Archive for September, 2009

Idiom Research

For a brief I’m looking at phrases we have in english, the equivalent in a foreign language and the re-translation. Here is a collection of some I could use:

English: To make a big fuss about nothing
German: Viel Aufhebens machen um etwas
Re-translation: To make a lot of lifting about nothing

English: To skip work
German: Blau machen
Re-translation: To make it blue

English: You can do it however you want!
German: Das kannst du halten wie ein Dachdecker!
Re-translation: You can keep it as a roofer!

English: Its all Greek to me
German: Das sind ja Böhmische Dörfer
Re-translation: Its all the villages of Bohemia to me

English: I’ve had enough
German: Das geht mir an die Nieren
Re-translation: It comes to my kidney

English: You’re getting on my nerves
German: Du bringst mich auf die Palme, Du gehst mir auf den Senkel, Du gehst mir auf den Wecker, Du gehst mir auf den Keks
Re-translation: You make me go on top of the palm tree, You’re getting on my shoelace, You’re getting on my alarm clock, You’re getting on my cookie

English: When pigs fly
French: Quand les poules auront des dents
Re-translation: When hens have teeth

English: I have other fish to fry
French: J’ai d’autres chats à fouetter
Re-translation: I have other cats to whip

English: Look before you leap
Spanish: Antes de que te cases, mira lo que haces
Re-translation: Before you get married, look at what you’re doing

English: I’m very happy
French: J’ai la banane
Re-translation: I have the banana

English: It’s nothing to write home about
French: Ça ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard
Re-translation: That doesn’t break three paws to a duck

English: To call a spade a spade
French: Appeler un chat un chat
Re-translation: To call a cat a cat

English: It’s raining cats and dogs
French: Il pleut des cordes
Re-translation: It’s raining ropes

English: Good luck
Italian: In bocca al lupo
Re-translation: Into the wolf’s mouth

English: Curiosity killed the cat
Italian: Tanto va la gatta al lardo che ci lascia lo zampino
Re-translation: The cat loses his paw trying to get the bacon

English: To kill two birds with one stone
German: Prendere due piccioni con una fava
Re-translation: To take two pigeons with one bean

English: Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours
Spanish: Dando y dando, pajarito volando
Re-translation: Giving and giving, the bird is flying

Comments

Promo Crit Feedback

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This is the feedback I got about my promo piece. I do pretty much agree with whats been said here. I did mean for the business card to be perforated but I guess this wasn’t clear enough. I know what I need to do to improve it now through. I just need to make sure that it is updated regularly with work so it could be sent out to future employers/clients.

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Want/Need

What I need to do in the 3rd year:

  • Improve my abilities in layout design
  • Achieve a professional finish to my work
  • Create a portfolio that will get me a job
  • More experience in working with real clients & life briefs
  • Work on my skills in typographic design
  • Learn more about sending work to be printed and costing jobs
  • Work on briefs that involve publication design
  • Make contacts
  • Get more work placements
  • Get my work out there so more people can see it

What I want to do in the 3rd year:

  • Do creative projects
  • Have fun
  • Experiment
  • Get a good result in my degree qualification
  • Become employable as a professional designer
  • Become an expert in publication design
  • Gain more experience in print making
  • Write a brilliant dissertation
  • Do more hand rendered work
  • Create a great portfolio that I’m proud of

Work I need to produce:

  • Dissertation
  • Presentations
  • Blogs
  • Self promotional work
  • Professional quality design work with consideration of print quality, stocks, finishes etc.

Work I want to produce:

  • Books
  • Leaflets
  • Posters
  • Branding
  • Experimental typography

Skills I need:

  • Layout – arrangement in publications
  • Typography – hand rendered, display, publication
  • InDesign – setting up different formats, shortcuts, preparation for print
  • Client contact
  • Job costing

Skills I want:

  • Layout – arrangement in publications
  • Typography – hand rendered, display, publication
  • InDesign – setting up different formats, shortcuts, preparation for print
  • High quality finish of work
  • Letterpress
SubjectProcessProductContext
TypographyPrintPublicationsBranding
LayoutLetterpressWebsitesExhibition Design
GridsWeb DesignPostersPublication Design
ColourHand RenderedLogosPromotion
Language

Comments

Personal Brief/Occasions

For my personal brief I am going to use cross stitch to create a series of typographic works. I’ve decided to adapt the Occasions brief but use cross stitch as a process. It may be that I have to photograph or scan the pieces to adapt them into a viable format but I think cross stitch would work well. Its a very traditional process that fits in with the kind of traditional designs used on cards etc. but I plan to make it more modern by using more subversive messages to make something that a younger generation would find appealing.

The Brief
Produce a range of type Lead/typographic designs for a range of paper based product for a specific/targeted market.

Your designs should consider the development across gift cards, wrapping papers, gift bags and any other formats that you can identify within existing or proposed markets.

Considerations
Target Groups to consider are male, female, teenage, kids, new baby, wedding and general congratulations.

Wording to Consider – happy birthday, just for you, surprise, new baby boy/girl, on your wedding day, to the happy couple,with love, wedding, congratulations, though any suggestions to fit the aforementioned areas would be appreciated.

Colour considerations are essential and should reflect current and projected trends.

Target Audience/Tone of Voice
Who is buying & who is it for?
Appropriate to audience but consider humour, contemporary, classic, sophisticated, fun, sincere

Background
Concept is a design company that focuses on design for paper product including gift wrap, gift bags, accessories (ribbons bows, tapes) for xmas, spring events and special occaissons.

Their clients include John Lewis, Waitrose, Paperchase, Clintons, Birthdays and Tesco

Product ranges cover a range of budgets, price scales and audiences from low priced but quality to higher end creative.

Designs solutions focus on the commercially viable/successful but forward thinking.

Mandatory
Formats used should reflect existing commercially available formats.

There should be a minimum of 6 designs per range i.e 6 cards, 6 wraps, 6 bags etc. or a combined range of 3 designs

Deliverables should demonstrate the perceived range of product and projected further development where necessary.

Deliverables
Mock-ups for design solutions (to scale)
Presentation boards demonstrating concept, solutions and range.

Comments

Leeds City Council

The third brief I have chosen to do is a live brief from Leeds City Council to design a document for their Public Arts Strategy. I’m doing this collaboratively with Jane.

Comments

Doing My Nut In…

The second brief I have chosen is called ‘Doing My Nut In…’. It is a past brief from ISTD 2008.

… whenever people begin to talk about their own language, they all have something to offer – favourite words or sayings, dialect anecdotes and observations, usage likes and dislikes.’ David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language, Second Edition, 2003

This project is a further celebration – of language in its local forms. It is a theme that we regularly return to as a fundamental typographic focus – how we use words to communicate. You may consider the vernacular, the slang, the argot of a specific location, area or group and typographically express the meanings and, if possible, the derivation of the phrases. Similarly it may interest you to consider how phrases are interpreted in different languages. Is there, for instance, a Spanish or Dutch equivalent to ‘it’s doing my nut in’? Maybe we are using translations of phrases that originated in other languages, without knowing their provenance. We use a saying that translates into English from its original Arabic as ‘The straw that broke the camel’s back. With interesting variations it translates into:

Spanish: la gota que colma el vaso
the drop that spills over the glass.
Dutch: de druppel die de emmer overloop maakt
the drop that makes the bucket overflow
German: der Tropfen, der das Fass zum Überlaufen bringt
the drop that makes the barrel overflow

Extend this research and you could examine the variations in punctuation between languages and the impact on typographic usage. Whatever approach you adopt must visually stimulate and inform the reader.

*Local could be where you live – Barcelona, Bournemouth, Belfast, Brisbane, Bloemfontein, Beirut…

The Brief
Design a publication or screen-based piece that uses at least six examples of your chosen area of language usage and typographically interprets – and celebrates – their richness. Incorporate informative text with each example or combine these as a summary that covers all examples. This must express a typographic hierarchy and continuity through layout. The format is your choice – book, broadsheet(s), website, DVD… but must reflect a consideration of production opportunities.

Target Audience
Designers, design students and lovers of language

Comments

Promo

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This is my promo pack and business card I’ve designed for the crit tomorrow. I used the identity I already established for my website as it appears on my portfolio as well. I combined the 2 elements as I thought they should have to work together. I just used images and no explanatory text as I think the imagery speaks for itself.

Comments

Design Strategies Presentation

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Slide 1: At the beginning of summer I set up my website carolinehenson.co.uk. I just used indexhibit because I wanted to get my work online quickly as I thought it would help me to get a work placement. I set up my blog on my website as I got fed up of using blogger and personally found this system to work better than separate blogs. I have kept it updated frequently with work I have done, things that inspire me and occasions when my work has been mentioned on other blogs. Surprisingly, I got the most feedback on some cross stitch pieces I did quite a while ago and the only place I had these uploaded onto was my flickr. I’ve missed cross stitching and bought loads of supplies over the summer. Unfortunately I never got round to actually doing any but hopefully thats something I can bring into my projects this year.

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Slide 2: My dissertation is on the subject of grids and asks the question ‘is design ruled by the straight line?’. To prepare for this I read these 10 books over the summer. As you can imagine, this took quite a bit of time! Especially when it came to fishing out the important bits to note down. I feel quite prepared to start on it now as I have loads of notes on many different aspects of grid-based design. I looked at grids in their most obvious sense like in books, posters and so on but then I also looked at things such as painting as the ‘De Stijl’ movement heavily featured grids and lines. I found reading about architecture to also be really interesting. I got out ‘Towards A New Architecture’ by Le Corbusier. He had a strong interest in grids and even invented a modular method of measurement.

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Slide 3: In terms of primary research I’ve contacted Antonio Carusone – founder of the famous Aisle One design blog and The Grid System website. He has agreed to be interviewed for my dissertation. A designer at Purpose who helped me with my portfolio and someone at my work placement have also said that they are willing to help me out. I’m now looking for someone involved in architecture to contact as I’m interested in how grids have affected the design world as a whole.

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Slide 4: Over the summer I had a look over some really old ISTD briefs. One that caught my eye was called ‘Red, Green, Blue’. It basically asked for the creation of a journal of some kind based on the colour red, green or blue and black. I chose red as its one of my favourite colours. I used this brief as just a chance to play around with type and illustration rather than anything serious. I called it ‘When In Doubt Wear Red’ as quoted by fashion icon Bill Blass. It is comprised of facts, quotes, song lyrics and short stories all linked by the colour red. This was just a fun little thing to do but I think this brief could be taken a lot further and I may re-do it sometime this year.

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Slide 5: I’d been looking at lots of bold geometric type on some design blogs and decided I wanted to create some myself as I’ve never actually tried to create my own font before. I came up with the idea of using triangles as counters as I thought this could look good. I sketched it out but when I tried re-creating them in Illustrator I felt that some of the characters worked well such as the c and the n but others were too thin and stick-like such as the p, the r and the y. So I redid the ones I wasn’t happy with. I then created a quick poster with it because my InDesign had a major breakdown and nearly destroyed my macbook. I named it Trinity because of the 3 points of the triangle. Its ok for my first ever font I suppose but I do think it looks a bit crap. I think I’ll stick with utilising the fonts of others, rather than creating my own.

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Slide 6: Another thing that inspired me was paper cut type. I’d seen some that used layers of paper, something I hadn’t really seen before and wanted to have a go at doing some of my own. Layering creates a slightly psychedelic visual so I chose the word ‘dream’. I used both the cuts and the cut offs to create two different interpretations. The blue and white relate to cloud imagery which is often associated with dreams. I think this experiment worked quite well as its a very different style of paper cutting than what most people do.

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Slide 7: A large chunk of my summer was spent emailing many many companies around Leeds and Sheffield for a work placement. Even though I did start in May when we were told to, I was crap at following people up. I did get quite a few replies from people who really liked the work in my portfolio but didn’t have any room for me in their company. Eventually, around mid-August I got a reply from a guy called David Hatton at BrandNew in Armley. I’d liked what I’d seen of their work on their website and decided that it was relevant and close enough for me to spend some time at. I then researched what Armley was like, found out there was nothing there apart from some old asbestos factories and scared myself into not wanting to go there for fear of death.

Luckily I got an email from ICM in Headingley. This seemed ideal as they did lots of print work, were only 15 minutes walk away and I could go to Shaky Jakes every day. However once I had an interview there I was left feeling cold and was only wanted to go for the daily milkshake. They also had several other applicants so I thought I might not get it. A week later I had an interview at BrandNew with a guy called Adam. The people there were so friendly, they were really enthusiastic about the work in my portfolio and took loads of time out to show me examples of things they had done. They immediately asked if I could start and I accepted. Turns out I got the place at ICM as well but I didn’t really care.

I liked how there was such a variety of work at BrandNew. It is part of massive company called Logistik who have loads of different departments including their own little sandwich company. Within BrandNew there was a web team, coding people, 3d & motion people and the print team who I worked with. They do work for clients such as Bupa, Marks & Spencer, Yorkshire Water and they recently did all the rebranding work to turn Kabuki sushi into Sesame who have a shop in Leeds Uni.

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Slide 8: During my time there I did a lot of moodboards. I found these to be really useful when coming up with concepts and visuals for projects considering we didn’t have the long time scales for research like we do here. Adam even asked me to come with a concept for the new website animation and print campaign for BrandNew. Moodboards helped me a lot when I had to portray my ideas to members of the other departments. Thank god for the 3d and motion team, whose presence meant I didn’t have to go anywhere near After Effects.

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Slide 9: The first project I did was for a new inhouse company whose name was yet to be decided. BrandNew put an emphasis on sustainability and that was one of the qualities of this new company. I had to design logos and storyboard animations for two of the chosen names and show how they would work on business cards, leaflets and websites.

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Slide 10: I did this pdf for Martin House, a charity for bereaved children. This info pack was for teachers informing them how to deal with recently bereaved children and where to find helpful resources. This is going to be put on their website as a downloadable pdf and was one of many live briefs I did. One of the things I liked about my placement was that they were constantly busy with work so instead of giving me past briefs like some places do, they always gave me things that would be sent to print, shown to clients or would help them in some way.

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Slide 11: I did these stylesheets for The Pearl Club and Women’s Business Forum. These serve as identity guide lines so if any designer needs to do work for these companies, they have to use the swatches, fonts and logo styles that I have used here. This was a good exercise for me and I think that doing some worksheets in a similar style for my future projects will help me to be consistent in everything I make.

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Slide 12: These are some winner envelopes I did for a Yorkshire Water awards ceremony. I think they look a bit cheesy but its what they wanted.

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Slide 13: I also did some artwork for Marks & Spencer to show their sponsorship at the British Cheese Awards. Doing this brief and the Yorkshire Water brief showed me how difficult it can be to work with clients as they often don’t realise what a designer needs to be able to make something look good in large formats. Both companies didn’t bother to send over proper versions of logos so that meant either hounding them or improvising, luckily they liked the result both times. It was especially important on these banners as the pop ups were going to be 2m tall and the hanging ones 3m wide. Marks & Spencer were also quite confused as to what they wanted. At first they said they wanted the stacked logo with their special ‘heroic green’ colour as a background and then they said they wanted a black background with the Your M&S logo. The email system they had in place at BrandNew showed me how important constant client contact can be.

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Slide 14: On my last day I had to come up with some colour palettes to be used on a redesign of a website called Wonder. I spent about 4 hours creating loads of colour options for a client and when she came in she just completely dismissed them all saying she wanted ‘steely metallic colours’ like the blue they used on their logo. The way she said it made my morning feel like a total waste. She could have bothered to tell us this earlier when she was briefing us. So I had to re-do everything. This experience taught me how difficult it can be to work with clients, especially when they are so headstrong like this horrible woman. But overall I had a great time there and Adam said he would add me to their list of freelancers and that I would even get paid next time.

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Slide 15: When I finished the second year I had it clear in my mind that this year I wanted to focus on publication design and after the summer that is still very much my aim. Researching grid-based layout for my dissertation and working on several layouts as a part of my work placement has solidified in my mind that this is the direction I want to go in. My work placement has also increased my interest in branding as I like being able to see something through from start to finish and branding seems like a good way to do that. They also told me that thats where the big money is. I have strong skills in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator as those are the main things I will need to work in design for print I will continue to build upon my skills in those programs. I am still slightly interested in web design and working in the industry has shown me how much work there is in that area. I will try to develop my skills in Dreamweaver and web design but not at the same level as the other programs I have mentioned. I’m really excited to start the 3rd year and hopefully my work will develop in both quality and professionalism.

Comments

Envelopes

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I found these envelopes in More Paperwork by Nancy Williams when I was on my placement. The images have been drawn directly onto the transparent part of the envelope as well as the paper behind it to create a new image when the paper insert is removed. Interactive handmade design is something I’m really interested in.

Comments

Yin Yang

The first brief I have decided to do is Yin Yang from ISTD 2004.

Brief: A museum, gallery or public space in your area is planning to produce an exhibition/installation featuring graphic design. Instead of the typical homage to a single designer or group, the aim is to stimulate awareness of the diversity and influence of typo/graphic design as a communication medium. You are required to develop concepts for an exhibition featuring the work of two graphic designers whose work is complementary. They may be contemporary designers working in different fields or designers from different eras whose work reflects the changes in style and attitude of the two periods. They should be designers whose work has had political, social or environmental influence. While your proposals should incorporate the essence of the designers’ work, this is not merely a showcase for their work. You must establish a format and visual style for the exhibition that expresses complementarity. This factor is central to this project as most of us, during our design education, have been required to design something in the style of a particular designer or design group. We do not want to see proposals in the style of your favourite designer. Your challenge is to make a statement about the influence of typo/graphic design.

Target Audience:
The host location must satisfy its regular visitors but is developing this project in conjunction with local education institutions at all levels to stimulate awareness of Graphic Design.

Requirements:

• Title and visual identity for the exhibition. This should be applied to material where appropriate. Full and single colour versions are required.
• Catalogue – cover design and four double-page spreads, including introductory spread—or equivalent. A minimum of 1000 words must be incorporated. This text matter should be presented separately as marked-up copy. Content, style and production specifications should reflect your treatment of the exhibition. A same-size dummy catalogue and details of grids should be provided.
• Exhibition panels – three exhibition panels, including an introductory panel. These should be presented as a 25% of full-size visuals with same-size examples of type usage.
• Press Advertisement – In addition to the design, identify and specify an appropriate publication and size for the ad.
• Exhibition Poster or Ambient media.
• Admission ticket
• An innovative piece of merchandise

Exhibition design is something that interests me, especially after learning about how to design for exhibitions in one of the grid books I read over the summer. I think if I choose two designers whose work heavily featured grids then that would work quite well as it relates to my dissertation and personal interests. There are a lot of requirements such as posters, tickets and catalogues but I think it would be fun to design all the different elements.

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