final boards

Here are the bards of my progression:

Open publication - Free publishing - More ted baker

Image negotiated brief

(click for bigger image)

The Brief: To design typefaces based on the colours of the spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. The type has to consider the connotative and psychological assosciations of the colour.

Background: 'Working with type as image allows you to convey more than simply words the have been written.'-Amber Smith.
The way type can be rendered as image, particularly using hand drawn techniques is of particular interest to me. Exploring ways to visually interpret something as abstract as a colour using type is a great exercise in thinking laterally.

As a designer who likes to work with type as image it's important to develop a large catalogue of type you can refer to so this body of work is designed for me and other designers who want to use hand rendered type as a core part of their practice.

Considerations: 'THINK VISUALLY. Consider what the visual essence of your subject matter is (colour) and how best to communicate this. What are the obvious responses? How can you move beyond these?' -Amber Smith

Practical considerations:
The type faces are going to exist out of context as a font, how is it best to present this and avoid widowing. Also considering the colour it's self, is it necessary to present the actual colour it's self, if so how is this introduced? The format is A2 so scale of drawing should always be considered in order to preserve quality.

Mandatory:
All images should be supported by a broad range of visual investigation in the form of design sheets and notebooks.

Final pieces should be presented on A2.

Deliverables:
7 A2 posters of typefaces based on the colours of the spectrum.

Signage Brief

So with the signage brief, I had a lot on, which isn't an excuse but I decided after a quick few sketches in my sketchbook, that I needed to bang them out quickly and so I went with my first idea, rightly or wrongly, which is to make it simplistic, using geometric coloured shapes to create simple and vibrant signage that gets the message across quicky.


Here are a few different layouts for studio one, experimenting with colour and layout. The decisions I made on this one informed the decisions I made with the rest of the signage. I made a conscientious decision to avoid sqaures because they don't really have a dynamic feel, they seem kind of clunky and awkward. In terms of typography, I used Clarendon because it's the font that college use for all of it's design and I thought keeping a consistency would be nice. I thought I'd try the teal colour that I saw in last years final show graphics, but it doesn't seem as effective.


Then I began on the next two in the same document, again using geometric shapes, I decided to stick to CMYK because it's a well renowned colour system that designers have to deal with every day.

I created the studio 2 very quickly, just trying the different colour combinations to see which works best. The yellow was too light against the two and it didn't stand out, so my original choice of magenta worked the best. In terms of studio to leading to 3, I had this idea in my sketchbook and it works really nicely on paper.



With the tutorial room, I tried to make a speech bubble using geometric shapes, it didn't seem to work as two different colours, but geled alot better when it was one, the image became more readable as a speech bubble.




The imagery for office was thought of in my sketchbook, I started looking at desks and chairs but deicided the symbol for paper worked a lot more simply and efficiently. And there we are. To say I knocked them up really quickly, I'm actually really happy with the outcome. They communicate clearly, although they're more type based than they are image based, however, I don't think typography is avoidable on this brief.

YCN hand in: getting the boards prepped and what went down!

Ok so these are the boards we were going to submit, Te splash page was great and the scalability one worked well too. Using very simple vector shapes to simulate the shopfront. I had suggested that on scalability we have a second window for the mannequins which has a similar set of background material (trees and logs etc.), so we took a photo of the set, sans the characters and Vickie actually photo-shopped the mannequins in, which is odd, because she wanted me to do software, thinking she was less capable. Quite the contrary, she did a sterling job and I think it was good to let her do some of the things she might of been timid about doing in order for her to progress as a designer. I also added a window decal to the design to continue the saying from 'Tally Ho!' to 'Tally Ho! The hunt is on!' which ties the window concept with the concept of 'hunting for fashion' that we had talked about. I simply put the window frame from the 'Tally Ho!'sign through illustrator, turning it to a gold colour and using hand drawn typography. I quite like that as an image and I think it works quite well when put into context.
The final board, promotional material, was asked for in the brief, however because we had so many other things to do outside of this project and a lot of time where we couldn't get on with it, we ran out of time which is unfortunate because it looks rushed.







Once we were done however, Fred pointed out a legibility issue with the text that we hadn't realised, staying too close to the project to examine it thoroughly a mistake that turned into a last minute typographical change and spending an extra £6. However it was necessary for the concept to tie together. Here are the boards with the adjustment:

Creating the final 'shop window'

Here's the progression of different colours and layouts me and Vickie tried out, and a few different angles for the photography, we decided on the last picture as the best, this has been photoshopped to increase the clarity and improve the lighting.
Early on it was decided that it was too clustered so we tried to simplify it by changing the background to white and trying to remove some of the leaves and logs, and we just carried on playing around till we got the results we wanted.

Final crit and progress.

Here's a quick progression from where we were at last week. We started planning on what we needed to pit into a narrative to make it coherent: Hunters, dogs, fox escaping. From this we started to make a few visuals in the format we'd want to work with. The trees and the background work really nice, but we both agreed that with character we needed more detail than just the very basic origami shapes, otherwise the characters sort of become the background and it's a series of coloured shapes rather than a narrative.

With that in mind, I added some texture in the form of line detail with an orange pen as well as using white and black paper to create the foxes features:

We also added a frame, that was in a collection of old things that vickie had, that I thought would be ideal for putting into the composition, giving it a very 'English-heritage' out in the country-side kind of feel to the work, and we used a script font to fit this. Taking this to the crit with Graham, we got to main bits of feedback: Aesthetically, it was good and pleasing to the eye and the detail levels worked and stuff, however it wasn't funny, it wasn't edgy enough.

Witht hat in mind, we reverted to another idea we had, about the hunters being turned on by the foxes, with this in mind we have to start making extremely quickly with only a week left and it being a very lengthy process.

Book Fair Brief

For the book brief I decided that a poster was the most effective way to carry my typeface, theres not enough content to create a book, plus this way it's more cost effective and quicker to reproduce, something that is good to bare in mind when having to reproduce 10 of them. So below are the scans of the blue alphabet I made. I used the theme of the ocean and water as a basis and worked from there.






Here is the typeface laid out, and my attempts to make it more engaging, the first is the basic typeface in a blue.

I then layerd this with a greenier blue and used the multiply tool, I like the effect, when you see the detail it makes your eyes jump a little, it's almost like the lettering shimmers.

Finally, I added some boats onto it, to make it more illustrative, however, I think it's really childish in the way it looks.


Ultimately I decided that no one is going to buy a typeface just laid out as a typeface, it needs to be contextualised. After a bit of quick looking, i found the quote 'Roll on though deep, dark, blue ocean..." by Lord Byron, and I thought it was really poetic and melencholy and suited the typeface beautifully.

So I applied the typeface to the quote:
Here it is in a few different colours, before double layering it and multiplying like I did before to recreate the shimmering effect.






While I quite like the qoute and the typeface, the illustrator i me wanted to create more flourishing with so i put in the boat.


here's a correction the p was a little illegible on the word 'deep' so I deleted some of the bubbles around the letter to improve it's clarity.


Here's the poster printed out.


Here it is rolled up and labelled. The labels were designed using my own handwriting and imagery from the poster. It has to communicate some of the content, issue number and price. I think I've successfully done this and I'm happy with the result.

Crit Feedback

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive in terms of the concept and image generation. One of the most significant and valid points was made during the crit by Craig Laing, he said that we need to be careful about our colour and pattern choices, that we need to avoid reducing the image to a series of block collars and make sure that the narrative comes first over stylistic flourishes.

Matthew Milner and David Gasi suggested that we need to inform our decisions with more contextual research, however, I feel that we've done quite a lot, and they were unable to view our blogs.

For the next crit, we need to have developed a set of visual directions that relate directly to the ideas we're doing. So the two strongest that we got feedback from on the crit were the idea that the animals begin hunting the humans, and the idea that animals escape in unusual fashions. Both are quite an irreverant take on hunting, and it's 'Britishness' means that we will fulfill th brief quite well with both of these options. Matthew Milner also suggested that the displays by Ted Baker he has seen involve motion, this is also something to bare in mind if we're looking to win.

What We've done so far:

Ok so heres a summary of the sheet work we've doe so far, it's what we took into the crit yesterday and what we talked about, so I'm going to establish what we talked about in the crit and then follow it up with a blog post on the feedback we got.

So the first 5 or so images are sort of initial response brainstorms for the brief, we created a list of key points from the brief and generated a few quick thoughts on each one, in hopes that it would clarify the brief for us. So the key ponts were : it's a shop window, it has to be scaleable, it has to avoid looking traditionally autumnal and it has to be irreverently british.

this brainstorm on British humour is Vickie's work and I think it's a really strong way of getting anything and everything about Britishness down, whilst I approached it with a few posts on my context blog she literally documented everything she could think of.

At this point we had done a little more research, looked at some of Jean Jullien's work and stumbled upon the idea of hunting, which actually turned out to be a pretty great idea for a concept. Below is a very quick and messy jotting of ideas, I think we've moved o from the idea of hunting for clothes, though we might try it out again if we're struggling for impact with other ideas, however the list of qaulities we want in our work is quite significant.

This is a quick mapping of what we need for our concept and our outcomes, we've decided that the best way to do it is 3 concept boards and either a scale model or a lot of detailed and high quality photos of a model.

After the crit last week and some subsequent research, we began to worry about looking at hunting as a concept, Graham suggested that it would be good to push it and make it controversial, however, Vickie and I find it very difficult to approach the subject in this manner, so we began looking at alternative concepts. We really liked the saying in the image below and thought that we could perhaps generate some visuals in response to this.

Below are a series of visual responses to this quote done in a very paper crafty and high-touch way. I think after a while we realised that it wasn't going to fit the brief, that building a concept around a quote might make some interesting visuals, but ultimately it wouldn't necessarily be 'irreverently british' or humourous in any way.

So we came bac to the hunting idea, here is a mood board of visuals and colours we were thinking about at the time, however, I think we need to think more in terms of narrative because the research we've done on Ted Baker so far suggests that they create dioramas that tell a story.

here's another that deals with potential colour schemes we might like to look at. I think we perhaps jumped the gun, we need to develop a clear narrative or a few narratives at this stage before we can start developing an appropriate visual response to them.

Below is a summary of our two potential concepts and a few ideas around it. I think this was good at getting a little clarity and really establishing that hunting was the way forward. There's a few ideas there that I think would create a witty and inviting punch-line out of quite a controversial subject.

Below is a quick diagram of a shop window, it just sort of establishes something we've been thinking about in terms of the need to make the shop window viewable, readable as a narrative and engaging from several different viewpoints because a shop window isn't always going to be viewed by the audience straight on, they're shoppers and they're going to be walking past, it needs to attract and grab attention from the angle as they approach the shop from either side in order to really draw attention.

In respons to this, we made some very quick 3-dimensional animals and visuals that give an insight in terms of the aesthetics we would like to explore as well as the ability to view the idea from several different angles, i think increasingly we need to start putting our ideas into very quick 3D visuals to play with layout and such at an early stage. This will allow us to see if an idea is or isn't going to work earlier, hopefully avoiding wasted time.

Next post, the feedback we've got.