We had a talk with a designer that used to work for Wonderland magazine yesterday which I really enjoyed. It was refreshing to hear someone who admitted he had no idea either which area of design he wanted to go into when he was at university too. Also he gave us some good tips regarding work experience such as, even if you have to make the tea etc, just be polite and get on with it because it's all about making contacts and who you know.

his work was really good, I particularly liked the Bestival work he has done as I love the Bestival artwork! So it was cool to meet the guy that was behind it. It was also interesting to hear his thinking behind all his work and how he gets to his final ideas etc.

The crit went really badly today. I didn't realise we basically had to have our final design layouts completed in InDesign and as I couldn't download it over the holidays because it wouldn't work, my layouts were in Photoshop which I didn't think would be a problem because I didn't know we had to have the finals for today. Anyway, a lot of other peoples were amazing! But I felt like it looked as if I hadn't done much work even though I had done a few of my editorial illustrations over the holiday. I guess I was just unprepared.

The talk with Chris Davidson (Hub Agency) went really well and I got the placement which is good as I was getting worried I wasn't going to find anything in time. He seemed really nice and he's already thought of some projects that I can get on with when I come to work with him for the week so everything seems good.

I have received a few responses from work experience! One of them is quite far away so probably wont go for that, but the other is for 'Hub Agency' situated in the Enterprise Pavillion which is pretty handy. I've got to go meet with the Art Director the Monday I get back to uni and show him some of my work...

Here is my initial illustration of the Eiffel Tower. I want it to look quite minimal and simple. I may add colour to it in Illustrator...

I found this image of the empire state building by Linda Zacks and I really like the minimal sketch. This is how I imagined my Eiffel tower to look so I am going to have a go at drawing it tomrow

2nd page spread

1st page spread ideas



Here are some of my initial mock ups after my crit feedback. I'm not sure which opening page works best? Or whether to put an image in the negative space.

The second page I really don't like, I think it is too in your face and busy in contrast with the first page ideas. Hopefully in my crit they will help me decide which layout to go for, for the first page.

We had our crit today which was helpful. The feedback I got suggested that I play with the headline more, perhaps crossing the text over so that it reflects 'crossing borders' or have it laid across the middle of the double page spread. I want to use a lot of negative space in my layout as this is something I really like in magazine articles. Also perhaps adding some colour as the spread was very black and white.

Over the holidays I am going to work on my editorial illustrations, perhaps do something about Paris as Lenz talks a lot about how she loves living in Paris and how Graphic Design has enabled her to do so.

Today was really helpful. We had a workshop with Justin all day. In the morning we had to do some rough layout ideas on layout paper which was really good as usually I work quite small but this meant we had to design on a bigger scale. Then after lunch we moved on to the Macs and designed our rough layouts in InDesign. I had to decide on a headline for my article and then illustrate the meaning of the headline in the text. Mine was 'Crossing Borders' as Annette Lenz talks about the opportunities that Graphic Design opens up to you by enabling you to work with different cultures and in different countries. Tomorow we have a group crit looking at each others designs from today.

http://issuu.com

I like the use of negative space. The illustration is the focal point but it works well with the text. I think I may use a 3 column grid like this one.

I found a really good website which features hundreds of magazines

http://issuu.com I was looking at 'Fake' magazine and found this which really jumped out at me. The image is really strong and bold and takes up predominantly all of the double-page spread which I think is really effective. I like the simplicity in the colour. The bold black text has the visual hierarchy as it contrasts with the image.

My final CV! I did this CV in InDesign as I now have some knowledge of the programme and it looks much more professional. Everything is aligned properly and it just looks a lot better as a whole. My name is really bold and striking so hopefully will stand out as a CV. Now to send it off to employers!

Today was interesting. Kit and Justin got us to choose one word from our transcription. We then had to chose a font from the pages that they gave us and handmake our word from the font we thought best represented the meaning of the word. My word was 'Dream' so I used a psychedelic looking font and got rid of the baseline so that it looked floaty and 'dream-like'

Here it is

Transcribing is looooong. So glad we got to split up the parts! Annette is really hard to understand in parts too.

We had our first introduction to InDesign yesterday with Jo which went quite well. I'm quite excited about this project as I enjoy doing layout designs and editorial illustrations.

We also had a workshop with Kit about designing books and pagination etc which was interesting and we got to see some books which Kit had produced when she worked as a designer which was cool.

My improved C.V! Kit had a look through though and we found some errors which I need to correct. I had some spelling mistakes as well as some alignment issues. Also, some of the introduction wasn't relevent so I am going to edit that.

New project! Thank god its not another animation!

The new project is a magazine layout which I'm really looking forward to. Today we were all allocated a typographer. Basically we have to listen to the chosen persons podcast and transcribe the interview, and then transfer it to a magazine article using appropriate illustrations/photographs etc. My designer is Annette Lenz, whom I have never heard of. I did some research on her but there wasn't anything in the library and I couldn't find out much about her on the internet. Here is some of her work though

Her work is quite geometrical and abstract. Strong use of colour and bold type, its really striking. The left image is quite dream like and intriguing.

We had a guest speaker in today who is a freelance designer. She was really informative and helpful and it was interesting to hear about her changing career. The talk reiterated the fact that being a designer is about getting yourself out there and networking. It's not what you know it's who you know. However, it all still seems quite daunting when you think about how many people want to get into the industry... Overall the talk was really helpful to hear about someone who has been there and done it.

Some tips she gave us were:

-Assume reader will flit around the pages

-Look value for money, grab attention

-Intro 1/2 a sentence summary of article.

-Subheadings break up text

-Captions add further info for the 'skim' reader

-Boxes- short related features along side main article

-Use a simple colour palette- about 2 or 3 colours

-Use a versatile and flexible grid

My first CV! It looks quite bland though and doesn't really stand out. I'm thinking I should add some colour, and also realised that I have my education history in the wrong order!

Im slowly starting to get Flash now after one of my classmates helped me on the first part of my animation, however I'm slowly running out of time and the deadline is looming :-o getting slightly worried now...

I went into Uni today and Neil helped me a bit with some of my issues on Flash. It all made sense but then when I came to doing it at home again I'm all confused again. I don't understand why I'm not getting it?! Usually I'm fine with new programmes... I may ask one of my peers to help me with it.

I'm having a few issues with Flash but I'm ill so I can't go into uni and get help! The tutorials on Youtube are all really confusing...

However here are a few more of my illustrations for my animation that i created from different textured papers.

Found this animation on Youtube! Really impressive

These are the characters I created for my animation. I am going to 'replace' the two so that it looks like his mouth is opening and closing. Then I'm going to shoot it from the side so that it looks like he is walking along eating various junk foods that I will also illustrate.

quick doodle of my storyboard for my idea

I found this song on Youtube which gave me an idea to have a character eating loads of food and being 'happy' but then at the end having the horrible truth about what obesity does to you.

From my tutorial about my tea idea, everyone was doing issues, so I decided to change my idea to childhood obesity as it is a growing problem that is pretty big.

Some facts i found:

-£549million is spent each year by kids on the way to and from school on confectionary etc

-Obesity shortens lifespan by 9 years

-Parents will start outliving their own children

-£945 million spent each year for treating the consequences of obesity

----- I think I will focus on the statistic about confectionary as it is such a huge amount of money. I'll look at comparing it with things they could have bought etc.

Had story boarding task with Justin today, here are some tips I got:

-Look at using paper textures as a background

-Camera angles

-Hand draw a few facial expressions

-'Audio starts here'

-How do you want the mood to change?

-Use arrows to depict movement

-If using a detailed character, you can just draw him as an outline for the rest of the storyboard

-8 or 9 mouth shapes in animation

-Annotate it if relevent

-Research target market for your statistics

-Music- make it relevant

-Research into a style

Final Flash Animation

Link to Blur music video animation

Link to Diesel advert

My idea is to focus on tea being the best choice of beverage, as I drink a lot of tea daily!

Ideas to include:

-how much tea is consumed a year

-how many cups people drink a day

-look at the numerous tea appreciation societies on Facebook

-'Traditional English' habit

-Benefits of tea

etc etc

Had first flash tutorial today which was quite interesting. It all seems rather complicated though so I'll just have to keep practising...

New brief! Quite excited about this as I did an illustrated animation last year which I really enjoyed. However, we've got to learn a new programme from scratch so not sure how that will turn out....

From the brief realised that my statistic could be on anything just as long as you show which side you are on, so it therefore needs to be a persuasive argument.

Things to research:

-chris cunningham

-saul bass

-adrian johnson

-nationalstatistics.co.uk

-tokyoplastic.com

-shynola.com

-spike jonze

-jarrattmoody.com

-whatthefont.com

Finally finished my final piece!

I like how everything contrasts and I think the layout is successful. When i actually printed my document however, the type was not very legible which is slightly annoying... but overall I am pleased with the message.

A couple of photos I took to put in my poster. Lighting is really bad so need to play with that on photoshop. Now I need to focus on my layout and hopefully I will be finished in a couple of days so I can focus on my sketchbook.

Crit was really helpful! The feedback was pretty much what I imagined it would be. The tutors liked my typography but it didn't provide enough information so they suggested I go back to my initial idea of having the flowers with a card saying 'how much did these flowers REALLY cost someone?'', as well as keeping my type as a strapline. They also suggested I rephrase my type to say 'the UNETHICAL cut flower industry' as not all flowers are sourced unethically and I don't want ethical companies to suffer.

I have had a change of idea for my project, I decided to make it solely typographic by creating a type out of real flowers.

I really liek this as it looks really pretty, but when you actually read the message you realise it isn't so nice after all.

I'm worried it doesn't communicate successfully enough though? Hopefully the crit when we get back to uni will give me some feedback.

Finished my essay!!! Bibliography is really hard to get right however, I'm worried I will lose vital marks on this. Now I can focus on my project! I need to buy some flowers and take a photo of them for my poster idea, seems a bit hypocritical buying some cheap flowers though when that is what my issue is about...