Today is the hand-in date for all my PPRD work. I am finding it hard to make sure I have everything together and in order. Looking back 

I am happy I managed to keep this blog going because I feel it has helped me look back at my work and how I went about doing it all. It will defiantly help me with my future work and will make me look at ways I could improve how I do it. I am glad that it is going to be handed in, I just hope that I can keep continuing with writing about my work in a blog.

I have handed in my Flash project. I am really pleased with how my final animation has turned out. It is better now I have added the clips of the character injuring themselves, it now seems complete.

I love the way it looks with the collage style and the hand drawn character.

 I feel the evening classes on Flash has really helped me with my animation. I am now looking forward to working on the website style piece I now have to create.

We have been given our brief for our new project. The brief is to create a magazine layout containing a interview with a designer we have been given to look at. My designer is Erik Spiekermann, I have heard of him before so I think it should be interesting to hear his interview on Type Radio. I think it os going to be quite hard to copy the interview from ear and write it down for my magazine layout. For this project I have to use and learn Adobe In Design. I have used it before but I do not know much about how to use it to its full.

Final critique for my Flash animation was helpful for me today. Everyone in my critique group liked my animation, but felt that I needed to include more clips of the accident scenes as I only has 2 scenes where the accident happens, and the rest were just the statistic of the accident that happens. I am going to add more clips of people involved in the accident such as someone sticking their fingers together with glue and another where the character cuts his finger with the knife. This will take time to do but I feel that it will improve my final animation and give it more of a awareness/ warning video feel.

Today I had a interim critique on my flash animation. So far I have created my opening titles and one of my accident scenes. The feedback I received was positive about the style and character design. I was told to continue and to look ways of creating my button. This really helped me carry on and gave me some new ideas.

Also I have sent my CV off to design companies looking for a work placement.

I have started to create my storyboard for my DIY animation. I have decided to start with an opening scene with a play button so it is interactive with the viewer. This is going to be in the collage style I have created my images in.

I decided to show clips of my hand-drawn people in the statisticly most common accidents that I have found during the research I have gathered. This will be the main focus of my animation.

 

Character design - I have started to create some designs and textures for my flash animation on DIY accidents. I wanted to create a hand-rendered, hand-drawn, collage style for my animation as I feel this really suits the topic. I am going to create a collage style but layering different textures and drawings. Here are some of the images I am going to use.

My final Designs for Amnesty International. I have displayed them like this for the Hand-in.

I have started doing research into statistics and flash animations. Here are videos from various design companies. This helped me start to think of ideas and ways I could make my flash animation.

Today was the Final critique for Amnesty International poster and bus design. We had a representative from the Amnesty International London offices in to look at our work and to suggest other ideas that we could do on our work. I thought it was a really helpful day and was interesting to hear what the real designers thought of our designs. She said my work was good and that she liked the photographs, they worked well with the topic Guantanamo Bay camp.

As part of a brief linked with 2 other colleges/universities, we had to come up with a poster that showed who we are and where we are from. My poster was designed around my home town, Rugby. I took photo's of the town centre and items that I think of when I think of Rugby. This is my final design.

Today I had the Hand in of text and image. I felt confident about what I had done. My favorite pieces were my editorial illustrations. I feel they are the strongest out of everything I had done, I included parts of all the work I had done in text and image, such as letterpress and vernacular typography.

We also had our Amnesty International brief given out. I have started looking into posters and campaigns they had already used. I was not to sure of the work the charity Amnesty International does, so I did research at their website and books. I found out that they are a charity who help with lots of issues to do with human rights all over the world.

I started to learn about book binding today. I created 4 different styles of book binding, first was Japanese where you do a cover and pages inside, and stitch the side to bind it together.

A 16 page bind with stitching in the middle to keep it together.

A fold out book, which could turn into a poster. A single sheet of paper folded into 8 equal sections with a slit in the middle to fold it up.

And another single piece of paper to create an accordion style fold out, which is all linked together to create a book.

I really enjoyed making these books. I found the Japanese style the most enjoyable to do, although my favorite style was the fold out book, but i found it hard to make it all equal and to find up well.

Today I learnt how to use Quark. I started by creating a document with the measurements I got given. The added a bleed, margins, and put in images and text by using the text and image box tools. I found this program easy to use after a while, although I found it quite limited on the things you can do.

I had a tutorial on how to use Illustrator today. I had a feeling it was simular to Photoshop but I found it hard to use where I was used to using techniques I was used to in Photoshop. I managed to do the tasks we where given. First we had to great shapes using the pre-made shape tools, then we had to create our own using the lasso tools and adding points to make a different look to the shapes. After we were given an image of a robot that we had to trace using the techniques we had just learnt. We also had to add colour and outlines.

I have been learning how to letterpress for a few days now and I am really enjoying it. First we had to find a piece of text about a journey or a place so I looked into the history of Poole Quay where I found the quote "Beating of the water bounds" which is a ceremony confirming the Mayor's authority over the Port of Poole and boundaries of the harbour and dates back to the 14th Century. I started off by just using the words "water bounds" to get used to using the letterpress. I found the letters I wanted to use and put them into the order I wanted and then stuck them together using masking tape. I coated the words using black ink and used the letterpress to make my prints. When the first print came out I realised I had used an upside-down 'g' instead of an 'a' but I thought it still looked ok.


The next letterpress session we had I used the whole quote and played around with colour, texture and positioning of the words. I think the prints I created turned out really well and managed to get the word 'water' to have a colour effect off water.

Today was a tutorial on Photoshop. Because I have used Photoshop before I had some knowledge on what I was doing but I did learn new things and techniques, such as how to use the Patch Tool and how to create Layer Masks. We were given the task of cutting out a girl laying down with a car in the background and put her into a different background, which was a garden scene. I learnt how to add points to a selection to make my selection more persice. After we had done that, we had to edit a picture of a woman using the healing brushes and patch tool. the next session we created a vogue front cover. I used a picture of Kate Moss, I edited the picture by using the healing and patch tools. I aslo cut her out and put her into a different background. After that I added the vogue logo to the top, but added a layer mask so the logo was hidden slightly where Kate Moss' head was. I found this a fun task and when time was up I was still thinking of other things I could change about the front cover.

At 10am we got into uni to get the coach to London where at 7:30 that evening we were going to see Kyle Cooper give a talk about some of his work. During the day we had to do the brief tha we were given to drift through a place where we had not been before and photograph anything we noticed that maybe we would of not seen if we were fimaliar to the area. When at London we headed for Covent Garden, then to Camden Market. This is where I took most of my photographs because I had not been there before. I am pleased with how my photographs turned out, I think I caught some interesting happeneings and items. The talk with Kyle Cooper was really good, it was interesting watching his work whilst he explained what he was thinking whilst making the titles and how he came up with his ideas.

Letterpress research

www.alexwilliamson.co.uk

http://theaoi.com/


http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerbooktrance/sets/72157601080085610/

Today we got given a brief to create a new typeface using only tape. We could use any colour, size and texture tape we wanted. In our groups we could use anything to create our type on, our group went outside to find a different look and idea. We came up with the idea of type on stairs, so we used a spiral staircase to create our characters on. The idea was that you could see the shape of that characters from any angle you were standing. We thought it could be used as advertising, e.g. at a train station on the stairs. I was really pleased with how the final outcome turned out. The only thing I would change is the size of the characters we made, they were too large and could only fit two character on the stairs.

Typographic and Illustartion research

Underware - http://www.underware.nl

http://www.jodybarton.co.uk/ (typography)

www.ifyoucould.co.uk

Various illustrators -
http://www.bigactive.com/

http://www.rosieirvine.com/

Jasper Goodall -
http://www.jaspergoodall.com

Research for Text and Image

Websites and books that I had information on helvetica -
http://www.helveticafilm.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g56jcOayc78
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica
http://www.identifont.com/show?MR

Books -
Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface by Lars Muller

Other illustrators
http://www.timmarrs.co.uk/



http://www.frostdesign.com.au/ - Vince Frost

http://www.debutart.com/Search2-keys.asp?P=3&KEYWORD=TYPOGRAPHIC# - Alan Kitching

Stefan Sagmeister -
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/sagmeister.html

From the Photographs from poole, we got given a brief to create an illustration only using colour paper. I used the picture of a seagull standing on an anchor and rope as i thought it had lots of colour and textures. I ripped and cut out coloured papers how I needed it and then glued it all down. I felt my final outcome did not turn out as well as I was hoping fro, it looked too busy and cluttered. Also I did not like the way the seagull turned out as I thought it looked childish. After I created another one using more plain and bolder colour papers from a photograph I took of two boat. This time this photo had less textures and details. I thought this one turned out better and gave a bolder effect.

Today we went to Poole. We had to make our own way there, so we got the bus from outside the uni to the bus station. When we were there we made our way to Poole Quay to take in the surroundings, take photographs and sketch. I feel my photographs turned out better than my sketches did. I tried to use as many techniques and materials as I could. I also took some rubbings but they did not turn out as well as I hoped for.

Here are some of my photo's from that day