Design Strategies

I think my presentation went OK I do think I have improved at presenting over the year wasn't as nervous as I used to get but it's still daughnting standing up infront of a group of people talking about yourself.


I though I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do but I think I need to revisist my statement and narrow it down to one final one which sums it up.  I don't want to limit myself to print although I would like to be predominently print based but I want to have a strong grasp on web design.


I do want to focus on branding and identiy though and I think the work that I had looked at did represent this, although there coyuld have been a lot more.

Glad Creative

I really want to build up my skills in coming up with strong, clever yet simple concepts. I really like some of the branding work by Glad Creative.

Concepts like this work so well but are som simplistic combining two ideas together, the idea of a coffee morning and the League of Peace simply recreating the universally known peace symbol using cake. I really like simple but really effective concepts like this and want to improve my thinking skills.

The range of clothes for babies is called 'Glad rags' which works perfectly because of the company name, again so simple but works so well.

 

They have a great name to work with and play around with language which they have done for their range of stationary, maybe I could look at using something like this with my own branding. 

RED flyer

I've reversed out the red so that red is more dominant than white but left the back with a white background and red type.

October Creative Network

I've finished all of the images for the letter. Bridget wants a different colour, a brighter one so I need to experiment with a better colour/colours.

And

Nice branding I found

October Creative Network flyer

Bridget asked me to have another think about the concept and gave me some new information saying she wanted it to be like the pop-up Made flyer which I remember I really liked at the time.

Bridget also mentioned that the title has changed to Yorkshire Creative Showcase and will include disciplines such as Graphic Design, photography, fashion design, animation etc.

So I came up with a simple idea of using a range of creative tools you would fine used in all of the practices and use these to spell out the letters of the title. So for example a needle and thread, camera, computer etc etc.

Even if Bridget doesn't use the concept I'm glad I tried it because it forced me to use Illustrator, I am always careful to stay away from Illustrator because I thought I was just so bad at it but doing this I found it quite easy and so hopefully I will willing incorporate it into my work from now on.

October Creative Network

Bridget contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in doing the next flyer for October's Creative Network event.

I was quite surprised but pleased she contacted me as I felt like I was quite unprofessional about the last one but she said she really liked it.

Anyway this one has no given images to work with and the theme is expose yourself but Bridget wants it to have a digital theme as the event falls a week before Leeds Digital Festival.

I had a quick explore of the words explore and digital.

Initial idea I had was to use pixelation and to 'reveal' subtly the title 'expose yourself' within this. I'm not actually sure if this is the title but the two previous event flyers Bridget showed me both used this title.

These are just very quick experiments, I had a mess around with filters will pixelate things on Photoshop,  but then I want the words to blend in to the background and be subtle. So I created a grid of small squares and pixelated these, I then created letters on top of this so they are the same size squares and changed the opacity so it's not so obvious. Obviously it's quick and messy but is a rough first idea.

Skills set

In order to help me write my statement of intent I have wrote down a skills set which includes where I'm at now, what I can do, where my interest lie and where I'd like to improve upon and focus towards.

I have also focused my areas of interest down for the third year in order to make decision on the kind of designer I want to be and the areas I would like to work with.

Spetember Creative Netwrok Flyer

This flyer is proving to be a lot more work and stress than I anticipated! I have made many ammendments to the flyer and have altered it a few times now and have started to really not like it, especially the back but Bridget said she likes it and has said she's going to send it to the printers which is exciting/scary as I really feel like a novice and like I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to that.

Final flyer
 I enjoyed doing the flyer even though I don't really like the outcome, especially the back but I do feel excited that it's going to be actually used.