OUGD602 PPP 03 Brief 02 Design Strategy Reflection on Design Process

It has occurred to me, especially after the last full extended practice crit that my way of working has changes considerably through my time here. In first year I got caught up in the process of digital design and believed that good design was minimal design. However, in second year I increasingly held on to the idea that working with my hands made me happy and so did this to the extent where almost all my work was hand drawn. In third year, I believe I am closer to a balance than before. Although I have briefs that are much more hands on, they are also more commercially viable as designs. I have also stepped back into minimal designs but in a way that is completely mine, not done out of fear of getting it wrong. Mostly this has been achieved through the use of colour in projects such as FAFF branding and The Freshers campaign. I have also managed to fit in a number of smaller briefs that indulge my love of lettering, but only where relevant (triptych poster). Overall I think that being able to have an overview of the briefs undertaken throughout the year has enabled be to create a better variation of approaches and shape my practice in a way that is more applicable to commercial practice.

OUGD602 PPP Brief 02 Design Strategy Presentation Brief Analysis

Brief: Undertake an independent and sustained investigation into opportunities for progression  within your own intended area of creative, professional practice and/or academic focus. You will use your PPP blog to provide evidence of ongoing research activities, reflection  and evaluation of an increasingly iindividual and independent understanding of your  design practice. Your research will be summarised in a 10 minute presentation that focus on and  summarise your design strategy with specific reference to your career aspirations,  progression opportunities and the work/skills that you have developed in relation to  your future aspirations. This is all information that is present on my blog. Be it my interaction with professionals  through my Context of Practice module, or my continued efforts to get some manner of  work experience. I have also created a number of posts just reflecting on certain projects,  collaboration or my approach to a brief. Your research activities should aim to: Identify and evaluate professional practices, concerns and opportunities that you  intend to pursue on completion of the degree programme. This has been covered in my professional interaction with chalkboard commissions and my aim of setting up Elittlebeth design as a small business. Document and reflect on your industrial experience to date, including a brief summary  of what you have learnt and how this has affected the way you will approach your  professional development and further opportunities for progression. This will come with work experience once I procure it. However, it is relevant in my  selection of a collaborative studio space for my work experience. This is because I  think that is the environment I wish to work in, so specifically chosen work experience  will allow me to test the water. Record and evaluate any examples of self-directed projects, business ideas,  collaborations and opportunities for enterprise that you intend to pursue. (summarise  the concept, content or underlying rationale for these) This is something that I could execute better for Elittlebeth Design and for submission  I will mock up some design boards to make this concept clearer.

It strikes me that the majority of the structure of this presentation can be shaped around my manifesto or mission statement. Reflection o each point and my past, present and future with then create the majority of the presentation. I will start by looking at my past posts on this blog and merge my ideals with the way that I work.

OUGD602 PPP 03 Brief 01/02 Self Branding and Promotions Outcomes

I sat down and had a chat with John about the Elittlebeth business I am thinking about setting up, He said, by all means do it but fns a way to make that work work for you now. After looking at my lettering sketchbook for this project, he suggested that I make little versions of them because the represent me really well, add a memory stick of my more  commercial work and use them as self promotions to studios I like.

I will complete a few more designs and then look to creating this promotional tool as the centre of my PPP brief 01 submission. This is a much more immediately useful application of my time than creating invoices and material for the Elittlebeth company.

OUGD602 PPP 03 Visiting Professional Talk Lee Goater short notes

Lee goater

Self employed.

Brings in graduates and sometimes students.

Studied in Manchester

Moved to London to intern and to get a job.

Large amounts of corporate branding and working on stuff at the side to keep the creative juices flowing.

Loves minimal and modern work but also loves complex craft processes.

Alan kitching

David Shrigley

Martin parr

Freelance work was scary and so he continued working for agencies 

Worked into the place of an art director but found that he wanted to be doing more graphic design.

Going freelance provided freedom and openness that meant he could, within reason do what he wanted.

The variation of the types of work is what keeps it interesting.

What he has learnt:

Always start a project with the straight forward question of what do you want.

Own up to your mistakes

Don't do things without reason

Double the time estimate on anything

Don't free pitch, too much time for no money

Understand the value of different things

Satisfaction is a great value form work that is not financially rewarding.

Work with nice people

Ask questions, never feel stupid about asking a question.

Know your audience.

If you get excited when pitching an idea, other people will get excited.

Be hungry about and for graphic design.

Really speak to people in person or over the phone.

Don't show people everything, tease and build, don't give everything away.

Don't waffle and be to the point in your project descriptions.

You are a brand make sure you are on brand and talking to your audience.

OUGD602 PPP 03 Elmwood Presentation

Today we had a visiting professional talk from the elmwood studio based in Leeds and branched out to a hell of a lot other places. They talked through how their studio works creatively and Stephanie talked about her journey from our course to senior design at their studio.

Stephanie di da load of internships basically, throughout her studies and then moved to a summer internship straight out of college. This then lead to connection with elmwood where she then became a junior designer.

The continued expansion of elmwood is mostly because to the large clients that hey have in all areas. This means that they have to local funds and connections to set up more studios. They have a number of large clients for whom the work is less creative which pay the bill and keep them going so that they can work on the smaller more creative clients.

We were given an hour long brief, to highlight the fast working environment of professional graphic design. Our of a hat we got a company or organisation. Ours was The Medieval Alliance an 14th Century Re-enactment  company. We came up with a concept based around the shape of medieval coins and the fact that there would be two sections to the company "heads or tails" heads for the adults to get involved in serious historically accurate re-enactment and tails for the kids, something more educational. We talked about how this could integrate with UX design online and the use of live feeds to allow people to get involved in the fighting.

Although we came no where near winning (probably last really) I think it was a lack of clarity in our explanation of the concept that let us down not really the concept its self although some simplification there would have gone a long way.

Overall this is the only time I have had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to a visiting professional talk. I love the work that they do and most of all the collaborative way that they do it. I want to get in touch and possibly try and get an internship if possible. I also want to look into applying to do some lettering for their spring sumer window art display, because it looks like a great project and a way to get to know the studio better.

OUGD602 PPP 03 Brief 01 Self Branding Creating CV for Internship Applications

Because I want to apply to Tigerprint and other studios such as elmwood I am well aware that I will need a CV that aligns with my self branding and identity tone of voice. Once I had my warmer orange logo I shaped my CV around this . I know that this will predominantly be viewed online so more definite lines and a little more of a sleek finish is required. However, I have chosen my secondary logo colour, a mid grey, for all the text to maintain the softness that is part of my brand identity.

I knew that for practicality's sake this needed to fit on one A4 sheet.

  To start with this was tricky to achieve and i had to reduce the pt size down to 9.

I then printed the CV out and got a number of my peers to read through the content and give any feedback about the design. I also got them to look at it on screen. They agreed that the colour and logo were strong and the simple to the point layout combined with the logo colours was a strong nod to my own work and me as a person. However, it was said that when printed the text was too small and a little bit of a struggle to read. So, I did some readjustments and managed to increase the pt size to 11pt. This was agreed to increase the readability of the piece.

The next step it to create a short portfolio pdf that aligns with my designs so far and would be suitable to send off to Tigerprint and elmwood.

OUGD602 Brief 02 self Branding Digitisation and Development

From the perfected sketch it was easy to scan and then vectorise using the image trace option in path settings. This is not usually what i would do but because the sketch was of  fairly hight quality it produced the perfect vector with a few tweaks to reduce the number of anchor point and leave in a few imperfections to maintain that hand made aesthetic.

I knew that I wanted a texture of some sort rather than flat vector colour. Again to suggest print or the contact of ink on a page. Eventually I am considering  creating a stamp that really, authentically produces this finish. However, I will have to consider very carefully the ink colour matching. For the moment I chose a dark earthy green because again I wanted to communicate a natural hands on approach that seemed human and approachable.

I edited a texture file into the colour I wanted as shown above.

It was a simple matter applying it to my lettering. I chose a very simple sans serif font for the word 'design' . This was because I needed something to contract and therefore enhance the handmade look of the lettering and also there was a minimum width of the type that could take the texture and still be legible. I would have liked to use the light weight version of Source Sans Pro but the texture didn't sit well on it. Perhaps this is something that I will need to address later in the design process and crate something between the regular and light versions of the font for use on a stamp and universal logo. Because again a light weight font will not print well on a stamp because of the texture disrupting the letters.

The texture worked really well on the emblem that I sketched up and it will serve brilliantly as website IDs and image overlays when needed. I can also integrate it as a tag into my chalkboards and lettering pieces. Just like Jessica Hische does with her pieces, so they can always be track back to her.

After stepping away from this project for a while I font that I actually wanted a warmer more personable colour and a slightly sleeker finish so that the logo looked better on digital platforms. To do this I removed the texture, chose the lighter version of Source Sans pro and  selected this warm autumnal orange. During informal crits people overwhelmingly chose the orange over the green as representative of my work. This is interesting because it is very similar to the colour of ink I ended up mixing for my letterpress chalkboard business cards. So, fitting it with what I have already produced would be easy.