Test pieces using After Effects.

These are the first videos I've done, they utilize very basic transform tools such as position, rotation and opacity. They give me an idea of some of the potential for things I can do in after effects, so it should be interesting to say the least.

OUGD201 evaluation

OUGD201 Design for Print
For the brief “What is Good?” I selected the response “Obama is good...” I firstly looked at some initial secondary research, such as reading Obama’s autobiography and polls on his popularity etc. which I found to be useful in terms of basic facts, however it merely described Obama as a symbol for change, for me personally, I saw this as not an accurate reflection of everyone’s view. In light of this, my primary research took on the role of contacting marginalised groups of both right-wingers and left-wingers who might not view Obama as the media-horse for change. I did this through email and internet forums because it seemed like the only way to get in touch with some of these extreme views. I think this was useful in terms of getting a wider range of views, however, I was disappointed by the lack of returned emails from the right wing and left wing political commentators, including the Westboro Baptist church. having some more views like this to build my work from may have given me a more credible final piece. Using my peers to test the political awareness of 18-24 year olds was incredibly useful, combining that with some secondary research on figures for political awareness allowed me to create a really cohesive picture of who my audience were.
In terms of idea generation and my utilization of different techniques, I feel that I was very limited because I spent so long tracking down the research to inform my piece that I left myself very little time to play around with my ideas and really I only had two concepts to work with; the paper fortune teller and the spinner and I made the decision to run with them, I think I may have sacrificed some of the potential of my final piece by doing this. This decision to spend so much time ironing out a great concept also had a detrimental effect on the visual response I engaged with. I feel like I went to default illustration, even though it may have been an appropriate choice for my final piece, I perhaps could have explored a lot more visual responses.
The final product engages the brief pretty well, it resolves my concept statement quite well and the spinner is visually engaging. Unfortunately I struggled making the rest of the packaging visually engaging to a standard that I wanted. It didn’t have the professional finish that I really desired.
I do believe that my concept boards were to a high standard though in terms of layout and representing my product effectively. My documentation PDF may have been a little too flabby however.

CONCEPT STATEMENT.

Barrack Obama is Good because people can attach their own symbolism to him.

By this statement I mean that he can become a symbol for someone's hope, or a symbol of change, or a symbol of someone's anger, or a symbol of communism (amongst the extreme right) etc. etc. I'd like to explore the way people can attach these different views to him. I'm going to use this create a package from this, because everyone has an opinion in this way, to get people into international politics.

I'll show you radical research.

Ok, so I was lacking a serious amount of primary, so firstly, and less radically, I got opinions on a picture of Obama and his campaign logo, most had something similar about hope or change, suggesting that he is a symbol for change, however, I was using young university students who tend to sit on the left side of the fence anyway. Seeing this one-sightedness, I decied to set up a fake email account so I don't get in trouble and contact a load of right-wingers, extreme and more central, ranging from the BNP over here and the Westboro Baptist Church in America, to conservative Rush Limbaugh etc. Basically trying to coax some opinion on Obama out of them. I hope to hear back soon.



"Hey,

I'm quite a conservative student from England. I've just started reading about international politics and I've read a lot of reports that Obama is a Marxist and a Muslim. I was wondering whether I could have your views on this? It's worrying if it's true, but I'm not sure what to believe.

Many Thanks

Simon"

The bull I made up and sent out.

Experiments with colours and layout.

I originally wanted this booklet to be as environmentally friendly as possible, which would have meant just using one colour in order to avoid wasting inks. However two factors have come to my attention: 1. Using a spot colour means its a one off and that would lead to potential wastage as a printer would be hard pressed to be able to use it again, meaning that they'd more than likely use CMYK rollers to mix up pantone 375 U or whatever it is, and 2. While my booklet is mainly about a designer making ethical choices, I want to show my knowledge of different print techniques so the images I use, I reckon should play around with mono, duo, tri and qaudtones. Anyway heres some messing around with the first page of lithography, I'm just trying to nail a style that I can use for the rest of the booklet.







I like the last one the best I think. It has a nice balance of colours, though I'm still leaning towards the monotone for now. I might change some of the colours around further.

Design for print booklet.

here's the title page for my first section. I used a monotone image with pantone 375 uncoated, because the paper stock(s) i'll be using, given that its eco, will probably be uncoated. I like the green, its unfortunate but it is an easy way to get the message about environment across quickly. I might try out a few greens. see which is best.

What is Good? presentation

Here is my presentation on Barrack Obama is good. I decided to play it from the angle that Obama is good because he's a symbol of change.





Ok, so I started by looking at the things I learned about his past from reading his auto-biography. It was interesting to find that the activism he shows now started at a grass-roots level when he was an Organiser in Altgeld, Chicago. This perhaps propelled the idea that he's the man to bring about change even more. His Multicultural identity probably helped too.


While doing some further research on what he did when he was younger, I found a proportion of right wing people claiming he lied about his past and that he's a Muslim and a Marxist. I tend to think that these people are a little (a lot) paranoid and I found the wonderful image above. I think it fully discredits this opinion. These people fascinate me, I wouldn't of minded doing my project on them.



I then went chronologically to his election campaignand focused on his logo and how this propelled the idea of Barrack Obama as a symbol of change. Its a logo of a sunset on a hill and gets the balance of symbolism and corporate identity quite nicely. I didn't get much first hand research before the presentation due to personal problems, so I may ask a few students what this symbol means to them.

I then looked at his Presidency and how he got a Noble Peace prize for the change he's created and the hope he brings. I also substantiated it with things he's done such as shut down guantanamo bay etc.

I think my presentation went OK, but it was a bit one dimensional due to lack of primary resources or radical research. Given what I've learned about the new brief I'm going to need to work harder to get some interesting ideas.

16 Page Booklet

2 things have led me to develop the logo/title graphics for this 16 page booklet; 1. the inspiration that researching for my environmental presentation gave me, and 2. A great workshop on using colour properly in illustrator. During this workshop, I used the visuals I created to mess around with colour and turned them into something useful:

I think I wil develop my content in terms of everything I learn, with an environmental spin on it, for example, how litho, flexo and gravure work, but also their environmental implications and what,s being done about it. How different ink colour systems work (i.e. spot colours and cmyk) but what do they do to the environment when disposed of and their possible solutions etc. To demonstrate this more fully, I think I will try and contact some paper distributers and print my 3 double page spreads on some odd looking paper stocks and specify in my spec the kind of inks I would use, etc. etc.
I will post more as it develops.

Summer Postcard Brief

Ok so we were asked to create several postcards that explore several colour options when it comes to print. I decided to base my work on an obsession with Dia De Los Muertos, or The Day Of The Dead, that I touched on in my taxonomy book. Here is a mexican sugar skull, I spent a few sheets developing how it would look, but it's based directly on one from my taxonomy. I decided to go with the one above as a final resolution because it's aesthetic appealed to me the most. In terms of a real printers, I would have to give the specific pantone numbers (381 U green, 508 U pink, 2905 U blue) that I had chosen to the printers if I was to use spot colours, however given that this is a full colour image and I chose CMYK compatible pantone colours, it would probably be more cost effective to ask for it to be printed in full CMYK. On a lithograph this would mean that the printer would not need to wash down all the rollers to remove the CMYK and add the spot colours. The only problem with this would be that I would have to sacrifice the vivid nature of spot colours for the duller, more limited gamut (range of colours) that CMYK can produce.

here i have explored what would happen to the colours if you overlayed them, mixing these 4 spot colours would creat a greater range of colours, however 4 spot colours would probably create a cost that's probably too high for most clientele to pay. However, like in the image below, Where I have transformed the colours to process CMYK, you can see in the overlapping how different colours can be developed. I don't like these alternate reolutions as much, though they probably do show more about colour theory in terms of going to the printers.

Here is my pictogram for obsession with day of the dead, I tried to create a thought bubble that kind of suggested that it was on my mind a lot. The real issue with this, however, is that the skull is far too complicated. It takes too long to interpret. Normally a pictogram is like a bare bones message, the print is normally one colour to strip one level of interpretation and confusion away, and I feel that the skull kind of counteracts this simplicity. I may try and work on this later because it's not very successful.

Here is my 3 colour word, I decided to avoid tints and such because I wanted it to fit with the simplicity of my full colour image. After a while, I realised the colour choices I made seemed to be partially inspired by the colours within the mexican flag (obviously tinted and changed a bit) And I think that that is what makes the image successful to me. Obviously I could of generated a few more colour variations within the image by using tints of the original colours, this would use the same colours but have a lesser or greater concentration of said colours. Again because it's keyline plus 2 spot colours, commercially it would probably be cheaper to print this at full CMYK, but it does show how 3 colour might work, with reasonable success.

Here is my 2 colour logo, after slimming down the colours to make it 2 colour, I started looking first at a cheap true 2 colour, which would involve just using the magenta and black rollers of a lithograph. I developed several variations of this, including one with a gradient background, which kind of shows how tints can be used in print; Though it looks greyer and greyer, these obviously aren't an infinite set of individual inks, but a lesser and lesser concentration of black ink on the substrate (in this case paper stock). I think it looks pretty successful and given how small it appears on this blog page, I think it works quite well scaled down, as it would if it was a real corporate logo on a letterhead, coaster, pen etc. etc.

Summer Powerpoint Presentation.

I decided to put this under design practice, because I feel that the conclusions I make in it are not about the context, but developing my own practice for print based design.

I decided to look at the environmental impact of the print industry and the solutions to these problems. I'll put some other designer's solutions in the design context blog as well.

I initially looked into the environmental impact and issues thats derived from the papers/stocks that are used to print on. The main implications for the environment seem to be with the logging process which tends to reduce the biodiversity (range of species) in forests by a frankly ridiculous 90%, even if trees are planted in replacement of the ones cut down. Also there are problems in the actual production where 3 tons of wood are used to make 1 ton of paper as well as large amounts of wasted water and the industry's notorious status as the world's number 1 air polluter. On top of this the bleaching process releases chlorine into the water polluting it which can cause damage to humans. A solution to this, that I can use in my own print practice is to use paper made of 100% Post consumer content (PCC) or 100 recycled paper, also using paper free of chlorine (from the bleaching process.) I could also use alternatives not made from trees i.e. hemp, kenaf, terraSkin (derived from rocks) or recycled denim. It's almost universally agreed that there is no difference in quality between recycled and non recycled paper anymore and the prices are competitive with virgin (non-recycled) paper.

I also looked at the problems with inks, a lot of the time they're petrol based which makes them dangerous to dispose of, they can release volatile organic compounds as they decompose, these can be harmful to humans and cause birth defects when pregnant women are exposed to them. Also warm red inks and metallic inks contain barium, copper and/or zinc, which again can be harmful to humans when put into landfill. A solution to this when I'm designing is to find a printer who uses soy or vegetable oil based inks which are much better for humans and our environment. Also as a designer I can avoid reds and metallics in my work as much as possible unless specifically identified by a client.

I also looked at Fabrics, the most important elements of which are again to specify using vegetable based inks instead of PVC plastic or petrol inks and to make sure the cotton you use is 100% organic to avoid pesticides and chemical bleach processes which are harmful to the environment. A lot of this can be achieved by finding environmentally friendly printers who are on the increase. I've decided that this environmental research I have done will help inform the content of my 16 page booklet. I'll post work I've done on that as I go along.