name of who did this anywhere. What is it with people and not naming their sources?

A ovely gun, again I can't find the name of who did it, therefore making me just as bad as everyone else because I haven't put a name down. Damnit.

Money doesn't grow on trees eh? How very ironic.

Now this one I actually have a name for, the only one too. Ray Beldner. It was in response to another designer's work, and I can't remember his name. But yeah, a rug made from dollars.

-HJ x

Money Art

2009-05-10T12:34:00.000+01:00

So, for my 'Speaking from Experience' brief, I hav been working on the problem that students do not know how to manage their money.

As a part of my research for this brief, I hae been looking into things made out of money, because it is an avenue that has opened up for this project.

This is what I have found so far.

C.K. Wilde

Mark Wagner. This is a portait of the fine artist Chuck Close made out of dollar bills.
These have really inspired me to ty to make things out of physial money, be in coins or notes. Obviously not real notes. I'm a student, come on.

-HJ x

My Manifesto

2009-05-07T11:33:00.000+01:00

Who did I used to be?

I've always been very art orientated, so I was mainly in art classes all through school. I never got to experience any alternatives to fine art such as photography and graphic design until I hit A-level, so I ook all three. In retrospect, that was a bad idea because it was a lot of work, but it definately helped me decide that Graphic Design was the way forward for me. It took my Foundation year to solidify that fact. I didn't really have a 'style' of my own, I like pulling in all different kinds of techniques until I find something that suits the project that I'm working on the best. I don't want to rope myself into a particular catagory.

Who am I now?

I like to think that I am a much beter designer now, though I still have no defiitive 'style' and I don't particularly want one. I've learned so many new things so far this year and I hpe to continue my exploration of techniques on through the next two years. Since starting in September I have become very good at managing my time and realised just how easy Foundation and A-levels were in comparison to this. I would say that I have a far wider skills base now than when I started on the course.

Where to now?

I definately want to develop my illustration skills, I can get much better at it
I want to become the master of screen printing
Get more paid work!

Title

2009-04-30T23:33:00.002+01:00

>Insert research about speaking from experience brief to do with money issues, budgeting and student loans<

If I hadn't been up all night cramming my elective project, this would definately be here by now.

But now I'm going to bed before I die on my keyboard.

Sorry.

Speaking from experience...

2009-04-28T16:21:00.000+01:00

What is the problem?
Being able to budget your money

What are you going to do about it?
I intend to offer advice to next year's students about things they can do to ensure that they don't run out of money

How are you going to do it?
I am going to gather pieces of advice from around the class about the ways in which people budgeted themselves so that they did not overspend, and collect warnings from those who did overspend. I am toying with the idea of the format being something money related, such as a cheque book or bank notes, maybe a credit card or a wallet.

Commission

2009-04-20T16:16:00.000+01:00

Over Easter I was commissioned by a radio station based in Swansea calld 'Xtreme Radio' to design them hoodie featuring pictures of boomboxes in one way or another. I chose to go for the hand drawn approach and drew out some boomboxes before applying them to the design.

I was only allowed to use one colour because tof keeping printing costs down, and because the hoodie fabric was going to be brigh red, black didn't really stand out all that well against the red so I chose to make the designed simply white instead.

They seemed pretty chuffed with the design.

I'll upload some photos of it once the hoodie arrives in the post.

-HJ x

Collaboration.

2009-04-10T19:34:00.000+01:00

FOr the collaborative brief, the lovely Carl Holderness and I teamed up again. We work well, pretty much. Anyway, we chose the challenge of getting people to give more, and interpreted it as the sharing of information. So the book was born.

We discussed the idea of sending books around the world, and leaving them out in the public areas of Leeds, but the likelihood of them coming back covered in penises or at all was slim.

We swapped projects with Chloe and Vickie, we had to think of improvements to their music festival project and they came up with improvements for ours, which involved keeping it within the university.

We went with it, deciding to make a book from the old students for the new students, pieces of advice and such.

We made one book at first, but comepletely forgot about the whole...two colour plus stock thing, which sucked entirely, so we had to re-do it.

By the way, it looks like two shades of red, but it's not, the lighter shade is the same colour set to a 50% transparency. Ahah, sneaky way around it.

These are the pages from the book, full of questions and such that we gathered from around the uni using questionnaires. What did you want to know about Leeds when you first arrived for university?

Chloe and Vickie also came up with the idea of making posters to create a hype about the book, to make people aware of it's existance

And we put them up around the uni.

This is the book, as we left it, with a pen, in the cafeteria of the university. We wanted something on the cover to be instructional, and simple, and not make people think that it was just a notebook left lying around by somebody.

And this is Carl, hard at work on our presentation boards.

I checked on our book a shile after we'd put it out, and it was almost completely full! I went down at the end of the day and it was gone though. They'd cleared away all the tables for a meeting of some description and it was just gone, and no one had handed it in anywhere too. We found the poster that was near it in the recycling bin though.

We're gonna see if the student advice people will put out an email to see if someone has it in their bag or something.

We did ask for it not to be removed from the uni.

- HJ x

Old LPs

2009-04-09T18:51:00.001+01:00

Again, raving through the loft, I came across several interesting album covers. My mum has good taste in music, I can say that much.

Meatloaf - Bat out of Hell. Illustration by Richard Corben.

My mum bought this album in 77.

Led Zepplin - Physical Graffiti. The designers of this include Peter Corriston, Elliot Erwitt and Dave Heffernan.
Clever design.
1975.

Hawkwind - Warrior on the Edge of Time. Artists - Pierre D'Auvergne and Eddie Brash.

The whole thing unfolds into a shield!

1975

The whole album was inspired by and based on the Elric novels by Michael Moorcock.

Another Hawkwind album, this time The Chronicle of the Black Sword, again inspired by and based on the Elric novels by Michael Moorcock. The artists for this record are John Coulthart and Bob Walker.
I can't find the date on this one, but I'm going to say mid 70s.

Lovely, right?

-HJ x

War of the Worlds

2009-04-08T14:08:00.000+01:00

Let's talk War of the Worlds, the musical.

I was raving through my mother's vinyl collection in the loft, and came across this. Now we have this on CD, and it is awesome. If you've never listened to it, do it. Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Do it.

Anyway, it's awesome, it's got some amazing artwork on the sleeve and in the book that came with it that I want to share.

This is the fold out of the sleeve itself and the scene is that of when the first martian crashed to earth, described as 'the cylinder'. The painting is by Peter Goodfellow.

The first page from the book. The painting is my Geoff Taylor and is called 'Panic in the streets.'
"...the beginning of the rout of civilization, the massacre of Mankind..."

'Thunder Child' by Michael Trim.
"...the Thunder Child vanished forever, taking with her Man's last hope of victory. The Earth belonged to the Martians..."

'The Red Weed' by Geoff Taylor.
"...the Red Weed began to creep like a slimy red animal across the land, it's living scarlet feelers crawling, crawling!"

'Parson Nathaniel' by Peter Goodfellow.
"...they must be cast out - and I have been chosen to do it!"

'Brave New World' by Geoff Taylor.
"We're gonna build a whole new world for ourselves. You know where? Underground!"

'The Birds' by Geoff Taylor.
"...out of the hood hung red shreds at which the hungry birds now pecked and tore."

Oooold stuff. Good stuff.

-HJ x

Visual Language Evaluation

2009-04-01T14:46:00.003+01:00

1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

I have definitely gone back to my fine art roots within this module when it comes to my What is Line project. It was the chance to go back and do something that I used to enjoy doing a lot.

As for the session work during visual language, I have gained skilled in perspective. I've touched on the subject before but not in great detail and we looked at it in a lot more depth with Lorenzo this time around. I have learnt about icons and schematics and how the simplest way is often the best way. It has taught me a lot about breaching the language barrier and making things universally understood.

2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

I definitely just started exploring lines as soon as I got the brief and then the research came afterwards when I had more of a definite direction that I was working in. When I had the right direction I researched into artists whose work applied to my own. Experimentation definitely came before in depth research.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalize on these?

Experimentation is definitely a strength of mine. I had fun with this project and it was the chance to go back to something I used to do a lot of and have no time for anymore. Experimenting definitely helped me decide the direction in which my work was going.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?

Apparently I'm incapable of being able to lay down enough newspaper to not wreck the carpet in my room.

I spent a lot of time on the experimentation and the fact I did little to no research before I started is a weakness.

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1. Research first, it'll probably make life easier.

2. Spend less time mucking around.

3. Lay down more newspaper and not wreck my room.

4. Use all the time that was given to me and start right away.

5. set a specific amount of time aside per week to work on Visual Language.

6. How would you grade yourself on the following areas.

Attendance: 2

Punctuality: 2

Motivation: 3

Commitment: 3

Quantity of work produced: 5

Quality of work produced: 4

What is Line Statement

2009-04-01T14:20:00.000+01:00

'A mark indicating position, connection or boundaries.'

What is line resolution

2009-04-01T14:02:00.004+01:00

I decided to put my paintings and my what is line exploration into context by creating a HOW TO craft book for parents to do with their kids.

The audience of the book is the parents of the children, and not the children themselves because the majority of crafts within the book should be done under parental supervision.

I looked at lots of different stocks to print the pages out onto like tracing paper, sugar paper, brown paper...

But the book was really the clearest and the cleanest on white paper, so that's what I went with. I wanted the cover to be highly visible, so I used Magenta and Yellow to really make it stand out to attract attention of the people who pass it.

The book is A5 and consists of eleven double page spreads with one craft idea on each. I am very pleased with the resolution. Wop wop!

I mentioned that I looked at the idea of printing this out onto brown paper, and I really liked the test piece that I printed out, so I decided to make a mini version of the book on brown paper, using both the stock and testing out another scale.

The book was very small, and pocket sized, but I think that it is too small and easily losable.

Paints

2009-03-25T13:59:00.000Z

This is a contact sheet consisting of photographs of all the paintings I have made over the course of this project. The majority of them are A1, and then A2, with a few A3 and A4 sheets scattered amongst them. Whoah!

-HJ x

Oops...

2009-03-23T23:34:00.000Z

Let's look at the state of my room for a moment.

Uh oh.

-HJ x

Armed with a straw...

2009-03-22T22:57:00.000Z

I really really really wish I'd thought about doing this technique earlier in this project, rather than a week before because damn, I really love the results of these images. Essentially, it's just food dye on paper with me chasing it around with a straw. I got so light headed but it was completely worth it. I actually love these pictures a lot.

I was feeling a little creative here, clearly and decided to MIX COLOURS. This one with the red and blue is definately my favourite, because there are some gorgeous transitions of the colour in there. I know that's not what I'm supposed to be focusing one but still, I love it.

I love the mash up in this, and the green that's appearing when the two colours meet.

-HJ x

Bubbles

2009-03-22T22:04:00.001Z

This was an interesting idea, and one that I wasn't entirely sure would work, but there you go. Also, I had to hunt down some bubbles in Leeds, which is a lot harder than I imagined and I ended up having to pay a pound per pot. That's wild! I was not impressed. Either way, I mixed quite a lot of food dye in with the bubbles and hoped for the bed, and this is what happened. I only had three pots of bubbles too so I had to select what colours I would use, and I chose red blue and green. I would have chosen red blue and yellow, all primaries, but I wasn't sure how well the yellow would show up. So instead, we have RBG.

It was a pretty messy process, but it's something that I've wanted to try out for a while, and that was my chance. Some pretty interesting results, and it didn't ruin my carpet at all, which was most excellent!

-HJ x

Glitter.

2009-03-21T21:44:00.001Z

Never. Again.

I've never has such a disaster as working with glitter in all my life. We had a crit for what is line last week, and someone suggested glitter, and I was like, great! because I had some and that could look really cool. So I went about it, and it was going well and I had a few things done.

Anyway, I couldn't get the lid off this one pot, and I was like, wrestling with it, and then it popped off and flew everywhere and I think I inhaled half of it. I'm going to be sneezing rainbows for a while, no joke.

Everywhere. I had to fetch the hoover out. I stopped working with it after that.

This is one of the pieces that I managed to successfully do before the Great Glitter Disaster of 2009.

Glue on brown paper becomes...
GLITTER FEST. Now, it looks really pretty but it was completely messy and so not worth me glittering up the insides of my lungs and stuff. But aw. Sparkley.

-HJ x

Damien Hirst

2009-03-20T14:12:00.000Z

Personally, I'm not a Damien Hirst fan, but I do like the 'In a spin' series that he's done. It's currently on exhibition in the uni, on the floor below where I'm sitting right now actually, and I like it. Even if the writing on them does look like it's been done by a five year old.

It's a very simple technique of just dropping ink and paint onto a piece of paper that's sitting on a turning table, or something. Like one of those pottery wheels.

Anyway, it fits in with my project because of the fact that the images were created by not touching the paper.

And they're aesthetically pleasing.

-HJ x

MOAR PAINT.

2009-03-19T22:45:00.001Z

That's right! More paint. Though this time I thought, I know, I'll try a bit of Jackson Pollock and get some emulsion. It did not work. It wasn't half as runny as it seems when you're trying to paint a wall, and took quite a bit of force to shake it free of the brush. It took a while to dry too, but interesting results. Though my arm was tired after.

I wonder what kind of paint Jackson Pollock actually used.

[EDIT] Apparently he used gloss paint! Which is equally as useless when I tried to do it.

And more goes at poster paint onto coloured paper. I didn't so much let it drip this time and drop it onto flat paper from a height. I like it, it's pretty.

-HJ x

Fail.

2009-03-18T22:52:00.000Z

One thing that I have discovered does not work, during my experimentation with paper types, is using greaseproof paper. Now I know, the clue essentially should be in the name of the paper itself, but I thought I'd try it, because you know, it's an experiment.

Anyhow, I taked some up, set the paint going and thought, that looks cool, because it wasn't so much drying on the paper as just sliding down it. But eventually it dried, and I took it down, laid it on the floor and stuff.

When I went to pick it up to put it in my bag for the crit, all the paint just like...popped free of the paper. It was dried to itself in long strips, which are fragile, but stay together if you're careful. And I was just like, oh. Maybe not then.

-HJ x

How To

2009-03-10T15:43:00.000Z

The latest brief is certainly an interesting one to say the least. We were all gathered in a room and asked to pick a number between 1 and 1000. And when we all had, Fred pulled out this Collin's 'Book of How To Do Just About Anything' and pulled out the sections our numbers were.

I got 'How to peel and mince garlic'.

I started by taking photos of the part of the garlic.

And then drawing them to the best of my ability.

The drawing below is off a 'lady garlic'. A joke as to what would 'lure' a piece of wild garlic in during my concept of 'hunting wild garlic' which I'll touch on later.

And at first, I was just like, ...aw man. Really, not the most interesting of things, but I seem to have picked up some decent ideas since, and am now working like a fiend on it.

An idea that I had was to literally show the steps of how to peel and mince garlic via illustration, and then put the images in the form of a chopping board or kitchen tiles. I want to put it in the context of the kitchen somehow.

My first step is crushing the garlic bulb. Now, I wanted to draw them in an older looking style using cross hatching like illustrations in old cook books. Now the image below, I drew it and inked it and though, wow, that looks like garlic, job well done. But I took it into the classroom to keep working on it, and everybody mentioned that it looks like, well, balls. To put it bluntly. And now the more I look at it, the more I see it, which sucks because I liked the image. Guess I'll do it again.The next step is peeling the indivisual cloves, as shown below.
And then mincing said cloves.
And putting it into your meal. Yum yum. Shame I can't cook.
Another idea I had was to illustrate the entertaining ways to crush a bulb of garlic. The image below of the steamroller is the first of such experimentations.
It's amusing, to say the least. I'll see where this goes. I do have until Monday, afterall.

-HJ x

Screen Printing at Blenheim Walk

2009-03-06T16:34:00.000Z

Finally, we got an induction into the screen printing facilities at Blenheim Walk, which will save us having to walk all the way to Vernon Street whenever we wanna do something. It's much smaller, of course, so we had to do our inductions in small groups of six. It was pretty good though. Plus, there's a lot more variety at Blenheim, we can print onto fabrics and there are three amazing printers there, which can print onto canvas and stuff like that. I'm kind of excited about that. The lady who talked to us, Wendy, she seemed really nice too.

The first thing we did was choose pattern screens, we were printing onto simple cotton. there were some really interesting patterns to choose from. I didn't take my camera, or I would have taken pictures of the stages, but anyway.

We had to lay down the light colour first, because obviously, it's easier to print dark over light than light over dark. I chose yellow and purple, clearly an awesome combination.

Here is a scan of my pattern when it was finished. Lovely, huh? I really like it, even if it is a little crazy to look at. Like, whoah.

We then moved on to screen printing using the screen beds onto paper using a screen of a font that one of the members of staff had design. I'll upload this when I go and fetch it from the drying racks. Just know that it's lovely.

-HJ x

Painting with Glue.

2009-03-05T21:22:00.000Z

I decided, as a part of my experimentation with seeing what marks I could make without touching the paper, to see what kind of affects I could make whilst painting with glue. It's only simple PVA glue, which I've had for a while, so I just thought, Sod it! Let's see what happens. Essentially, it goes on just like white paint, obviously.

But it's kind of runny, but not as much as paint, so I put the glue on while it was flat on the floor, and then tacked it up on the wall, after putting news paper down of course. It started to run before, which make some really interesting marks on the paper. It looks like of gross, but I really like the effect.
The most interesting thing is how it looks once it's dry.

Another interesting thing about working with glue is that it comes out a lot more...beady than paint? I'm not sure if beady is the word that I'm looking for, but it kind of spreads when it meets other lines and forms junctions of sorts. It looks really nice.

This is what I mean when I say that the glue is most interesting when it's dry. For this image I tacked a sheet of black paper up on the wall and just let the glue drizzle on down it. clearly, as it got thinner at the top it dried quicker and made this wierd, but awesome look. You can see the transition of the glue as it dries and gradually gets tackier as it goes down the paper.

I think that it's definately a worthwhile experiment with some surprising results.

-HJ x

What is Line?

2009-03-03T17:56:00.000Z

Okay so, the direction for this project has changed after several spectacular failures in the department of working with light. I did a series of paintings using the gooey stuff from inside glowsticks, and I was like, right! And left them up to dry and went off to college. Turns out, as they dry, said gooey, glowing stuff soaks into the paper and disappears entirely, and not even UV light can bring it back again. I was most disappointed. What a wasted night.

So I decided to start working with regular paint, cause I know for a fact that it doesn't disappear overnight. I decided to see what kind of patterns I could make by letting gravity do it's work. I made at least 20 paintings, I'm not sure of the exact number, and they were mostly A1, a couple of A2's thrown in there. So, pretty big, and therefore difficult to photograph in a narrow hallway. Plus, they curled as they dried, but there were the best pictures that I could get of them, so please, don't judge.
The state of my room afterwards though, oh my God. Really should have tried harder with the newspaper behing them. There was paint EVERYWHERE. I washed it off as best I could, cause it was mainly posterpaint and watercolour. Now my walls just look really grubby. Oh well. It's an art student's bedroom, what do you expect?

Oi what a mess.

-HJ x

Lost Souls - Poppy Z Brite

2009-03-01T15:23:00.000Z

Okay so, Lost Souls is pretty much my favourite book ever in the world. I love it so much. This si the cover on the book that I have, the one that Leigh is borrowing at the moment.
It's pretty bad quality a picture, but it was the best I could find. I would have scanned my own copy, but it's not in my posession at the moment.
During my Foundation course, we had to redesign the cover of a book of our choice, and I obviously chose this one. I had so much fun with it and really liked the outcome. I would show you a picture of the sketchbook that went with it, but it's back home in Grimsby, tucked under my desk. The thing was immense though, and weighed a ton.

This is the cover of the book that I designed for that project, and I really liked it. It was the result of lots of layering and blending and that's actually my eye, just tweaked a lot.

And then, on an adventure of surfing deviantART, I come across this. A Russian artist known only as fya-shellk as made her own copy of the book, complete with all her own beautiful illustrations.

I would pay good money to own oe of these, but unfortunately, it's one-of-a-kind, so I can't. Her work is completely beautiful though and it must feel so good to have such a unique copy of a favourite novel. I'm jealous, clearly, but I'm very impressed.

Here are a few examples of the double page spreads inside the book.

:[. Want.

-HJ x

Cars

2009-03-01T15:02:00.001Z

During the Adobe Illustrator workshops, we learned how to use the pentool, and we were practicing on a picture of a car. I don't remember the make, but it doesn't really matter. I wanted to hone my linearting skill, and wanted cars to use as part of a traffic jam in my final resolution for the book of 100. These are some of the vehicles.

VW Beetle

Smart Car

Mini

Nissan Micra

A Land Rover

Ford Ka

An Estate car

I'm pleased with how they turned out, and feel like my pen tool skills are improving.

-HJ x

Commissions

2009-03-01T13:50:00.000Z

For a friend of mine, I was asked to design some posters for their Women's Officer campaign for the student union of Swansea university. I was working through a middle man, and came up with some designs that I really liked. They didn't take too long, and these are what I came up with for them to choose from.

This one below is my favourite, and my friend really liked it too, and took it to the person in charge. And he really liked it too, but he wanted some changes made.

My friend hadn't known that they needed to be in black and white for the printing costs. And that because the university is in Swansea, Welsh needed to be on the poster too. So I waited for the translation to come through, and then added it on and sent it out again, only for it to be sent back again. Welsh sentences are longer than english, so obviously the text was smaller. But it was sent back because I'm not allowed to show preference for one language over the other. So this is what it looked like in the end.
God it's vile. But it's what they wanted, so whatever I guess.

I was then asked to design one that looked like a comic strip, using the name 'Kim Possible' for the candidate. I actually like how this one turned out in the end, it's purely black and white, which should appeal to their printing budget.

And there is a Welsh version too, so there they have it.

I should have pictures of these posters printed out at full size and up on the walls soon. I'm tempted to ask if they can print out just a couple of the colour versions, and get pictures of those, because I actually liked it better when it was in colour.

Another thing I was asked to do, recently, was design a logo for a hoodie for the English Students of Swansea University. They wanted it simple, and small, and this is what I came up with. I like it, the client liked it, and so it was an easy job.Unfortunately, I only had creative control over the front of the hoodie. The back still says 'English Students do it like prose', but I can't do anything about it. At least the front will look good. I should have pictures of that too soon.

-HJ x

Old work.

2009-03-01T13:21:00.000Z

I just found a file full of pictures of my old work in the partition of my hard drive. I figured I'd share some with you. See the work that actually got me onto this course, hah.

This is a transcription of Wrath, of the Seven Deadly Sins series by Digital Painter Marta Dahlig. She is amazing, completely amazing and this is only a part of her original image. This was much bigger than it looks there, because somebody spilled oil all over it in between classes, right before my interview for LCAD. I had to hide a lot of it behind the mountboard, but you can still see some splotches of it. I was so amazingly ticked off.

Life Model - Terry.

I'll get back to you with the name of this designer, but this is my transcript of her work. I actually love working with watercolours.

This image was put up on the projector for all of us to do a transcript of, but the photographer was never named to us.

I used to do a lot of portraits and realism, especially as there was only Fine Art at my senior school, no other options. Portraiture is something that I really enjoy doing, and it's a shame that I don't really have enough time to do more of it.

I just thought that I would upload a few examples, and hope that I'll get the chance to do more of it sometime soon.

Kyo - Dir en grey
M.C.Escher - Drawing Hands

Chuck Close's Self Portrait.

Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day fame.

I really wanna get back into all this.

-HJ x

Typography

2009-02-28T15:07:00.000Z

During playing around with type for the latest brief, for which I am submitting to the Don't Panic poster competition. I'll have another blog post on this project at some point soon, but at the moment I' just focusing on type.

I never had a chance to work with typography before I came to LCAD, and honestly, I didn't know anything about it.

I was messing around with a Plato quote that I was using for the poster, just to see what kind of typefaces I could produce by playing around with brushes and lines.

The above two images were made using paint brushes in Illustrator. I really like how messy and scrappy they turned out, but they are still completely readable, unlike some of the results that I came out with.

This image below was clearly made using the dotted lines and scissor marks that we see on an image that needs cutting out. Because there were so many lines and corners in the actual type, it went a little crazy, but I think it looks good. It's still readable, thought interesting to look at.
The image below is my favourite. I accidently created it using one of those page divider deals on Illustrator, and it went crazy but I really like how it looks. I'm going to play around a lot more with type in future now that I realise just how I can make type far more interesting.

-HJ x

The Dark Crystal

2009-02-25T14:07:00.000Z

Now, I don't know how many of you have seen The Dark Crystal, but it's very good. Very strange, but I enjoyed it a lot, and would recommend watching it. It's like, twisted Muppets, and it was done by the same guy. Though I'm not sure whether this or the muppets came first. Anyway.

It's kind of like Labyrinth, which was also done by Jim Henson, but Labyrinth freaked me out a lot as a kid. Also, I get Legend and Labyrinth mixed up quite a lot.

I found this book in my room, because the living room at home is being redecorated, so all of her books, and there are a lot, are being kept in my room. She has some awesome books, and got quite a few art books like this when she was younger, I love rifling through them.

This is the concept art book for The Dark Crystal, illustrated by Brian Froud. There are some truly beautiful illustrations in it. It was printed in 1982, so it's older than I am!

Some of the images are on tracing paper so they form more intricate designs with the images behind them. I think that it's a fantastic idea, really, laying images up like that, and both images look great alone as well as together. This Brian Froud character is a very talented man.

My feet in the last one, hah. Oops. Anyway, if you haven't seen this movie, I suggest you do, or try find the book somewhere to look at. Or just look up Brian Froud's work.

American election VOTE posters.

2009-02-15T12:35:00.000Z

I found this treasure trove of voting posters for the US election. A design company called AIGA invited designers to take a part in their campaign of creating posters that would inspire and encourage people to vote. Because so many Americans just don't bother (not that it matters, most votes don't count. Only certain states' votes really count). There are hundreds of entries on the site, and I trawled through them all, picking out my favourites to post on here.

The above poster was created by Mary Meiners to highlight all of the excuses that people use as to why they didn't vote. It's very interesting to look at and aesthetically pleasing. All that jumbled up text just makes me want to lean in and work out what all of them say.

This poster was created by Zach Norman with the phrase 'Use your voice'.
Unfortunately, this one has been removed from the sight and so I can't tell you who the designer is. It's one of my favourites though.

This design was sent in by Scott Brucato with the phrase 'Thing about it'.

Emily Green designed this one to spread the message that 'we need a leader that understands all of our needs and that the environment is one of them.'

This has since been removed from the sight and I really can't remember who designed this, I love it though. Picking out the letters in a brighter colour to draw attention to them is a sure way to bring the eye in and grab attention.

This one was designed by Will Ecke, and I think that this is one of my favourites. It's very simple, and the way that the two animal representatives have been combined to create a heart is excellent and aesthetically pleasing.

The site where all of the other designs are is here.

-HJ x

Book of 100

2009-02-13T22:10:00.000Z

This is the final resolution that was made for the book of 100 brief. I wanted a box that looked like a book, as you can see. I bound it like a book, and to be honest, I'm really pleased with how the box turned out. My first attempt at making a box didn't work at all, and I managed to superglue my work to the table, but it was soon rectified. My flatmate told me that I should just make these boxes and sell them. I think she wants one.

The wooden wheels on the side, which are actually wagon wheels for doll house vehicles or whatever, are the turning mechanism for the 'scroll' type book inside. I had to make the holes of the wheels a little wider by scraping the inside of a pair of scissors. Easier than I imagined it would be.

Anyway, I thought that the wood looked good against the green and cream coloured box, and seemed to fit in with the whole feel of 'green'. Green as in eco-friendly. Despite using wood not really being the most eco friendly thing to use. Aesthetically it works, however.

This is the inside of the box, and as you can see, this is the first version of the 'scroll' book I made. It was very long, my illustration took up about..25 A4 pages altogether, I believe. During a crit, the one on the day before the deadline in fact, A lot of people felt that it was far too long, and they didn't get what the cars had anything to do with anything. They got bored with turning it about halfway though, so I bought some Pro Plus and got cracking as soon as I got home. It was a long night.

And this is the second attempt at the scroll mechanism within the box. I changed it quite a lot, and made it much shorter. I didn't take anything out, I just shrank everything down so it covered about eight pages instead. Another thing I did, was I removed the car illustrations and put them in a seperate line, which I coloured red, which indicates several things. First, it imitates the red light which is keeping all the cars stationary and stuck in a traffic jam, and second, red is a colour that connotes the bad things in life.

Which is why the figure dancing around is coloured green, because the green is good and better for the environment, as well as the signal for go. This time, only the figures are on scrolls, because while they move from side to side, the car illustration can't physically move anymore, meaning it's stuck while the person has the freedom of movement. That was what I intended, at least.

This is the cover of the book. My original intention was to have the 'Green Person' aka, the walk signal, sprayed onto the front cover, but I chose against it. I used this question instead, because posing a question to the viewer automatically asks their opinion and makes them curious as to how to answer it. That is my way of getting people to look at this book. I was going to spray paint this onto the front cover, but I ran out of time and had to stick a piece of acetate on instead.

This is my workstation on the day of the deadline, hah. Caffeine, Sausage roll...what a way to start the day.

The turning mechanism was not as smooth as I would have hoped for, but I feel that it was the best that I could managed with my limited tools and limited experience with making such things. That, and actually spray painting the cover of the book, are the main things that I would change about this design had I had a little more time, but overall, I'm pleased with the result.

-HJ x

What is Line? UV.

2009-02-13T18:14:00.000Z

More light experiments using UV!

My room all lit up in UV, how pretty.To be honest, being that I messed around with using light in the book project...I'm getting kind of bored with it. Sorry to say.

-HJ x

Photoshop Book

2009-02-13T12:54:00.000Z

Just like before, with the Illustrator brief, we had several sessions on Photoshop and InDesign with one of the computer technicians, called James. Going along with the book theme for this module, we had to create a 16 page booklet on what we have learned so far on this course.

This is the front and back cover of the book.
Images from the Mono Print workshop.

And from the Screen Print workshop.

Things I have learned to do in Adobe Illustrator.

Bookbinding.

A little more on bookbinding and some examples of the different techniques.

Examples from Visual Language sessions with Amber.

And a page on Time Management that we have been covering with Jo.
It was very simple, altogether, but I think that's fine because there was no need to over complicate things. I like the way the book turned out, althought I didn't read the brief properly apparently, and made the book A5, when it had to be A6. So there was a mad dash to the Mac Suite on the day of the deadline. I managed.

-HJ x

Module 102 Evaluation

2009-02-13T01:50:00.000Z

BA (Hons.) GRAPHIC DESIGN LEVEL 01
Module Code OUGD102
Module Title DESIGN PROCESS

END OF MODULE SELF-EVALUATION

NAME HANNAH JACKSON BLOG. ADDRESS HANNAHJACKSONBAGD.BLOGSPOT.COM

1. What practical skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

During this module I have learnt a lot about book binding and I feel that I have applied this newfound skill quite well throughout this module.

2. What approaches to/methods of problem solving have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

I have begun to let my research and development guide my work rather than having an idea to start with, though I do need to get my mind off the final resolution.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

Illustration seems o be one of my stronger points within this particular module, this is something I would like to experiment further with.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?
Doing things in the right order is one of my weaknesses, I can’t seem to break my habit of working towards a final resolution rather than experimenting more in my development work and letting that lead me.
I also need to do more thorough research.

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1. More thorough research.
2. More development before I choose an idea.
3. Manage time better.
4. More mock ups.
5. Not take on too much.

6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas:
(please indicate using an ‘x’)

5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
1 2 3 4 5
Attendance 5
Punctuality 5
Motivation 3
Commitment 4
Quantity of work produced 3
Quality of work produced 4
Contribution to the group 4

The evaluation of your work is an important part of the assessment criteria and represents a percentage of the overall grade. It is essential that you give yourself enough time to complete your written evaluation fully and with appropriate depth and level of self-reflection. If you have any questions relating to the self-evaluation process speak to a member of staff as soon as possible.

What is a Line? - Lightmark

2009-02-12T11:01:00.001Z

The following images were created by Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke, and were found on a website called Lightmark. Their work often takes place in remote, sparse places, in which their beautiful trails of light often look very surreal and sometimes very alien looking.

Using this as inspiration, I plan to move away from creating letterforms and experiment more with shapes and curved lines to see what kind of outcomes I can come up with. I have chosen to look at this technique because it is an interesting way of 'painting' without actually making any marks.

-HJ x

What is a Line? - Kyle Webster

2009-02-12T10:47:00.000Z

Kyle Webster is an artist I stumbled across whilst hanging out on ffffound.com. He has a blog called 'The Daily Figure' and obviously, he draws a figure a day, well, almost every day. It does almost exactly what it says on the tin. He uses no reference for these drawings, and completes them in a matter of moments. They are very simplistic and beautiful, almost using continuous line but not quite. He uses them as an exercise to perfect his develop his figure drawing skills.

I would love to be able to do an exercise like this to perfect my drawing skills, but at the moment I simply do not have time, and that sucks quite a lot. Another day, though.

-HJ x

32 Page Book of 100.

2009-02-01T12:17:00.000Z

After collecting all of our research on the subject of choice, which for me was movement. In hindsight I wish I'd done something different, it took me a while to come up with this idea. We had to somehow put our 100 things into a book of 32 pages. Granted, I didn't have quite 100, but I still like how the book turned out.

This first picture is from the early pages of the book, and to demonstrate a form of movement, I wrote the words in the dark using a torch. It took a while to get right. Each word is actually a different picture that I meshed together to make the sentence. I blacked out my window and set my camera on the tripod and went mad really.

This is another example of light moving, that I created with my camera on the tripod with a 30 second shutter speed. The lights and light trails were caused by me throwing glowsticks at the wall from behind the camera. I really like how the image turned out, and got some really interesting shots.
Such as these:
The idea of my book was to document movement as a 'how to draw' guide. So I took pictures of the stages of movements with my flatmates, who were very helpful, and then put them on the lightbox and created simple line sketches. I would have lined them properly in Illustrator, but time management was a bit of an issue at the time, so I didn't. I think they still look okay though.This is a collection of the images of the finished book, showing each double page spread. The print quality wasn't amazing, because I just printed it out on the printer in my room. It's good, but it's not that good. Anyway, it seemed to get a good response. People liked it.
I'd like to re-do it with illustrator smooth images and decent prints, but that's a task for another day.

-HJ x

Durex Balloon Animals

2009-01-26T20:42:00.000Z

One of the best adverts I have ever seen, no joke. Don't click if you're under eighteen. Oh God

Concertina Exercise.

2009-01-22T23:04:00.000Z

Okay, so this was an exercise that we did with Jo on Monday afternoon, it was interesting for sure. We folded up strips of paper into Concertina style books, and had to put the title of the books we had made over the week in the first box in some visually exciting way using type. Then we would pass it along to the person on our left and they would fill in the next box, and so it would go around the table until it was full. I think Martin was doing very well considoring his right arm is in plaster and he's right handed.

The ones below were another strip of paper, though this time we had to use images, we spent like, two minutes on each frame. Once they'd all gone around, they went around again, and we had a minute to work on top of someone else's drawing and add to it. That was pretty interesting.

I don't know how Disco Stu ended up on mine.

-HJ x

Visual Studies

2009-01-22T22:52:00.001Z

Okay! So in the first week back, during Visual Language we looked at Perstective and Tone with Lorenzo. Pretty cool. The first thing we had to do was try and create the perfect cube, as seen below. Mine is a little too tall, I think, it's very pointed towards the edge too, but still, not bad for a first attempt. Pretty good technique too, I'm gonna practice this one.

And then, from there, we had to do our initials, and using the same technique, make them 3D. Now, I only have two initials, so I added an A on the end for a little more practice. I think it turned out pretty good. I want some of these grey markers, they were pretty nifty.

And the week after we did perspective and tone, we were looking at schematics. I might have spelled that wrong. Anyway, I chose to illustrate the story of posting a letter in ocon form, making them as simple as possible. The journey goes as such. Put letter in envelope, write address, lick envelope, stick on stamp, bike to post box, post letter. Job done!

I think it worked well, because it was really easy to read the my classmates got what it was instantly, which was the goal. I wanna work more with this kind of thing as well as refine this one. Maybe do it in Illustrator or something.

I'll post it on here when I do.

-HJ x

I HAS BOOK

2009-01-16T20:20:00.000Z

Look at that, I made that all by myself today in the Book Binding workshop with Printroom Roger. It took most of the day, I never really realised how much went into making a book, it's a lot more complex than you'd think!

Anyhow, I really enjoyed the workshop today and I'm well proud of the book I managed to make, I mean, seriously, not bad for a first attempt. I've always wanted to know how to do this, so it's a skill I definately wanna work on. I want to try all different kinds of binding methods and see what I can do.

I'd quite like to try making a book without a hard spine like that, where you can see the stitching and the cover is just sewn right onto it, but it looks like that'll be a project for another day, because I have to have a 32 page book ready for Monday. I should be able to manage that, I hope, and thankfully it doesn't have to be bound like this.
By the way, this is referred to as 'Perfect Binding'. Mine's not perfect but with practice, I could get this down just right.

-HJ x

MORE WHAT IS A BOOK

2009-01-16T19:44:00.001Z

Tortie Rye is responsible for the creation of the below books, except, some of them I'm fairly sure she just modified existing books, I could be wrong. The little round things in the picture below are described as 'Cactus Books', and unfold into, obviously, a cactus like structure. Aren't they cute?These are bauble decorations, but are still classed as books and are aptly names 'Bauble Books' again by Tortie Rye. They're very nice to look at, though from the picture I can guess that there is no text in these 'books'? Meaning that they are purely for aesthetic value.

Still lovely though.

Literal Book Bags

I remember seeing a tutorial on some forum or another on how to turn a book into a handbag, so I went looking for them and found this example on a website called 'The Bag Lady'. I assume she sells bags. Anyway, it's a good way of creating an interesting looking bag, and recycling a hard back book. If only I was a handbag carrying person, I would go and raid the nearest charity shop of their interesting covers and go completely nuts.

The following images are the work of Brian Dettmer, and they are referred to as 'Book Autopsies'. Sounds pretty morbid, but they look completely fascinating. I'm not even sure how he does some of them, but the end result is pretty interesting.

I'm not too clear on their 'readability', but they are still definately books.

-HJ x

What is Line? Jackson Pollock.

2009-01-15T23:43:00.000Z

Now, I have a Fine Art A-Level, and I think it's that what has led me in this painty direction for What is Line. I enjoy painting. I'm not very good at it, but that doesn't really matter for this style of painting. Which I like to call, making a mess.

Mess is definately my thing, I'm good at that.

Anyhow, I've been looking into the term 'Action painting'.

"Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist." - Wikipedia

One of the most famous 'Action painters' is of course, Jackson Pollock.

Here he is. Doing his thing.

Now...to be honest, I don't like Pollock's work. I'd go as far as to say that I dislike it intensely. Hate's a strong word, y'all.

But for example, the image below? Picture the roof of a caravan that wasn't been washed in some time. Remind you of the build up of bird crap? I thought so.

This one, I suppose, isn't too bad, but it's very dark and depressing, which obviously, Jackson Pollock was himself, so it clearly reflected on his moods and such.

While I don't like his work, I like the way he works, make marks by throwing paint around and drizzling it from sticks and such. Sometimes, he didn't even use paint brushes! And this is mainly what has inspired me to try as many different techniques that I can think of to make marks, lines specifically, without me ever touching the paper.

-HJ x

Lichtfaktor

2009-01-12T11:18:00.000Z

This video by Lichtfaktor is one of the best pieces of light graffiti I have found, and is my favorite. It is truly amazing and must have taken a lot of work. I love how the light fight was created, and would love to try something like this, though time may prove to be a bit of an issue. Oh well, I do have all reading week to work on this!

WHAT IS A BOOK?

2009-01-05T22:34:00.000Z

Emily An.

Yes, these are books, despite what they seem. They are constructed from Newspaper or magazine pages, and represent just how much of a tree it takes to make just one newspaper or magazine.

Although there is an obvious centre, and in some images a spine is clearly seen, I'm not sure that these 'books' were meant for reading. I don't know about anyone else, but I for one would probably not be able to get the thing back into the bark exterior.

In the image below, the middle 'book' is to represent The Yellow Pages. Look at how much paper that is!

As well as being interesting, and one of the most unique forms of books that I've ever seen, I think that they are very clever. It really hammers it home, to me at least, just how much paper is used to create one publication, that we later throw out.

I've become a bit of a recycling fiend lately anyway.

Su Blackwell.

Blackwell creates scenes from books, by cutting them out and creating 3D models from the pages. It's sort of like a wierd form of pop-up, except I don't think that you can close the books. It's an interesting way of altering a book, however. As we can see in the image below, a scene from Alice Through The Looking Glass has been created, using cut outs from pictures as well as models fashioned from other pages in the books.
And the image below depicts a forest, though this one looks a little flatter than the ATTLG one, for instance there is not chair made from a solid block of paper. These seem to be flat trees pushed up from the pages. No less interesting, however.

It kind of reminds me of that one scene from The Three Musketeers? When Aramis flipped open his bible to reveal a gun hidden in there from the pages being carved out around it? Nifty hiding place.

-HJ x

Packaging Design

2009-01-04T21:01:00.000Z

So I've been lurking around lately, and really, I haven't gotten a lot of work done at home yet.Some, but not an extensive amount. I'm a little umotivated and spend my days watching Miami Ink. Plus, Santa brought me the flu for christmas and that kind of knocked me out. Anyway, here's some awesome packaging design that I've discovered during my surfing.

Andy Mangold redesigned the Monopoly packaging, and I think it looks so much better. It looks much classier and suits such a classic game, rather than the gaudy packaging that we often see the game in. You can see the details and the rest of the redesign here.
This packaging for baby converse was designed by Ronny Poon. Personally, I love the lace up detail on the box, and according to the designer, provides some form of child learning benefit. A quote from the designer is:

"A fun package for toddlers’ Converse shoes. It helps improve children’s motor skills by allowing the child to lace-up the box. When 5 boxes are collected they can be placed together to form the Converse star."

I can't see a toddler needing five pairs of Chucks, but fair enough. I thought it was aesthetically pleasing.This is possibly the best condom packaging I have ever seen in my life. This design was entered into the Sex & Sundhed packaging competition by Mads Jakob Poulsen and Robert Nagy. It's simple and humorous, and well, it gets the message across.

-HJ x

What if...? SELF EVALUATION

2008-12-17T18:31:00.000Z

What if…? – SELF EVALUATION

What problem did you identify?

The texture of fresh fruit is preventing people from getting their ‘5-a-day’.

What evidence did you find to support your decisions?

Facts and statistics about many people failing to meet the 5-a-day target.

What methods did you use to gather your evidence and what forms did it take?

Primary/Quantitative/Qualitative – Surveys, Questionnaires.

Secondary/Qualititative – Articles

Secondary/Quantitative – Statistics

What methods did you find useful and why?

The initial survey that we did was very useful as it backed up our problem and allowed us to move forward.

How did these inform the response to your problem?

By knowing that the majority of people we asked said that the texture of fruit affected their five-a-day intake, we decided that the next step would be to inform people of the alternatives to fresh fruit that also count towards their five-a-day.

What methods did you find problematic?

How did you overcome this? How will you address these issues in the future?

What research didn’t you carry out that would have proved successful?

We could have gotten some qualitative primary research by asking people to elaborate on the particular fruits they had problems with.

What five things would you do differently next time?

-Taken the solution out into the public domain.

-Asked people to elaborate on why texture affected their 5-a-day intake.

List five things you have learned about the design process over the past 2 weeks.

-The difference between Qualitative and Quantitative research.

-Thorough research is very important.

-Working blind is scary but worthwhile.

-Without research I will do a resolution in a style that I am comfortable with.

-Doing a resolution and then going back to do the research is not a good process.

-HJ x

Oh I'm ready for it.

2008-12-16T23:12:00.000Z

Come on, bring it Christmas. I'm ready for it.

TYPOGATEAUX

2008-12-16T18:44:00.001Z

Okay, so. Leigh and I teamed up to do the Typogateaux project together. Because we're both awesome and all that jazz. Anyway. This is the documentation of the process. It was a fun and messy process too.

Leigh making cake batter.Me taking my turn at stirring.
Mmm...
Easy, Leigh.
Mmm...doesn't look that appetizing...

Into the oven with you!
Eating the leftovers, mmm.
The result. A little burned but...this was just a practice cake!

This is what was salvaged from it. Still tasted good.

The second attempt. Much softer and generally better done.

Cut into letterforms...
The base cake batter!
Mmm, making the icing. What a tiring job.
Icing the letters.
Still...icing the letters.
The base cake! Now that looks like some good cake.

Icing the base cake.
Making a mess while I'm at it, too.

Sticking the letters into the icing.
And this is after I painted the letters with food colouring and added the black lines! Tetris! Or at least, the best that we could do. I'm well chuffed.

And now it's sitting in the fridge, waiting to be taken in on thursday. Job well done!

-HJ x

Carl's Illustrator Poster...

2008-12-12T22:55:00.001Z

Awww

Seriously, how nice is that? The illustrator version of the font he made for me. He gave it to me with my namebadge as a christmas present, and I gave him the one I made for him. Awww.

I told you I'd stick it up, Carl!

-HJ x

I JUST FOUND THIS PICTURE

2008-12-12T22:46:00.000Z

That's me in about....ooh, 2006? Age 16. I would have said younger, but that's my film SLR so it was during AS levels. That's in Cyprus, and I was on a mountain and it was cold. Hence the hoodie. My dad took this when I, clearly, wasn't paying attention, haha.Look at that mad rad hair!

-HJ x

WHAT IF...?

2008-12-12T22:05:00.001Z

Alriiiight, so, another group project, this time working with Emma, Gareth and Mille. The point of this project is to teach us to work more with our research, and let process drive the outcome, rather than have an outcome in mind. That was we only end up doing things that we've done before. Doing a project and not knowing what the final outcome will be is a little bit wierd, though I guess it worked out okay.

At first we were dealing with texture and personality, though it was a difficult concept, and so we went on to deal with the problem that people aren't getting their five-a-day because they don't like the texture of certain fruits. We did a survey amongst the class to confirm this.

This is a series of macro shots looking at the texture of both the skin and the flesh of certain fruit. It looks all interesting, and nice. Our solution turned out to be a way to make people realise that there are alternatives to fresh fruit that still contribute to their five-a-day, and we took it upon ourselves to make people aware of this. This came in the form of a fruit stall, offering alternatives to fresh fruit such as dried fruit and fruit juice. The pictures below recorded the experience.

This proved to be pretty successful, and the fruit went kinda fast. I mean, what right-minded student would say no to free food? Not I. Anyway, we had a survey to fill out again asking people if they found anything new they liked and if it would contribute to their five a day, and 'yes's outweighed the 'no's by a mile. I would call that a success,

This is all out research and recordings pinned to the wall for the crit this afternoon. I'd say we got a fair bit of work done. A lot more than we did for the last group project that's for sure.

I feel I'm already evolving as a designer.

-HJ x

Mario Kart Song

2008-12-12T21:08:00.000Z

I'm spreading the love, despite it not being Graphic Design related.

-HJ x

Technically not graphic design but...

2008-12-10T22:15:00.000Z

I just made soap! This is my first attempt at it, and this side of it looks really good! (It's wrapped in clingfilm, by the way, it's not actually got white bits on it.) The other side, which was the top, looks kind of dodgy because I heated it up too much. Oh well, first attempt though! Not bad, if I do say so myself.

Mmm...honey and lemon scented.

-HJ x

Human Numerals

2008-12-09T18:44:00.000Z

A continuation of the 'number one' theme that I was giving during visual language. Human numerals! Hurrah!

What a lovely expression, Carl :]

Beautiful expression, Ed Webb.

Clearly, there wasn't a lot of room in the classroom, so you can't see some people's feet, but we had to make do, so. Still pretty amusing.

Leigh! Haha. Look at you all bein' an X.

I wanna do this again, but properly, where you can see people's feet and everything. That could be quite good.

-HJ x

Visual Language Week 5: Ones

2008-12-09T14:06:00.000Z

On this session, everybody in the room was given an object, letter or number to gather from around the classroom. We weren't allowed to leave the studio, so all of our things had to be sourced from the classroom. As you can see, I got the number one, and there aren't that many of them in the studio. Plus, I left my camera on my bed and had to borrow Leigh's when she wasn't using it. Isn't she nice?

There were a few more, but nothing really amazing, just tiny, pathetic excuses for numbers so I just threw these up.

-HJ x

Visual Language week 4

2008-12-09T13:05:00.000Z

So I'm completely running behind on this, please bear with me.
We did this on week four of Visual Language with Amber, which was a while ago, I know. I'm catching up now.

So yes, A2 sheet of paper divided into 16 sections. Amber called out words to us for us to visually represent, as well as giving us different times for each one, ranging from thirty seconds to ten minutes, I think. Once we'd done one on our own sheet, we'd go to someone else's sheet and do the next word on their's, while someone else did one on mine, and then we'd go back to our own and do another one, so on and so forth. Unfortunately, I don't remember what the words were for each one, but I do know that the Batman related box was to represent George Clooney. I did that one and it's my favourite. I also like the cow that Leigh drew for me.

I didn't have my camera with me during the session, so I didn't get pictures of anyone else's, but trust me when I say there were some good ones out there!

-HJ x

100 Photographs

2008-12-09T11:32:00.000Z

The first brief of the new module was to take 100 photographs in a week, and have them all printed and cut out ready for the studio session. Not that hard, you might think, but it was more difficult to take 100 photographs than I actually thought. I think I did okay though. 100 exactly!

The subjects were: People, Objects, Places, Text and Textures. I had a lot of textures, because that's an interest of mine anyway. I love texture.

Anyway, then we were split into groups, me, Will, Gareth and Hanna G. It was a good team.

We split them into piles of each category.

And then tried to work out a way of arranging them with one another's in a pattern that made sense.

We tried to fit all of them on the table space that we had, but clearly that wasn't happening. Hanna and Gareth's were the same size, so we let them have the table, and me and Will took ours to the floor. Which seemed to work out quite well for us.

I really like the way that we laid ours out. It just worked really well, and worked together as well as individually. The themes go, from left to right: Textures (5 columns), People (2 columns), Text (2 columns), Objects (4 columns), and Places (3 columns).

A couple of examples of how other people in the room were working and laying theirs out.

Next, we were given the names from another group, and had to go and rearrange their photographs into some kind of order. We had Dan Boom(e?) and Gavin Drury.

Dan's:
This is how it started. It was kind of hard to categorize. There were a lot of train pictures, and pictures of plants near a train station, and then some shoes and then Matt (Milner?). Will and I started categorizing from green to not so green, but we kept changing our minds. We ended up doing from the wilderness to civilisation. Or, the beginning and end of Leeds. Ending in Matt.

This is what it looked like by the time that we were done with it. It kept falling off the wall though.

Gavin didn't have any photographs, so we took on the mammoth task of Tom Cummings. Don't ever try to categorize Tom, it's just, really hard.

Looking through his photographs, which were all really random in relation to one another, we struggled to find some way to categorize them. We came up with the idea of from Tom to not Tom, but that proved to be too difficult. We ended up going from crazy colours to dull colours.

It starts out running along the top of the board and around the corner...

And keeps going across the window, and around another corner...
...and onto the other board, working around other people's work and down the other side and doubling back on itself along the bottom. I think that the way we laid it out even represented Tom. It started off neat, ended...well, you can see how it ended. Later, when we had to write down ten words that coupld possibly represent our work, Tom made the mistake of writing his name on the sheet, and everyone ticked that instead of the actual options. I thought it was pretty Tom.

Back into the other room to see what had been done to my work.

Dan and Gavin had arranged it from rough to smooth, starting with the roughest textures at the top, and the smoothest at the bottom.

The top third containing the rougher textures.The middle textures.And the smoother ones, ending in a nice smooth ribbon. This was a good way of categorizing my work, I wouldn't have thought of that. All in all! A wierd but pretty good day.

-HJ x

Result of the first module.

2008-12-09T11:30:00.000Z

66%

Hell yeah~

-HJ x

What is a Line?

2008-12-01T14:59:00.000Z

line¹ (ln)

1. Mathematics A geometric figure formed by a point moving along a fixed direction and the reverse direction.

a. A thin continuous mark, as that made by a pen, pencil, or brush applied to a surface.

b. A similar mark cut or scratched into a surface.

c. A crease in the skin, especially on the face; a wrinkle.

a. A real or imaginary mark positioned in relation to fixed points of reference.

b. A degree or circle of longitude or latitude drawn on a map or globe.

c. The equator. Used with the.

a. A border or boundary: the county line.

b. A demarcation: a line of darker water beyond the reef.

c. A contour or an outline: the line of the hills against the evening sky.

a. A mark used to define a shape or represent a contour.

b. Any of the marks that make up the formal design of a picture.

a. A cable, rope, string, cord, or wire.

b. Nautical A rope used aboard a ship.

c. A fishing line.

d. A clothesline.

e. A cord or tape used, as by builders or surveyors, for measuring, leveling, or straightening.

7. A pipe or system of pipes for conveying a fluid: gas lines.

8. An electric-power transmission cable.

a. A wire or system of wires connecting telephone or telegraph systems.

b. An open or functioning telephone connection: tried to get a free line.

10.

a. A passenger or cargo system of public or private transportation, as by ship, aircraft, or bus, usually over a definite route.

b. A company owning or managing such a system.

11.

a. A railway track or system of tracks.

b. A particular section of a railway network: the Philadelphia-Trenton line.

12. A course of progress or movement; a route: a line of flight.

13.

a. A general method, manner, or course of procedure: different lines of thought; took a hard line on defense.

b. A manner or course of procedure determined by a specified factor: development along socialist lines.

c. An official or prescribed policy: the party line.

14. A general concept or model. Often used in the plural: a trilogy along the lines of the Oresteia.

15. A condition of agreement; alignment: brought the front wheels into line; a wage agreement in line with current inflation.

16.

a. One's trade, occupation, or field of interest: What line of work are you in?

b. Range of competence: not in my line.

17. Merchandise or services of a similar or related nature: carries a complete line of small tools.

18. A group of persons or things arranged in a row or series: long lines at the box office; a line of stones.

19.

a. Ancestry or lineage.

b. A series of persons, especially from one family, who succeed each other: a line of monarchs; comes from a long line of bankers.

c. A strain, as of livestock or plants, developed and maintained by selective breeding.

20.

a. A sequence of related things that leads to a certain ending: a line of argument.

b. An ordered system of operations that allows a sequential manufacture or assembly of goods at all or various stages of production.

c. The personnel of an organization or a business who actually make a product or perform a service.

21.

a. A horizontal row of printed or written words or symbols.

b. One of the horizontal scans forming a television image.

22. A brief letter; a note: I'll drop you a line.

23.

a. A unit of verse ending in a visual or typographic break and generally characterized by its length and meter: a line of iambic pentameter.

b. The dialogue of a theatrical presentation, such as a play. Often used in the plural: spent the weekend learning her lines.

24. Informal Glib or insincere talk, usually intended to deceive or impress: He kept on handing me a line about how busy he is.

25. lines Chiefly British

a. A marriage certificate.

b. A usually specified number of lines of prose or verse to be written out by a pupil as punishment.

26. Games A horizontal demarcation on a scorecard in bridge dividing the honor score from the trick score.

27.

a. A source of information.

b. The information itself: got a line on the computer project.

28.

a. Music One of the five parallel marks constituting a staff.

b. A sustained melodic or harmonic part in a piece: a rock song with a driving bass line.

29.

a. A formation in which elements, such as troops, tanks, or ships, are arranged abreast of one another.

b. The battle area closest to the enemy; the front.

c. The combat troops or warships at the front, arrayed for defense or offense.

d. The regular forces of an army or a navy, in contrast to staff and support personnel.

e. The class of officers in direct command of warships or of army combat units.

f. A bulwark or trench.

g. An extended system of such fortifications or defenses: the Siegfried line.

30. Sports

a. A foul line.

b. A real or imaginary mark demarcating a specified section of a playing area or field.

c. A real or imaginary mark or point at which a race begins or ends.

d. The center and two wings making up a hockey team's offensive unit.

e. Football A line of scrimmage.

f. Football The linemen considered as a group.

31. Informal The odds a bookmaker gives, especially for sports events.

32. The proportion of an insurance risk assumed by a particular underwriter or company.

33. Slang A small amount of cocaine arranged in a thin, usually tightly rolled strip for sniffing.

34. Archaic One's lot or position in life.

Illustrator Brief

2008-11-23T21:42:00.000Z

We had to further develop the typeface we made for our assigned partner, in my case Carl, in Illustrator. Now, I'm Illustrator self taught, and it was a little bit of a drag sitting through several hours of Illustrator sessions. Though, I did learn a couple of nifty tricks that were pretty interesting, though still. Two hours.

Anyway, this is what the A1 poster looks like. As you can see I've put the typeface into the proper Space Invaders game layout, and I really love how it turned out. The original Space Invaders game was green on black, but I changed it, obviously, to be yellow on black, because that most definately fits in with the whole CMYK restrictions of the brief, no doubt about it.

How nifty is that? I'm pretty chuffed with that, if I do say so myself.

-HJ x

Stina Persson

2008-11-23T21:07:00.001Z

Stina Persson is one of my favourite artists, and as you can see from the work below, it's simply beautiful. I may, or may not, have mentioned before that I love working in all kind of materials, paints, inks, pastels, you name it.

I came across this artist in a book called...Illusive, I believe, a year or so ago at my last college and fell in love with the technique. I rushed out and bought masking fluid, that's safe to say.

Persson works with cut paper and inks, though my favourite of her styles are her watercolour pieces, some of which are shown below. She masks areas off and then just goes nuts with the paint, and it's same to say that the result is amazing.

I even tried to adapt the technique myself, and wow is it a messy job. After lots of failed attempts and lost of mess, I finally came up with ine that worked, and here it is!

Obviously it's a lot cleaner and sharper than Persson's technique, but I'll definately be giving this one more work in the future. It was good fun. I look wierd in watercolour.

-HJ x

10 Letters

2008-11-23T18:46:00.000Z

So in my first post to this blog I mentioned how terrible my first attempt at this project really was, so I redid it for my module deadline, which is tomorrow, eek. Anyway, my word was 'deconstruct', and I think this typeface fits the bill much better, because it's based on glyphs made out of lego. For some reason, I couldn't get the picture any bigger, but you get the general gist of it.

Enjoy, y'all.

-HJ x

Visual Literacy Week 2

2008-11-12T19:10:00.000Z

So the second week of visual literacy rolled around, and there was more cutting and sticking. Also, the Randomizer made another appearance, except there were two. :O.

On yellow, we had to write five adjectives, cut them up, fold them up, and stick them in the box, and on blue we had to write five verbs and do the same. Then we picked one of each and had to visually represent it on A2 off-white using the primary colours. The first ones I pulled out were Destructive Fall, and that is represented in the right of the image below of a dude falling down a cliff. I finished it pretty quick and so picked two more out of the box. I got Excited Jump, which was essentially the same, only backwards. So I decided to try be clever and do the same image, but with the guy jumping back up the cliff. They ended up being pretty sweet, but because the figure was in yellow, he was a little difficult to see. The direction of the letters kind of helps though.

And then somebody had to pick an animal, and someone chose Bear. We then all picked an adjective to represent. I ended up with fat, can you tell? He's split his stitches. Loz got drunk, and that was such a good picture, but I couldn't get a photo.

And then we had worms, which was, to be honest, really easy. For this one, we had to pick a verb. I got jump, and this is what I came up with.

These are some of the images that the rest of the class came up with.

This is my favourite, Ed Webb's.

-HJ x

No News is Good News part 2

2008-11-12T18:30:00.000Z

From those little sketches that I posted before about carbon footprints and angry looking clouds and carrier bags, this was what was created.

The brief was to create a series of three posters, 2:1 A3 format, one made of image, one made of type, and one combined. No black or white was allowed, apparently that included paper stock, but I was safe when it came to that because I printed on brown paper. I love that. It gives everything more of an 'eco' feel.

I would have uploaded the posters seperately so that you could see the detail, but for some reason blogger turned them blue when they loaded up, and photobucket turned them pink, so you'll have to make do with a photograph of them on the wall. Ignore the post-its, they were people voting for the one which they thought answered the brief the best. Mine got four votes, yay! Well chuffed.

These are the posters from my classmates that made it into my favourites

This one's Gareth's. It's very attention grabbing, as you can see, and the message is clear and well thought out.

This one belongs to Loz. I love it despite the fact that the yellow one didn't exactly work out the way she had hoped. Still though, works as a set and it's interesting/amusing.And Ollie's, which was cleverly thought out and well exectued in my opinion. Drawing attention to the cliches that are all over the place in graphic design at the moment. Love it, I voted for this one.

-HJ x

Star Wars Acapella

2008-11-12T18:25:00.000Z

This! This is the best thing I ever seen in my life. Watch it right now. It's not even Graphic Design related but damn, it's still amazing. I dare you not to love it.

Stuff that's just awesome.

2008-11-12T18:10:00.000Z

Alrighty, so this is a collection of awesome stuff that I've found while surfing the web. I love to surf. The font below made of bones was created by Sara Morissey. I think it's so clever how bones in the body have turned on their sides and moved around to represent letterforms. I especially love the sideways skull that forms the D at the end of BLOOD. And the H formed from the ribcage at the end of FLESH.

The image below is actually a real advert for SEGA. I can't believe that it ever went to print, and appeared in real magazines. It's very clever, though dirty, I completely love it. Innuendos in adverts are amazing.

This is just about the best thing I've come across ever in my life. It's a handmade Adobe Photoshop CS4 screen, made up of boxes and paints and paintbrushes to represent the real thing. It must be absolutely huge when seen up close. This was created by an agency called Bates141 Jakarta

Again, I can't find the name of who created this, and it's not very graphic design, but who cares? It's my blog and I'll put what I want on it. This image, to me is just so beautiful. How the dress stills forms the right shape even though it is full of balloons and not full of human. Although, in reality, it must be made of something already rigid for it to make such a shape. I really love how the balloons can be seen through the thin fabric and are blurred and soft looking. Beautiful.

-HJ x

Interesting colourwheels

2008-11-12T17:59:00.000Z

Whilst surfing the web, I've come across these interesting ways of representing a colour wheel. I especially like the leaves below. I could not find, for the life of me, who made it, but if they ever stumble across this blog, kudos to you. It looks great. I love red leaves.

Okay, the two colourwheels below were found on this website. I think they're really interesting and unusual ways to represent a colourwheel, but they're very aesthetically pleasing too.
-HJ x

Visual Literacy Week 1

2008-11-12T17:53:00.000Z

Okay so obviously I'm running a little late on the blog thing. But it's cool because I have a ton of stuff to upload tonight, and then I'll be on top of things again. Hopefully.

Anyway, we've just started this module called Visual Literacy with Amber and Lorenzo, but we haven't been taught by Lorenzo yet, it's still cool. It's all cutting and sticking so far. Fun stuff.

Anyway, a load of words were put into 'The Randomizer', which is essentially a cardboard box, and we had to pick a word at random, and visually represent it in a 15x15 square using coloured paper using squares, lines and letterforms. It was pretty fun, and there were some obscure ones in the box.

From left to right, clockwise: Repetition. Excitement. Line. Mirror.

I had some others but they weren't too great at all. I had one that said boom, but it got a bit destroyed on the way home, so you can't see it.

It was a fun exersize, I enjoyed it, even if I did get the most epic of papercuts from it.

-HJ x

Visual Literacy

2008-11-09T22:49:00.000Z

Okay so I'll be brutally honest, I completely forgot about this brief (despite it being tacked to my wall) until Lindsey reminded me that it was due in tomorrow, so, oops. I'll do what I can and probably build on it if it turns out a bit shit.

So let's get started!

Visual Synechdoche

This term is applied when a part is used to represent the whole, or vice versa. Quite simple, the main subject is substitued for something that is inherently connected to it. This substitution only works if what the synechdoche represents is universally recognized and understood, rather than taken at face value for it's literal meaning. The ability to refer to a group of a class of objects through a visual device enables a designer to convey an idea in a clean and unfettered manner.

Class example: The Statue of Liberty to represent New York City.

My Example:

The super hero of the Marvel comic books and God, The Mighty Thor. While not universally recognised and understood, within the context of comic books and Gods, this character is well known, and those who know of him also know of his trademark weapon, the Hammer of Thor. The character himself has been substituted for the image of the Hammer almost alone in the image, well known enough that he doesn't even have to be in the image for people to know who the image is about.

Visual Metaphor

A visual metaphor is used to transfer the meaning from one image to another. Although the images may have no close relationship, a metaphor conveys an impression about something relatively unfamiliar by drawing a comparison between it and something familiar.

Class example: The Big Apple as a metaphor for New York City.

My example(s): Saying somebody is a wet blanket as a metaphor for being dull.

This image has depicted the earth as the yolk of a frying egg as a metaphor for global warming and how the earth is getting too hot. I think that this works brillianted, and it's very visually appealing. It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Visual Metonym

A visual metonym is a symbolic image that is used to make reference to something with a more literal meaning. For example, a cross might be used to signify the church. by way of association the viewer makes a connection between the image and the intended subject. Unlike a visual synechdoche, the two images bear a close relatiionship, but are not intrinsically linked. And unlike visual metaphors, metonyms do not transfer the characteristics of one image to another.

Class example: Yellow cabs used as a metonym for New York City. Yellow cabs are used in cities all over America, but we automatically associate them with New York City.

My example(s): Bagettes to represent France. Pizza to represent Italy.

Absolut Vodka company love to make their adverts where more often than not, the product isn't even featured in the image at all, but instead something that looks like the shape of the bottle, which makes the viewer think of the product. Absolut Geneva refers to swiss watchmaking, and the product of substitured for a small piece of the watch that is the shape of the bottle. I love Absolut adverts.

Anyway, I hope that about covers it for now!

HJ x

TO DO LIST

2008-11-05T18:24:00.001Z

I made myself a 'To Do List' and I've only crossed one thing off! Adfsahlgkdakjsa! Not impressed.

No News is Good News

2008-11-05T18:11:00.000Z

Over reading week we had to choose an article from the Guardian dated the 15th of September, that we were given on our first day of the course. Thankfully, I hadn't gotten around to using mine to protect the floor from paint splatter just yet, so it was still intact. Anyway, I chose an artical on Plastic Recycling. On Monday in college we were given half an hour, lots of A5 pieces of coloured paper, and were told to produce as many solutions as possible.

I made about sixteen. Apparently we're supposed to be able to make 30 in 30 minutes, but my mind doesn't work that fast yet. Out of the sixteen, there weren't that many decent ones, but here they are. By the way, I hate photobucket. I am not having a good day.

The one below is my favourite, and is definately going to be an idea I expand on for the current brief. I had a good time this morning walking painty footprints everywhere.

The image below pictures the pile of images that got rejected. They really weren't that awesome.

By the way, they're all photographs because my scanner is a retard.

What is Orange?

2008-11-05T17:21:00.000Z

Okay, for this brief we had to create ten images, 15cm x 15cm, that said what we perceive to be the meaning of Orange. For me, the colour orange has connotations of fun, happy times, so I chose to create an orange character in orange situations. Personifying an orange, I gave it a face, arms and legs, and created happy scenes from the orange's life. I started quite early, chooseing to depict the orange on Halloween.

I chose halloween because one of the colours associated with this holiday is orange. This image is humorous because instead of giving the orange a costume like a ghost or a monster, I decided to have the orange be dressed up as a lemon for halloween, and his best friend, a carrot, dressed as a pear.

All of these images were done in Illustrator and took quite some time, a minimum of three hours on each. My eyes hated me by the end of it, we'll just say that.

The next scene finds our orange during Christmas. The fire gives the room a nice orange glow, and Orange Amplifiers is a well known (and expensive) brand of amplifiers. I know that I wasn't supposed to use text within the image, but it really wouldn't have worked without it, so I thought 'sod it!'.

This, I think, is one of the cutest ones. I chose to place my orange during his break at work on a building site because of the flourescent jackets that builders wear. While the background isn't as detailed as the two above, I quite like it. I mainly like the distant oranges in their hard hats in the background.

Again, I know that I'm not supposed to use text within the image, but I really couldn't resist using such a name for a tanning salon. This scene depicts our orange chilling out after a hard day at work.
The image quality of this one is horrible, because well, I had computer problems and had to format my laptop. Apparently the one folder that I didn't back up was the one containing the files for this project. I had a horrified moment early and panicked until I remember that I had most of the files backed up on my memory stick. Just not this one. Can't really complain though. So yes, I had to scan this one, hence the God awful quality.
I'm aware that I only have five images here. There were five 15 x 15 auqares with just text in them, but during our crit, I discovered that the images worked better without the text, so I decided not to load them up. The original plan was to have ten illustrations anyway, but we were only give five days for the project and well, there just wasn't enough time. I do intend to complete it, and do five more illustrations before the module deadline sometime in November. Man I am swamped right now.

The process of putting up the images. Excuse the bad quality, I didn't have the flash on my camera and so it wasn't too steady.

The top half of the board, mine's in the top left hand corner. Complete with text squares.

The bottom half of the board. I do love the pumpkins.

Adios. x

Alphonse Mucha

2008-10-29T22:27:00.000Z

I have recently discovered the work of Alphonse Mucha. He was famous last century, so I guess you could say I'm a little slow on the uptake, but anyways. I am a big fan of Art Nouveau, I'd say it was my favourite, if I had to pick, out of all the art movements. Bauhaus would be at the bottom of the list, let me tell you. I know, I know, that we wouldn't have so much of what we have today without it, and we would be behind the times or whatever. If you had to do an entire year of just Bauhaus with my waffy A-Level teacher, you would understand. Besides, I am not a fan on Modernism, not in the slightest.

Anyway, I'm going off on one, as they say. These three images are all by Alphonse Mucha, and I really do think that they are beautiful pieces of work. I love the colours used, pale and washed out, nothing that really leaps out and smacks you in the face. It just works as a piece, and is beautiful. I love how elegant the pieces are, with the curves and the flowing lines and the folds of draped fabric. They're elaborate, but not to the point where you think that too much is going on.

One of my favourite things about these Alphonse Mucha images, is the way that he does hair. It's not even that detailed in it's shading, and it doesn't look like realistic hair, but the curls and the way it flows often gives it a sense of direction. In the image below the lack of detail to the hair is most apparent. It's almost a solid colour, but closer inspection would reveal that it's more of a wash of colour, slight hues within it. I love how simple the hair and the clothing is in comparison to the detail given to the face and the rest of the body.

A slightly unrelated point, but I don't know how many of you have walked past a Clinton's Cards lately and seen the gorgeous 'Deco' prints and fullsize cardboard cutouts they have in there? Well, if you haven't, just know that they're beautiful. I was walking past today after buying Chipsticks from Poundland, and I saw this box of rolled up posters, and it said, 'Deco Posters 99p!' in rather large letters. They were full size posters too. Anyway, I got all excited and was routing through the box, thinking, they're cheap! I'll get two! And then I moved the posters enough, to noticing some little writing under the '99p!' that said 'when you spend £10 on Deco products'. Ugh. I got so excited, and then bam. Please, Clinton's Cards, make the font a little bigger so that no more people get let down like I did. I swear, you don't get owt for nowt these days.

This, frankly gorgeous, picture is by an artist called Stella Im Hultberg. A lot of her pictures are like this, made up of ink washes and stains, and are on tea stained paper, like the one above. I love that the image isn't on white paper, it really wouldn't have the same effect of it was. The colour of the background adds to the effect of the image, giving the whole thing a soft, almost hazy tone. It really does inspire me to try working on not just different coloured paper, but on top of washes and textures that I make myself. I'm going to use some of those that I made while doing mono printing, some of those turned out pretty sweet.

And this last point couldn't be further from the whole Art Nouveau thing, but still. I don't know how many of you have ever played this game. Pretty much, the game took a week to make, and is made entirely of white vector lines. You can put your own music into it, and the line rabbit has to jump over obstacles in time to the music. It's so simple, yet very entertaining. It's almost as simple a concept as Pong. Anyway, if you do badly, the rabbit, Vibri, will turn into a frog, and if you still do worse, she will turn into this kind of worm thing with a television for a head. If you do really well, she'll turn into a princess and dance across the obstacles. It's pretty cute. Anyway, I've recently got my PS1 routed out and hooked up in the flat, and I was thinking, damn I need to get this game again, so I go to ebay. And seriously, for a second hand game that consists of...sticks, really, £20 is the lowest I have found. It's such a low key game! I thought I would have been able to pick it up for about a fiver!

Another bummer is that I've lost my FFVII game :[ I have disc 2 of 4 and the rest has just gone kaput. I really need to get a new one.

- HJ x

Beautiful Type

2008-10-27T14:20:00.000Z

Okay so, after surfing the web for a good while, I have encountered a good few examples of typography that is just, yeah, brilliant. I love it.

This one below is called Garamond Powerline and was designed by Daniel Adolph, at least, that's what I can work out from the rather unhelpful website that it came from: Here. Granted, I saw this picture below irst, and you can't tell exactly what it is because it's quite small, I sill found it loely and clicked the link to investigate further, where i found the closeups of each letter and wow, I really think that's it's amazing. I've never seen anything like it, it really is pretty original. I love all the wires leading off of them, and even though they don't meet, it still looks great when the letters are placed together in a word.

This image has been designed by SHCH Graphics Group and was found on here. I think that it's a beautiful piece of typography, and it was done entirely by hand with a pen. I think it looks all the better for the fact that it's silver on black paper. I think it makes it a lot more interesting to look at than had it been black on white.

I love that this image has been printed onto paper that has just been found, all creased and stained, it is so obviously recycled and makes me think of art that is eco friendly. I really do like eco art. I guess I would kind of call myself a bit of an Eco Warrior. Ths image was designed by debruehe on DeviantART.

The same story goes for this image, I love the whole recycled feel of the image. Personally, I love working with texture, so this image stands out to me. This was designed by fabianohikaru on DeviantART.

Finally, the image below was designed by DryBones90 on DeviantART, and I think that it is a very interesting use of typography. I love to see images maeup entirely of type, and while I've never tried to use this technique myself, I would love to give it a go someday.

For some reason, the journal is cutting off half of my images, so if you want to see them, you'll have to click them to see the full image. Sorry about that.

- HJ x

Carl's Font

2008-10-17T21:18:00.000+01:00

Okay! The latest project lasted two weeks, and we had to design a font based on the personality of a partner that we were asigned. It's pretty interesting project to say the least. Anyway, I got paired with the lovely Carl, and the words I had to work with were: (His) Perfectionist, Shy, Understanding, Camp and Videogame Geek. (Mine) Easy to talk to, Video gamer, Friendly, Cheerful, and Meticulous.

His style of working is the complete opposite of mine. Whereas my work is very messy and thrown on, I work with a lot of paint and inks and love to get really hands on with my work. I love traditional media. His work is very precise, and neat, and perfectly aligned. I can see why he calls himself a perfectionist.

My first idea was to try and combine our two styles, trying to create a controlled mess within a perfectly aligned space, but it simply wasn't happening. Another idea was to use the word shy, and to have Carl's name in small letters, in the corner of a block of bright colour. But during the crit we decided that that wasn't Carl at all, so the idea was scrapped.

Inspiration struck at the fact that video gamer was on both of our lists, so I decided to go back and look at the pixellated fonts used within videogames, especially retro ones.

You can't get much more retro than Space Invaders.
Tadaa. Personally, I love it. I know that it can't be seen all too well in the photograph but the Illustrator version will be up soon enough and you'll be able to see it in all it's true glory. I wanted to fill in the blocks, but I wasn't sure what media to use. Pen would have left it too streaky, and I spent far too long aligning it all dead centre and tracing it perfectly to ruin it with paint. That and my sucky time management skills came into play.

Also, I actually did the wrong glyphs. I forgot which ones Amber drew up for us to do, and just went with it really. I know that the @ was supposed to be included, but it doesn't easily translate into pixels. I'll work on that one some more and maybe have it as the Mother Monster at the top of the Space Invaders game. Oh the ideas.

I wanted to show it as a part of the game itself so that the theme became even more apparent. Pixel font is generally associated with video games, especially older ones. Besides, who doesn't know what Space Invaders is?

I did do a coloured version on Illustrator, but it looked a lot more like Tetris, and went along that line, but you'll see that later because that's a whole other story.

Carl's font for me. Personally, I really like it. It was completely different to everyone else's in the fact that he hadn't used actual letterforms. It's almost like a Dingbats font in a way, still an alphabet, but almost entirely unreadable. Except to Carl who spent so long staring at it he claims he can read it now. Crazy world. Anyway, I love it, and really think that it shows me. That is my kind of style, only more messy and uncontrolled. It's almost like he tried to combine both of our styles into one, like, a controlled mess. Whereas I didn't achieve that, he really did and it just works. I love it, though a key would be useful, especially when it comes to the punctuation.

Shoddy quality picture I know, but mine and Carl's typefaces together just after the presentation. We had to go first, but according to Tom we 'set the bar' so I guess it wasn't a bad thing.

X

Stencils

2008-10-17T19:27:00.000+01:00

My scanner really wonked out on these scans. I mean, look at that A! What even happened there? Kind of cool effect though. The point of this is to just say that I noticed that the recent printing had left some pretty sweet patterns and colours on my stencils. Thought I'd share them with you all.

That's all x

Mono Printing and Screen Printing

2008-10-17T19:02:00.001+01:00

So most of these are pretty basic, it was my first time with mono printing. We didn't exactly have the facilities at my last college, it was pretty good fun though. Although the colours and patterns always looked way more epic on the sheet than it did on the paper. I suppose it depended really on what press you used. Anyway, as you can see in the image above, I just wrote the alphabet onto the slide using my fingernail, though I didn't think about how it would come out backwards and all that, so I had to flip it on the computer. Lack of judgement right there.

This was actually the first one I made. You can't see from the scan, but because my stencils were made of cardboard and not paper, they were embossed into the print, which was a pretty neat effect, although it did leave a white space around each letter where the ink couldn't touch the paper, so the stencils weren't as crisp as I would have liked them to be.

These two were what was lefton the newspaper from the back of the sheet, which got filthy. Seriously, it is impossible to get them clean, because you're hands are dirty and just ugh, mess everywhere. Not the good kind of mess either, that kind of greasy grossness.

Three variations of the same slide, on different kinds of paper. You can kind of see the embossing on the last one, if you look closely. As you can see, the ink got fainter the more times I used it, obviously
I love the colours in this one, and kind of wish I hadn't scratched the A intto the ink behind the stencil. Kind of ruins it. Oh well, you learn from your mistakes and all that jazz.

This is my favourite one. The stencil was left green from a previous print and really stood out against the purple. I printed it onto tissue paper as well so it came out pretty vivid.

I did stacks of prints, no joke, but a lot of them didn't actually include the letterforms, just some pretty sweet colour blends and grungy backgrounds that I can use in photoshop at a later date. Anyway, onto screen printing.

My last screen printing experience wasn't fun, seriously, resulting in an angry Scottish dude yelling at me for something that totally wasn't my fault. It kind of put me off and I never returned to the Westward Ho print room ever again. Plus I thought that he might eat me or something if I ever showed my face there again. Very scary for a small man.

ANYWAY. We had to take our favourite mono print, which I pointed out, and photocopy it twice and all that. On one of them we had to edit it, like, really make it pop by blacking out areas and adding white highlights. The image above is the result of my editing. I love the tree roots, they're pretty sweet.

We did a load of prints of the unedited one after putting it onto the screens, using magenta, which looked pretty good. I wish we'd kept one sheet of the prints as they were when they were just magenta, but we didn't. We then put the edited version of the print on some more screens, and then mixed up some cyan, and laid that over the top, obviously the edited parts leaving different marks and standing out against the magenta in places.

And this is the result. Unfortunately, my tree roots didn't stand out as much as I would have liked, but I really like the overall thing. It really looks like one of those pictures you have to look at with 3-D glasses, it's got that slightly unfocused, fuzzy look to it. I enjoyed screen printing much more this time around, even though the screen beds are huge, and you kind of struggle to reach if you're a short-arse like me. Really glad I did it though, and I'd like to go back for more printing at some point.

Orange

2008-10-17T16:42:00.000+01:00

Continuing on from the last post, we had to pair up with another orange person and find two people from our complimentary colour, in our case, blue. Combining the two colours, we had to make some compositions up, not including white at all. Needless to say, we tried our best and these are the best of what we could do with what we had.

While this next image actually has noo blue in it, I really like it anyway. Despite taking it with the shoddy camera on my phone, I love macro photography and love how the texture shows up in the material. It would have looked much better had I taken it with my proper camera, but I forgot it, so, no dice.

I'll leave you with Tom being, well, Tom.

Orange!

2008-10-17T16:26:00.000+01:00

So I've done loads and I haven't posted in a good while, so I'll try to keep things seperate. Hopefully and in order. In seperate posts.

We had to collect at least ten coloured objects, my colour was orange which, surprisingly, is kind of hard to come by. Managed it though. We took all the items and in, and in our group with all the other folks with orange, we had to arange them, from most orand to most red and most yellow and all that kind of stuff.

We had some kind of strange objects, that was for sure. Including a rubber chicken. And a mouldy orange courtesy of Mitch. Joy.

Anyway, then we had to put them in a line in the floor, and the most yellow fed into the yellow objects and the most red fed into the red objects, with the most orange ones in the middle. All six colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, connected together to create a bit circle that went in one door of the classroom and out the other, connecting in the hallway, making one big colour wheel. It was pretty sweet when it was finished.

So, yeah. It worked out pretty good in the end, it looked really nice and turned out pretty interesting. This last one is my favourite image.

Craptastic typeface

2008-10-06T18:12:00.000+01:00

So I'm here again, still don't have the video that I said I'd upload. Oops.

Since then I've completed another weeklong brief, though this one was really not fun. Not a good piece of work. I actually thought I'd produced something good until I pinned it up and looked at everyone else's. Yikes.

The idea was there, and had it been printed on brown paper, it would probably have looked more like the garment pattern that it was supposed to. I'll probably do that before I have to hand it in with the rest of the module. And add a tiny pair of scissors into it, so that it's a little more obvious that it's there to be cut out.

I had a really good second idea for this project, so much better than this one, but it only occured to me about an hour before the deadline as I was filling in the design sheet. Oh well. I still have time to run with the idea before I have to hand it in with the rest of the module. Type is actually kind of interesting.

I got yet another brief given to me today, though this one's much more interesting, to make a font based on the personality of someone else in the class. I got a couple of ideas right now, but time will tell. This is really stepping out of my comfort zone for me, because my work in the past has been very messy and grungy, and the person I have to design for it really neat and precise when it comes to his designs. Just have to wait and see what I come out with really. I'm off to play with some paint now.

Laters x

The beginning of something beautiful...

2008-09-28T21:17:00.000+01:00

Well! Time for a first post. A bit late I know, I kept forgetting about it and all that jazz, but I will update it a lot more in the future! I just need a bit of a kick when it comes to such things.

I don't really have anything to talk about right now, other than the fact that I just attempted to dye my hair brown, and now it's black and I look like a babygoth. Fun stuff.

We just did a pretty damn awesome week long brief on why the letter E should stay in the alphabet. We did stop-motion, but I can't upload the video to my blog yet because it's around 550MB in size?

That and Ed still has the disc.

But you will see it. Soon.

Later x