Re-written breif:

After today's crit with Fred, I decided to rewrite the brief to cater more to my tastes. Whilst the book covers were nice. I think it's important to turn it into some kind of special edition package where I can go to town on print proccess and apply the designs to things like posters too. I thought that it might be appropriate to focus on one author then. I've read more of John Steinbeck than any other so I thought it was best to start with him, but with a view to releasing other author's colections, so I'm looking at ways to demonsytrate that a similar design layout can be applied to a variety of author releases.

Writing a brief.

We started by selecting some briefs. I selected the D&AD book cover design brief, for Orion. The teenage kicks brief written by Fred. Last years illustration brief for D&AD as well as the Ctrl+Alt+Shift brief for IDN. I selected each one for different reasons, mainly because I wanted to produce a set or series and book covers/publications would allow me to do this. I also wanted to marry my skills as an illustrator with increased interest in type and layout.

When we went in, we were asked to make a table of what we wanted to get out of/do this brief. Here is my list:



Then we were asked what the brief is dictating and what specifically we wanted to do thats in the brief:


We were then asked t identify the content,context and product of what we wanted to do:


From this we were then tasked with writing our own brief and rationale. Here are my stabs at that:

Negotiated brief, contextualised type.

Here I've looked at most of the typefaces and how they'd become a working typeface.










I left out orange because I dislike it so much, but I feel they all work really well, partigularly green and yellow

Evaluation

Workshop work

The timetabled workshops were always enjoyable and an interesting range of briefs, I found that the type as image and the book brief were particularly enjoyable briefs. Allowing me to engage with typography in an illustrative way, something that over the course of the module, I realised that I can have success with. I feel that these particular workshops are where I really put a lot of effort in and I'm really proud of the standard of work that I produced for these briefs in particular, I especially like the 'Humans are terrible' poster, photography isn't something I normally work with, and I was terrified that it would feel alien to me, however, I feel like using handmade type and placing it in a real world environment was just an extension of what I do as an illustrative designer anyway and I'm really happy to have tried something new but still have it fit well into my portfolio of work, also it won the competition for displaying in the corridor.. which felt great. I was also really happy with the book brief work. The pice it's self was of a high quality and I sold half of my books and recouped the money I spent and turned a (very small) profit, this was a great feeling, putting my work out there and having it well received by the target audience and I'm really grateful to Amber for giving us an opportunity like that.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to keep on top of everything all of the time and some of the brief suffered because of this. most notably the editorial and signage briefs. I wasn't able to devote as much time to these as i wanted to and because of this, the final pieces aren't up to the standard of the rest of the work. the signage is mostly acceptable, however 'studio2 leading to 3' is illegible because of the colour choices I made rather hastily. I still feel the rest of them function moderately well. In terms of the editorial pieces, I had to rush them and so I don't think I considered how they'd sit in context all that well, resulting in some sub-standard work. In other places, I've had to turn around the work really quickly yet I've had some success, for instance the scale/frame/format brief, was put together very quickly, but I still think it communicates it's message strongly and well chosen layout makes it look quite effective.

Finally, I wasn't able to complete the 2D to 3D to 2D brief, I have no excuses, I was ill, missed the briefing and several days afterward and through bad organisation wasn't able to make up for the time I'd lost. This is unacceptable and in the real world it would mean losing a client permanently as well as income. I fully accept the blow that this might give to my marks and feel really disappointed in myself for letting it spin out of control. I do feel however, that holding myself to account and learning from this mistake is going to prove useful. I know I won't make this mistake again and I'm taking active steps to ensure that my life is under better control, including keeping a more thorough diary and a wall planner going.

Negotiated brief

The negotiated brief was a chance for me to explore more of what I enjoyed through the workshops, type as image. I decided to explore colours again, this time looking at the whole spectrum. I really researched the connotations of each colour in detail, as well as asked peers and others what the colour represented to them, giving me a list of adjectives that could describe each colour. I think that this was really helpful, narrowing the search for ways to represent the colours typographically, in quite a short space of time. From this I picked one adjective for each and began looking at the hand-drawn typography of others for inspiration, picking out particular traits that might inform the way I look at designing my own typefaces. This again narrowed down the way I looked at exploring the typography significantly, giving me a clear idea of the direction I wanted to go into.

At this point I began sketching letter forms quite loosely, until I came upon an aesthetic I liked. Ultimately, I didn't spend enough time at this stage, developing a wide range of responses, but I am extremely proud of most of my typeface designs. I'm particularly fond of the green typeface, the bold, gooey and the violet typeface, I particularly love the 'Q' it has a good flow to it and the flourishes work the most effectively on that letter form. I'm fond of most of the typefaces, all of them having something to keep me interested and entertained, however, orange, I really don't like. I don't think I like the colour in general, which made it hard to think of something appropriate in the first place, but then also it's execution wasn't brilliant, and I can't help but think that this was a missed opportunity to do something more forward thinking with it.

I feel that the layout was particular strength, though I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like from the start and this stopped me from really exploring a broad range of layouts. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, the layouts themselves turned out how I imagined them and looked really strong, individually and as a set or catalogue. I also liked the belly band. The typographical layout kept the feel of a catalogue, that hand crafted type may not have done.

All in all, I've really enjoyed this module, I feel that I've created a number of pieces that will go in my portfolio successfully and I'm grateful for the opportunities to learn that it has given me. I'm disappointed that I didn't always put the time in to get great results right across the board, but will learn from this and manage my time more effectively using diaries etc.

Image, negotiated brief.

After scanning in my typefaces, I brought them into illustrator, starting with violet, I looked at ways of laying out my posters. I'd already decided on 6 lines of 5 characters in my journal, this allowed me to avoid widowing. It then just became a matter of spacing the letters in a way pleasing to the eye using the guid tool to make sure they lined up evenly.
Initially I looked at putting the typeface in colour against a white background, and this looked alright but it was a little bit empty and uninformative. I added the text at the bottom to try and contextualise the typeface a bit. I thought that it was a bit plain, and it would look much stronger as a series if I used bold block colours instead of putting the typeface in colour against a white background. The text at the bottom then went through a brief swap between helvetica and futura, oblique and regular, underscored and not, before I decided on futura oblique, underscored. It gives it a nice contemporary feel, as well as making it feel like part of a catalogue or a series. This layout will now become the template for the rest of my typefaces.
















With the red, i started with quite a pinky red, decided that this wasn't appropriate, I then looked at quite a vibrant red, but it didn't sit well with me, I felt it was a little bit too positive for the type's connotations and what it was trying to communicate. I decided to pick a dark red after this to see if it would look better, I wasn't too keen, so I settled on a muted red which, I thought it had the best balance of legibility and communicatin what I wanted.




Here's my choices for Orange, I experimented with a few, but to be honest, I hate orange so it was difficult to decide what was the best, I like the muted feel of the one I ended up on, it kind of seemed appropriate given the muted colours of the other ones. This is my least favourate poster, and to top it off, the printer for some reason printed this one a little bit streaky, which isn't noticeable from a distance, but still really bugs me. GRRR.



With yellow, I started with pure yellow, that you get in the ink cartridge, however this was far too vibrant and very difficult for the eye to focus on the white, making it difficult to view as a poster or as part of a catalogue carrying information. I then experimented with a few shades of muted yellow before landing on the final one.




Ok with Green, as usual I followed the format I started with violet. I started playng around with what green suited gooey best, I started with quite a dark green which didn't look right, before exploring mint green, which again wasn't appropriate. Finally I settled on a sort of very yellow-heavy green, which gave it a snotty, slimey green that i found fully appropriate to the subject matter. I then tried simplifying the detail, and whilst it still worked as a typeface, I was really keen on the detail in the type.










Using the same format as the others, I laid the type out 5 on a row, 6 rows down. Here are a few experiments with colour. I started with quite a vibrant blue and realised it needed toning down because it didn't say melencholy at all. I played around with various shades of muted blues, before deciding upon the last one as the one that suited the mood bet for me.










Here's the development of my label. I started out wanting to do something quite hand drawn in my sketchbook, but then I realised that there are proper typographical elements on each poster and it would probaly work better and look professional if I used typography and created a logo. So I started playing around with futura, which I'd decided on as the poster type and used a similar italic, underscored version for the title, whilst keeping the italics for all the other elements. Then I just played around with the layout and brought in a loog. Initially it was just the colours of the posters inside the pack, however I realised quite quickly that this by it's self looks really amateurish, so I added the triangle which represents a prism, a tool to refract light into it's many colours, and I was really happy with the way it looked. I then turned this into a vinyl sticker, which I used to fasten the belly band.





Here's some photographs of the finished piece. If I'm going to add them to a mini portfolio or whatever, they need a bit of editing with the colours and such but they're high qaulity god photographs and I'm happy with the outcome.