Author Archives: DLangley

A5: A Fairytale Rework

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My final rework has come about in response to feedback from my tutor about how some of my final pieces lose the energy of my original sketches as I move them into the digital packages. It is also a fun but reflective piece on my own journey through Graphic Design One and how sometimes I may have let Wendelin Witch get the better of me about the rules I should follow.

I decided for this last piece to throw caution to the wind and just let loose, I also wanted to work backward and forward between digital and analogue to see what difference that might make. I wasn’t too sure how to approach it but I was so taken with the Serif Fairy book that I thought about a much younger readership and a fairytale type approach. My tutor also suggested a ‘zine format could be a useful way of revisiting A5.

So I sketched a quick story board and Wendelin the TypeWitch was born!

8 cell storyboard skethces for a fairytale

Storyboard sketches A5 rework

I hadn’t decided if I should work in InDesign or Illustrator but in the end created a range of assets in Illustrator which I then printed and used to create analogue collages. It is designed to be an A5 stapled pamphlet and I have left it deliberately rough and ready, avoiding the temptation to tidy things up!

This process was great and I wish I had felt confident enough to do it earlier on. I know my tutor was encouraging it but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I guess I needed to feel I had a bigger toolkit before I could get there.

Family feedback seemed to think it was fun, but felt I was mean to melt Wendelin at the end!

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Assignment Five: reflections on tutor feedback

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My final feedback came in the form of a very useful video conversation and notes. This allowed for reflection on assignment five and the course as a whole. It also supported the sharing of resources and other references my tutor felt would be helpful.

Section Five was obviously about drawing the course together but in some ways aspects of it felt repetitive. There were elements like the infographics which we hadn’t covered before that I would have liked to have spent more time on and been given more exercises to help develop.

Project Feedback

The French Hen exercise I enjoyed, and found developing the different iterations intriguing. I wasn’t sure I had quite achieved what I was looking for and my tutor confirmed this, as he noted ‘ the transparent wine glass was a nice idea but got a bit lost in the final versions.’

Chase Housing Association felt to me a bit like the earlier Light Bulb exercise. It seemed that lots of ideas just kept coming. I was pleased with the outcome and my tutor felt the final version worked well. Initially, I thought it was a bit of a dull exercise, in part because I had a sense that logo design was not going to be a strength, it needed an attention to detail I’m not always good at. When we discussed this my tutor highlighted the value of this learning in terms of how I approach a brief that I feel to be dull. In this case I think my solution was to keep doing as many iterations as I could until something caught my interest. It was when I started thinking about the architectural nature of housing that I found a way in that interested me and I felt I could produce something distinctive.

I recognised a theme in the SingOut and infographic feedback that my earlier sketchbook versions had more energy and this got lost in the process of conversion to digital. I must apologise to my tutor who must be fed-up with highlighting this without seeing a result. I completely agree with the comments but as yet have not quite found the best way to address it. I think this partly comes from the fact that my confidence hasn’t quite reached the point where I feel I can completely let go. Learning the digital skills has been an important part of my GD1 journey and I recognise that my designs do tighten up as I use the different packages but having put so much effort into this area of learning it is hard to step back from it!

This has been a useful learning point as developing my work is as much about letting go sometimes as it is about feeling I have to demonstrate all my new skills and show progression. I wonder what my work might have been like if I had ignored InDesign and Illustrator all together.

We had a useful conversation about my desire to feel I knew the rules before I could be presumptuous enough to break them. I think this may have placed an unnecessary constraint on my work and I have also noted and tried to address an underlying assumption about what I think ‘good’ graphic design looks like. I recognise I have imposed some self-limiting beliefs on myself on occasion.

The TypeWitch story is a first tentative step in being out and proud playful!

Birthday List was an exercise I loathed (verging on hated) doing, I didn’t get the point of it at all, and I didn’t understand why anyone would want one of these. All the examples I looked at were gendered and clichéd, which is probably why my final result looks as it does, it became an exercise in exasperated completion rather than creativity. I accept my tutor’s view that this got too clipart in form. I should have been braver in finding a different form and perhaps thinking about designing an app rather than a poster. I have now played with this idea following my tutor’s feedback.

Assignment Feedback

I enjoyed this assignment and was reminded of one of my introductory postcards for assignment one, my love of books. I think I have gravitated to the book design exercises throughout the course. That is not to say I see it as a comfort zone, I definitely still find it challenging. I was pleased to note my tutor found my designs had a:

…dynamic use of colour and composition.

I recognise in his feedback that I have fallen into a common newbie trap of ‘designing as if the front and back covers will be seen at the same time.’

His advice to ‘think about them as interconnected but visually discreet’ is helpful. This was a bit frustrating as initially I was going to design them completely separately but was then worried they wouldn’t be consistent enough! Another indicator that I should probably trust my instincts more.

I have now reworked them to make them more distinct but connected.

I appreciate that my tutor has noted:

There is energy in your drawing that could be utilised more within your graphic design.

Having not drawn for years I have been surprised to find how much this has become part of my work and I am very keen to keep it going as I move back into photography.

I can’t express how pleased I am I took this course, it felt like a step into the unknown at the beginning but it has had a big impact. Had this been my second course I might have considered changing to creative arts but I hope to integrate all I have learnt into my photographic work. I am definitely seeing myself as an aspiring artist-photographer now. I want to finish by thanking my Tutor for such wonderful support, I felt he has understood me throughout and while I haven’t quite got to the point of fully expressing my playfulness in the final designs I am on the way and expect this to grow as I move to Level 2. During our conversation he gave me some good advice:

Show how you think and not how you finish, and keep it simple.

I have now collected a range of graphic design resources with different types of activity to help me keep this work going and to ensure that my range of influences are as broad as possible.

Thank you.

 

A type of island: San Serriffe!

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San Serriffe

On 1 April 1977 the Guardian produced a 7 page travel supplement on the tiny tropical republic of San Serriffe, “a small archipeligo, its main islands grouped roughly in the shape of a semicolon, in the Indian Ocean”, which was apparently celebrating ten years of independence.

The country was in fact completely made up as an April Fool’s joke. The name San Serriffe and the shape of the islands were just the first clues; everything connected with San Serriffe was named after printing and typesetting terms.

The name itself refers to sans serif typefaces; Bodoni, the capital, is a variety of typeface; the two main islands are called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse; the indigenous islanders are known as flongs, a mould for making type, and the whole Republic is ruled over by the dictator General M J Pica, named after a unit of measurement in type. The Guardian

I howled with laughter when I found this, it really appealed to my sense of humour. I love the detail that went into the joke and was amazed by the follow up coverage it has also generated.

What was interesting was how many of the clues I could now spot having done section 4, it was made all the more delicious because I could join in the joke and spot most of the typographic terms. Something I doubt I would have been able to do before the course!

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Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral of Pines

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A wooden box

Five dead birds

Nakedness

Nature as redemptive

Light as transformational

Solitary

Suspended animation

Dirt and debris

Water

Container and contained

Search for meaning

Ordinariness and intensity

Tumbling responses

Framed and framing

Intimate gaze

There are a myriad of possible responses to the Cathedral of Pines and I know at this point in time I am far from having them organised in my head. Crewdson talks of the work in this series as being more personal, and as optimistic. It has emerged out of a period of change for him that brought him away from his usual cityscapes and into nature. He talks eloquently of light and nature being redemptive. My response seems to be an embodied and emotional one. I am at once moved, frightened, enthralled, appalled… This leaves me torn in terms of writing for my blog, it takes me from an aesthetic and emotional response to having to move to a more cognitive domain. 

The images have an extraordinary quality that I feel draws you in. As someone with an deepening interest in still life I enjoy their carefully constructed nature, I see them as Vanitas on a grand scale. I like the relatively low-key palettes, the multiple frames within each frame and that the images are ambiguous enough for me to bring my own meaning to them. I found I was constantly moving between the image as a whole and the details. Tiny fragments of life become repeated motifs – nail varnish, emery boards, tablets and pill pots. I find I become a little uncomfortable with the intimacy in some cases.

 Several images stand out for me:

  • Mother and daughter, 2014
  • The Barn
  • The Disturbance

 I can read these in many ways either negatively toned or positively toned. My initial response to Mother & Daughter is one of concern and anguish. The door is open, the snow has drifted in, interior and exterior are intermingling.

 The images take me into theory in two ways – the first is the psychoanalytic concept of ‘container/contained’ from Wilfred Bion and the second is the notion of ‘frame’ and how we assign meaning through our frames of reference.

Cathedral of the Pines design

 The exhibition and promotional designs are spare and minimal, in some ways in contrast to the works themselves. A delicate pine sitting above wide spaced sanserif text. I think it conveys a sense of openness that can be seen in some of the images. The accompanying catalogue is substantial and exquisite. It sits in harmony with the exhibition and while it cannot replace the experience of seeing the actual prints it definitely does them justice.

 I am left with a slight question about what the images are saying about women but that is for another day.

Assignment Four: Reflections on tutor feedback

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Sentence created using a deconstructed typeface

Reflections on tutor feedback Section 4

I think it is fair to say that this may not have ben my strongest section, possibly because I felt more constrained by the ‘conventions’ of typography. Although I may have made assumptions about there being a right way to do typography. Reflecting on my tutor’s feedback and my work I was less playful and experimental than I have been in other sections. Ironically, I actually enjoyed this section more than I thought I would and feel like I had to learn the conventions before I could start to break them or play with them.

My tutor acknowledged this, ‘you’ve clearly tried to get to grips with the conventions of typography, and where you’ve started to challenge these conventions, the results have been stronger.’

Feedback on the projects is very helpful and I can absolutely recognise the strengths and weaknesses that are highlighted. The suggestions for developments in taking some of the work forward are useful: 

  • Taking the digital work back into analogue in the visual world
  • Building on the hand drawn quality of anatomy of typeface
  • Developing the quotes in different typeface
  • Reviewing the use of typefaces and developing more options in the posters

 My tutor highlights a useful point in the typesetting/hierarchy project that my layouts ‘were functional but lacking in you’re your usual spark.’ I think this is true and is probably because I felt more constrained by what the outcomes ‘should’ look like. His observation that I am probably more interested in design that is more visually dynamic is very true. I did feel like I needed to learn some of the rules before I was confident enough to look at breaking them. Recommendations to look at the work of other designers who are more free and easy in their treatment of typography is incredibly helpful.

Feedback on the assignment is very clear and fair, and recognises that working on two designs was a good way for me to develop my ideas. The comment on the minimalist version moving more towards a different format, like a series of cards, is interesting and something I might think about with other work. It was nice to read that he felt with the minimalist version that,

 “This was an interesting idea and the relationship between the form and content are playing against each other very well.”

I am pleased that the use of white space seemed to work and recognise that as I worked more on the design there was a danger that I started to fill the space I had originally created. My tutor suggests: 

“Perhaps think about where else grey and red can be placed to add dynamic but without diluting your intentions.”

Developing the other design further by thinking about a more 80s print aesthetic is an interesting idea and something I can explore. It is encouraging to have feedback that suggests my more playful approaches and drawings work and can be an acceptable part of my design practice. It was good to know that,

“The subsequent designs do take an 80s turn, and while these designs are very simple, you have managed to capture something of the era in the colours and layouts.”

I will develop my sketchbook work further and note the research points. I had looked at vernacular and protest typography but this may not have been clear on my learning log as it is under the research section.

The concluding pointers for the final assignment are really helpful ad I will keep them in mind.

 “The final part of the course focuses on layout by exploring how to design leaflets, flyers and posters. This is an opportunity to continue to understand the ‘rules’ of graphic design, but also for you to bring some of your playfulness in how you challenge these conventions. Tackling projects with more than one starting point works for you, so keep this approach going.”

I also have some useful references to follow up (I love the idea of finding kindred spirits!):

  • Phil Baines
  • Jamie Reid
  • Aesthetic Apparatus
  • Ed Fella
  • Peter Blake’s album covers ( I had looked at some of these but am happy to follow them up further)
  • Allie Brosh
  • Richard Littler

 This was an interesting section in that in many ways it felt very familiar, I regularly write reports so working with hierarchies and different typefaces is not new to me. I definitely learnt a lot about the development and conventions of typography and think I possibly imposed some self-limiting constraints that were not necessary. It is good to see the work of other designers that is very free in its typographic treatment. Ironically, I actually quite enjoyed this section definitely got a lot from it, I was nervous it would be very technical but think I had started to find my own way of working with the conventions.

 

Assignment Five: Your Choice – Part Three

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Brief 1: Book Design

Penguin Books have asked you to design anew house style for a collection of books on design for children and young people. They are starting with three titles: Colour, Typography and Photographs. Produce three covers – front, back and spine. The designs need to be recognisable as a series and at the same time be appreciated for their individual merits. The book dimensions are 190mm wide by 225mm high.

In addition they have asked you to produce the one on Typography, called A is for…Create an introductory chapter of at least four pages.

Thubmail sketches for a book design

Sketch 4

I started by developing the book covers based on the initial sketches (sketch 4).

As there was additional pages design involved in the Typography book I researched the main Pop Art characteristics:

  • Repetition
  • Recognizable imagery
  • Bright colours
  • Flat imagery
  • Celebrity/advertising images
  • Hard edges
  • Mundane reality and irony
  • Influence by comic books, newspapers and photographs
  • Consumerism and mass consumption
  • Blocks of colour

From this I developed a range of symbols in Illustrator as well as sketching a basic layout.  The biggest challenge seemed to be the wording and content, more so than the layout itself! It took me a while to decide what I would include in the first few pages. In the end I went for some background to typography and what I hoped would be some attractive exercises. I was a bit concerned that I had used a pop art approach in a previous assignment but I felt like my skills had moved on since then and I could be much bolder than I had been, I hoped that it would show my development.

I was still a little concerned that the book title is ‘A is for…’, which suggests a younger age group and an alphabet type book. I decided to overcome it by not making an obvious link and using A as the starting point for a voyage into typography, rather than a direct link to the words. I still wonder if young adults might be put off but hopefully the pop/graphic novel style would be attractive enough.

The design of the pages went through four main iterations as it developed:

I was looking for the beginnings of a book that was dynamic and interesting. I have used typography, colour, and layout (in other words pulling together all the elements of GD1) to try and achieve it. It took a little while for my ideas to surface but once they had I could see the direction I wanted to take. I printed each version as I went as I found it helped me identify issues I had missed on screen, like the stroke around the text box on page two, version two.

Pop art cover for a book on typography

Final cover design

I think the final version has a good degree of consistency even though I have tried to mix the format up throughout the pages. I am pleased with the result, not so much from the design point of view but because I can really see how my worked has evolved throughout the course and how my confidence has built.

Rework

Following feedback from tutor, which suggested in the politest possible way I had fallen into a common novice trap I did some rework on the covers. He highlighted that my chosen design appeared to have been designed as if the front and back covers would be seen at the same time and that they needed to be more distinct yet still being connected. I have therefore taken elements of front and back and worked them up further.

 

 

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Exercise: Chance Housing Association

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Exercise: Chance Housing Association (Graphic Design One: pg. 119)

The Chance Housing Association has been set up to try and help first time buyers get onto the housing ladder and they want a brand image for their stationery. It is important to them that the Association is seen as being different from the other local housing associations – more modern, more helpful, and definitely welcome to young people wanting to buy a home.

They want to use their logo on their letterhead and office stationery and it will also be used somewhere on the sheets that hold the property details. It also needs to be reproducible in the local newspaper and professional trade magazines.

mindmap for a housing association logo

Chance Housing mindmap

I started the process by mind mapping and doing some research. Research into first time buyers brought up a number of characteristics:

  • 65% of first time buyers come from the top 40% of earners (2015/16)
  • First time buyers tend to be older as a result of the rising costs of housing
  • There are a range of schemes on offer to help first time buyers:
    • Shared ownership: Household income of less than £80k
    • Help to buy: starter homes (under 40s), get a minimum discount off market price
    • Rentplus: rent to buy

The brief for Chance Housing Association (CHA) suggests their client range is likely to fall within the Help to Buy age range. Younger buyers who are probably struggling to get on the housing ladder.

The mind mapping threw up two areas that I wanted to think about – the physical structure of buildings and the emotional aspects of buying your first home. A time of excitement but also of anxiety, marking a milestone. This reflects CHA’s brief about wanting to be seen as supportive and helpful.

I also researched the logos and brand identities of other housing associations and organisations involved in social housing, and several characteristics emerged:

  • Many use acronyms, usually where they do their name in full is also included
  • Some are just text but most include a symbol
  • Most are sanserif
  • The most common symbols seems to be a house or roof structure
  • The predominant colours are blue and green
  • Some include three or more colours, particularly if they are concerned with diversity

The colour schemes are interesting; I think the dominance of blues and greens is about projecting an image of safety, security and trustworthiness.

To be different the CHA logo perhaps needed to include:

  • Bright and warm toned colours
  • Not to include a building structure
  • Serif typeface
  • Be within a bounding box or frame of some sort

I did a lot of sketching, playing with type layout and exploring different symbols. Some of which conform to the sector characteristics and some that are less conventional. There were a couple beginning to emerge for a shortlist, I particularly liked the idea of some the symbols being the shape of arrows and houses, symbolising moving up as well as pointing to CHA.

I wasn’t sure I quite had what I wanted and went back to the mind map, from which I picked up the notion of architecture and structure. I then did some sketches developing the letters into what could be blueprints or floor plans.

That led me on to thinking about square typefaces and I found several that I thought could work that I downloaded from Dafont.

I then moved on to developing some of the sketches in Illustrator. I was really pleased with the ‘Cubic’ typeface (Logo set 1) but felt that ‘Squared Display’ probably looked too much like a nightclub logo. It was interesting to note at this point how much more comfortable I am now with scrolling through lots of typefaces and seeing them as a source for inspiration as much as images and layouts.

Logo set 2 is based on my own designs using the idea of a floor plan. I was pleased with how they developed and that the idea could be worked up. I think they look quite contemporary and are different to other logos in the sector but in the end I wasn’t sure how legible they would be.

Logo set 3 played on the house/arrow idea using strokes and fill and different colourways. Although they are very clean I am not sure these are distinctive enough and perhaps don’t have quite the right tone.

Logo set 4 were just experiments with different decorative typefaces, again playing on the notion of architecture and buildings.

I decided that Logo set 1 was the approach I would develop into the stationery and publicity materials. I was a bit concerned about the yellow and it was problematic when I photocopied the stationery so I added a grey stroke which seems to work fine. I like the way the ‘h’ of CHA echoes a house and they resemble a honeycomb, the hive as a home. I also think it is distinctive against the other housing association logos I looked at.

Chance Housing Association Stationery

 

CHA and other housing association logos

As I developed the stationery it really highlighted the issues that you need to address, the nature of the information to be included, legibility and readability, setting the tone and so on. I knew using yellow might be an issue so I photocopied the results at different points. This led to adapting the logo (without the box) so that it still works when printed or photocopied in black and white.

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Assignment Five: Your Choice – Part Two

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Brief 1: Book Design

Penguin Books have asked you to design a new house style for a collection of books on design for children and young people. They are starting with three titles: Colour, Typography and Photographs. Produce three covers – front, back and spine. The designs need to be recognisable as a series and at the same time be appreciated for their individual merits. The book dimensions are 190mm wide by 225mm high.

In addition they have asked you to produce the one on Typography, called A is for…Create an introductory chapter of at least four pages.

As I started sketching I was thinking a lot about what might encourage people to pick the book up. I thought it needed to be able to attract adults and young people as adults may be buying it for their children. I’m not quite sure where it came from but I remembered something from a workshop I did a while ago which highlighted how we are hard wired to be able to identify faces and that the eyes are an important element of that. I also came across Joel Meyerwitz’s book ‘Seeing Things’ on talking to kids about photography and the eye became a theme for me. I thought it might work because I could replace the pupil with symbols for each of the books in the series. I played with several versions and mocked up the cover for the colour book.

 

 

I was not as excited about them by the time I had finished as I hoped so I went back to my other sketches. I had decided that the books would be produced as the ‘Penguin Young Designers’ series and thought it might work to have the covers themed under a different era in graphic design (sketch 4). I then chose to look at Pop Art, minimalism, chaotic design, Dadaism, Surrealism and Grunge. I went back through my Pinterest boards and did some more research, and decided I would work up grunge (colour), Dadaism (Photographs) and Pop Art (Typography).

Thubmail sketches for a book design

Sketch 4

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Exercise: Poster and flyer

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Exercise: Poster and flyer (Graphic Design 1: pg. 116)

You have been asked to design an A3 poster and an accompanying double-sided A6 flyer to promote a singing course run by an organisation called SingOut. They have very little money so want to print these posters on their black and white photocopier. You can use coloured paper if you want.

They have provided the information to include, consider if you need anything more, and the information hierarchy. Critique your work and reflect on your design choices.

I was quite looking forward to the constraints of this exercise and working with a monochrome palette. Online research suggested that images associated with singing are quite gendered and tend to focus on women. They also quite often include microphones, particularly the old square, 1940s type mic.

I was concerned that a female focused poster might limit the audience so wanted to try something else. I sketched a few ideas on the tablet and then started experimenting in Illustrator. I find it much easier with text based work to play on the computer rather than hand sketching, mainly because of the ease that things can be moved around and occasionally happy accidents happen as something might crossover, or be dragged into a place that created an effect I hadn’t anticipated.

I started with two versions that were quite sketch based, I thought if they were going to print them on a photocopier I would play on the handcrafted look. The third version was quite different in that I went for simplicity. I wasn’t sure if it might sit counter to their point about not having to read music but I think the shape of a note is a reasonably well understood symbol. The final version did include a woman’s head as a stylised line drawing and I decided on headline typeface that echoed the old Jazz style posters.

Having printed all four versions I felt the simple grid layout worked best, it was still eye catching but easy to reproduce at low cost. From this one I developed the flyer. It was interesting, and probably not surprising, to note that in moving between the two sizes simply scaling the larger version down did not work.

On the side with the main details it simply made the text too small to read and I was conscious it had gone below the RNIB recommended 12pt. While I was using the same elements they had to be reworked for the design to be able to impart all the necessary information. I like the simplicity of the design and think it would be noticeable, it also photocopied without any problems.