BA Graphics talk

We had a talk with Roger about going on to the third year of BA Graphics after i finish my time on Vis Comm. It was a really insightful talk actually, and It seems like the course is going to be really good. He showed us some of the previous students work and told us what would be expected, which to be honest, is a LOT, but even so, the way the course works looks very exciting. It's very research driven with a lot of time focused on concepts and ideas which is slightly different as the briefs we get at the moment are, in comparison, a lot more focused on producing something that could be used in some kind of real life situation. I am looking forward to the chance to have a go at some really experimental and exciting graphic design. Vis Comm has been really good for me though, don't get me wrong, I have learnt quite a bit whilst on the course and it has given me a sound undwerstanding of numerous aspects of design whether it be typography or software knowledge, but it will be good to have a go at doing some really free and loose designs on my third year. Just have to pass now then!

Hamish Muir

Today we had a really interesting talk from Hamish Muir, Co-founder of the design company 8vo. He started the company with fellow designers Mark Holt and Simon Johnston but they left to go their own ways quite a while ago now. It was a really inspiring talk as i really like his work and his way of working. He gave us an insight into the way he works and used to work before he used computers. There were a few main points that i will take from the talk and use in my own practice and approach to work. Possibly the best piece of 'advice' that he gave was that it's not important to always have the biggest and best idea ever as it's never possible to have that! Instead, a simple idea that solves the problem well is a lot better. This is great as i have gone through almost all of my education so far worrying about whether my idea is the best and it has been one of my biggest fears when showing my work to others. Hopefully, this will no longer be the case, as long as i can find a way of solving the problem instead. The next pointer he gave that will help me greatly was more of a comment on the way that he works rather than 'advice' was that he realised that he had to use the computer as a tool rather than a solution. The last of the main points he gave was another comment on the way that he works which is to set up some 'rules' to abide by for each piece of design. You could see where he had set these rules in his own design, whether it be a type face or a poster and it really seemed to work. It allowed him to be more free with what he was doing as he didn't have to worry about having aspects of the design all sorts of sizes and having to worry about the asthetics of things as the rules kept had already defined what size things had to be etc. All in all, it was a truly inspiring lecture and i will definately be using the points he gave in my approach to design no matter what the piece is.

Essay Talk

We had another talk with Anna today about the essay. I feel a lot better about it this now as i feel Anna has given me a bit more conformation that i am heading in the right direction. It's still not completely solid and i need to work extremely hard to keep up with the work but for the moment, at least it's going the right way. Anna suggested i look at the Innocence Smoothie brand as the second of my case studies, which i will look into as it is not a digital brand at all compared to ebay. I just need to start looking in more detail at some books in the library that will give me a much better understanding of brand building and critical theory surrounding brands in the digital age. Sleepless nights here i come!

PPRD Hand In

Finally one less project to worry about! to be honest, it hasn't taken up too much of my time and i think i have been worrying about it more than i have needed too, but then again, the marks wont be back for a while so i may have reason to worry! at the same time though, it feels good not to have to worry about it anymore, despite the fact that it wont make much difference at all as i am still going to do my blog and im sure my CV and portfolio will develop even further before the end of the course.

First Interim Crit

We had the 1st of 3 interim crits for our professional project on Friday. I knew it was not going to be what Mike and Kit were probably expecting it to be. Truthfully i was not ready for a 'crit' and this showed. I need think carefully about what i will call my fuel company before i go any further as the name will have to be something that reflects the 'green' ethos of hydrogen fuel. i need it to show the good side of the fuel and not have any bad connotations yet at the same time, be universally recognisable as i am going to design this comapny with a view to becoming an international brand.

MAA again.

We got an email from Matt today about the MAA giving us the actual feedback from the logo and presentation. They do want us to edit a few things on the logo, which is a shame as we really like the one that we submitted. 

Well done guys,

Every person who entered a design in response to the brief did a really good job and the competition between each of the entrants was quite astounding. But your design was picked over and above all the others.

The judges felt that the scheme that you submitted was professional yet not staid.. They felt that it created an impact but didn't overpower the viewer and that it represented the 'ethos' of the MAA without it being all about the logo.

Your presentation of your work was confidently and clearly laid out too.

The intention was always that they wanted an identity that they can use and they feel that your design represented the closest thing to that but the MAA steering committee did have some requests to make with the logo design. 

- To consider how the words 'Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole' might be incorporated into a strap line that highlights 'economic development' as the driver for the agreement.

- To revisit the teams design that used the demographic, relative population size 'dots' as possibly the best concept for development.

Having considered these comment, the MAA team would like you to work up and develop your identity and then re-present your developed ideas to Gordon Page, the Chair of the MAA and ex-chief Executive of Cobham (Cobham is a global company engaged in the development, delivery and support of leading edge aerospace and defense systems in the air, on land and at sea)

We will then present you with your prize and engineer some good coverage in the local newspaper, the Daily Echo, as well as seeing if we can get you some national coverage too.

I'm talking to the partners to sort out a suitable date for this withn the next two weeks. I will be in touch to try and organize a suitable, mutually convenient time to meet but in the meantie, if you could consider the two requests detailed above.

If you have any other questions, drop me a line.

Matthew Desmier

Head of the Enterprise Unit.

In the email, Matt mentions some local, and possibly national, coverage which would be really good, we just need to make the amendments and see what they say. It shouldn't be too hard as it seems as though they want an older version of the logo that shows the sizes of each population.

Essay

I have changed my title slightly from the impact of digital "technologies on visual identities" to "the impact of digital technologies on branding". Anna said in the last meeting (2/3/09) that visual identities wasn't clear enough as it suggested that i would be writing about identities on the web and how our identities are perceived differently on the internet etc, whereas i was intending to write about branding and visual identities. The next stage is to find some case studies and after looking online and finding numerous articles about branding and new digital technologies i think i have decided upon my first one. It will be ebay. I need to find a second study now, this one will show the pre-digital era.

MAA

We won! we got an email at lunch time today from Matt Desmier explaining that the board of the MAA had chosen mine and luke's logo to use for their identity.

Faber

After talking to Hayley, we decided to make our designs for the Faber D&AD project a lot more simple than we were previously doing. We had a look at how we could link the designs to what the books are to make them more of a special thing to have and own. We looked at the layouts of screenplays themselves and how they are written. Most, the older ones for sure, are written on typewriters so after searching a lot of the campus and raiding other departments, we found one and started playing around to see what effects we could get. The idea behind it is to make them more unique as they are print on demand and with a typewriter, it's not like you can print something off exactly the same whenever you want.



We concentrated on trainspotting whilst using the typewriter so we didn't get overwhelmed with lots of different titles and authors etc, so when we moved onto the next (Taxi Driver) we thought how else we could make a simple design. For this we used some metal letterpress blocks. However, we didn't use them for printing, we laid them out on a table and took photos of them.

CV

I designed a new up to date CV! I now have a lot more relevant qualifications and work experience since starting the course, so combined with a much better understanding of graphic design and layout, i have a made it a lot better.. in my opinion anyway.


I do not doubt that it will change again though.

Portfolio Talk

We had a talk with Gellan Watt, MD of Thinking Juice, and one of his designers about portfolios. They came in to give us tips on what we need to do to make a winning portfolio and to have a look at what we already have. Because of them coming in, i decided to start making a new portfolio for myself. I wanted to have something that would allow my portfolio to flow and link each page together so i made a simple template that i could just keep on the master page on my InDesign document. this is one of the pages that i made. It's not 100% finished and i want to go through it all again and make sure it is all in the right order but it will probably be something that always changes.


They gave us some really good pointers on what they would like to see in a portfolio. The most obvios one that we already knew would be to make sure tit has the right stuff in it for the job that we want for example, if we were going for an advertising job then we need to have ads in the portfolio. Another thing they said was they would rather see 4 really good items than 4 really good and 6 really bad pieces. Having said that, Gellan then said he would obviously rather see 10 really good things rather than 4! It was a good talk, and i got some really tips from it, i need to make sure i am confident with what i am showing, and i need to make sure i can talk about each piece and not say "I wasn't very happy with this beacause..", if i cn do this, then i will be set!

FMP timetable

I got hold of a calendar that James Ramsay had made and have got in stuck up in my room with all the important dates highlighted. I will add more dates when they arise but for the moment, i have just set out a simple plan of what i need and by when.

MAA Presentation

We had been working on this for a while now and felt sure that we had come up with some good logo designs. There were only a few minor tweaks that we thought we needed to do which didn't take long. This was our final logo:



We had now decided on a font for the main MAA text that went a lot better with the overall feel of the logo called "Bentham" and the simple sans serif font "apple symbols" for multi area agreement. As well as that, we had reduced i down to just 3 colours which as made it a lot calmer to look at and isn't too busy anymore. Wednesday 18th of February was the date of the presentations. We were told to go to the Enterprise pavilion at 2.45pm so that we wouldn't be late for the 3 o'clock start. Each person/group that had designed a logo had to go in individually to face the 4 judges who were Matt Desmier, Kit Johnson, the Head of the MAA and the Head Designer of local graphics agency Heirographics. Each talk was supposed to be roughly 10 minutes each but to be honest, i lost complete track of time when we were in there. me and Luke were first to go so quite nervous about what would be said, but looking back, it wasn;t too bad. The only thing that i would want to do again, is talk slower when presenting the idea. I think i was speaking a bit too fast as i was nervous but i didn't need to be. Apart from that, i think it went really well. We were able to answer all the questions that they asked about why we had done certain things to the logo and were able to talk clearly though the process of how we got to our finished design.

3 of the final entries were then chosen a few days later to be put forward to the board of the MAA who will choose a design soon.. i hope!

Learning Agreement

We got given the Unit handbook for our professional project the other day and the first part of the project was to write a learning agreement. On the first day of having the new brief we had a session with Dan Cadell who had some sheets that he had made to help us narrow down what we wanted to do and define what our project would be. We brainstormed for most of the day thinking about what we could produce.

I decided that i wanted to look at a branding project as that is what i am most strong at. As well as that though, i wanted to look into making and designing a website as i had enjoyed doing it in the last unit. This was all i got from this session but to have the idea of what i want to produce in the first day of a project isn't too bad. All i needed now was something to brand. The next few weeks i have concentrated on defining that subject. I want to do something that is quite relevamt to todays world and isn't too abstract. I work better when there is a sure subject to work with and that way i can't go too far off of the subject. I struggled a lot with finding a subject but eventually i settled on the idea of some sort of renewable fuel. I will focus on renewable fuels fro cars/transport rather than alternative elctricity sources. I have looked at numerous fuels ranging from electric and battery cars to compressed air engines, but the one i have chosen to use for my final project is Hydrogen. It seems to me like the most sensible choice for car companies to use as there are no emisions except water and oxygen. It is still in its early stages of development as a fuel as only one major car manufacturer has made a car that runs on it which is the Honda Clarity. There are other companies that are eveloping some cars but they are all prototypes such as BMW. Because of it being in its early stages will hopefully be a benifit for me as it means there is no major brand to it yet so i have a completely clean slate to work on. I can do whatever i want!

Onto my learning agreement then. I went through a few drafts before i came up with this final one which i feel covers all of the main areas.

It is inevitable that the world will eventually run out of “conventional fuels” for cars and because of this, car companies are developing new cars that run on “alternative fuels” such as electricity and bio fuel. I will use this as a theme for my professional project, I will research thoroughly into all of the currently available “alternative fuels” as well as those that are still being researched then decide upon the one type that I feel will be best for us to use. I will find out numerous things about each fuel before deciding, including: the cost, how available it is/will be, how far a car can go when either full up with the fuel or fully charged and also the likelihood of this becoming the next big fuel giant.
After the extensive research and I have decided upon which fuel I am going to use, I will give it a name and an identity. The identity/brand should be easily recognizable and very strong as it will be on many things, the biggest being the fuel stations and the transport for the fuel. I will create a logo for the fuel as well as many other things that the company will need including print materials such as letter heads and other stationary items and screen projects that will predominantly consist of a website and email templates. I have looked at many other websites for fuel companies, the biggest of which being shell and BP, and I have found there is a big contrast with the sites in that they are either very easy to use and simple or quite interactive and more complex. I will try to bridge the gap with my site by making it interactive as well as being easy to use and navigate. It has the potential to have to hold lots of information so must be easy to navigate and not be too cluttered, but at the same time, look very contemporary and well designed. There are then, 2 main sections to my professional project and this brief: the branding/identity of the fuel and the website for it. I have chosen to make it like this, as these are my two biggest strengths in graphic design based on previous experience, as I have had a logo chosen to be used by a company and have designed a second for another company since. As well as that, I have found designing and making a website really interesting and stimulating and I would like to develop this skill further.

Next stage is the research into branding, other fuel companies, web design etc so watch this space.