Professional with one f and two s's.

Some ideas for my Professional Project.

Theatre Orb Amendments.

After receiving the suggestions from Craig at Theatre Orb, I have changed the aspects of the designs that he mentioned to the best of my ability, and here's my work:

Theatre Orb 2

After a tenatitive wait, Craig replied to me with a few suggestions on how I could imporve my Theatre Orb designs.
I'll get right on it.

I intend to state my intention in this statement.

For my professional project, I intend to redesign a series of books, to be grouped together as a set. I have decided that I will be redesigning the books containing the works of the poet laureates from 1599 to present, one book for each poet. As the content of each vary from one another, each book cover can be designed independently, but there will need to be one aspect that unites the set. This could be either a common font or colour that features in the whole series.

As there has been twenty-three poets laureate to date, I will not be able to complete a full book for each author, but instead will design a set of book samples (BLAD (basic layout and design)) which will include a full print specification with paper types, type layouts, typography choices and colours, and the cover for each book, front and back, perhaps with a few pages of each, e.g. opening page.

Last year was a revolutionary time in the world of poetry; Elizabeth II elected the first female laureate. Ancient traditions are being dragged steadily into the 21^st century, and I feel that the cases this tradition is held within should be redesigned accordingly.

My target audience will be people between the ages of eighteen and forty whom, perhaps, have yet to read the majority of the poets laureate works. As I will be modernising the covers I will be avoiding any classical artwork or typography. I will need to appeal to book collectors, perhaps numbering the books, or having an image, phrase or word along the spine that will inspire the collector to get the next book in the series.

D&AD +1

A little more thought has been put into the D&AD brief, the fear slowly leaking into our subconscious minds, like a noxious gas leaks into a badly insulated house. With Dr. Anna's sessions looming on the horizon, we are all scrubbing around to get our live briefs and PPRD completed before the real work has a chance to begin.

We have amended our H.G. Wells book covers to suit the tutorial we had a few days ago with Neil. The first issue we had was trying to find some images to use that weren't in fact breaking the law. Secondly we needed to think about the type. Neil tells us to use a more modern, interesting type face, but I think we're all stuck in our ways, at the tender age of 21 we behave

like a group of vengeful 80 year olds, mourning the death of a long dead technology, Impact being the technology, the 80 year olds being a group of post-pubescent neurotics.

The images still need a bit of work, especially

the Mr. Polly cover, I guess I will have to pick up my pencil and actually draw something for the first time in years, lets see exactly how much of that skill I have lost in my unchartered hours sitting in front of the computer screen click click clicking…

Professional Project

DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUN...

Yes siree! It's that time again, the culmination of the last twenty-one years of my life and the tens of thousands of pounds I've spent arriving here.

You scared, Potter?

You wish, Malfoy.

Of course I've thought about what I want to do for this project, of course I have; I'd have had to be mad not to have spent lonely hours in traffic jams contemplating the most important project of the year...of my life. Well, of my life so far, perhaps. The hours I've spent in bed with the fear, lying awake trying desperately to push it back into the darkness from whence it came has given me only a limited idea of what i might produce. And the vague picture in my head is that of a book.

A book.

A book.

A book.

Is that enough? A generic, ambiguous, non specific book.

A vague outline behind my eyes. It should have pages, probably. And it should have a cover. Probably.

Who knows? Do you? Do I? Well I certainly don't.

Maybe a history books? Fonts through the ages, we all like fonts, don't we? Illustration through the ages. Maybe I could come clean, lets my dirty secret out to the world. I love Stephen King, there, I said it. Get your snide comments and sniggers out of the way because I'm proud of reading low end literature. Maybe I could redesign his entire set of novels. That would surely be a labour of love.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-book-art-of-robert-the-cara-barer-and-jacqueline-rush-lee

PAL 01/02/10

Theatre Orb

New Live brief.

A few days ago I attended a meeting with a man named Craig Norman, who was looking for someone to design a logo and

website for a new theatre company that will be based at the Lighthouse in Poole. He was hoping for an edgy feel in th

e colours of either red, blue, grey or black. I have had a look around at what theatre companies have been doing, and I di

d some quick designs and sent them off.

Visual rhetoric = communication.

Filters & Tactics:
Sensationalism:
Telling lies
and exaggeration
is a massively
underrated (graphic)
tactic. Visual
rhetoric
= communication.
http://twitter.com/matthewgalvin

Works for free.

Business correspondence for flooring specialist. Happens to be my kin, happens to be my duty to design for free.

Despite this being a very informal project for me to do, I feel that it gave me an interesting experience. Working with people that you know well can be difficult, as they will be standing over your shoulder watching everything you do. As my brother has absolutely no idea how Photoshop, or computers in general work, he seemed very impressed with the work that I did. Despite this being a very small project, it was still very exciting to see something I designed being handed around strangers, and it was very enjoyable outcome for such a short piece of work, and if I can do much more like this, Iwill be a happy bunny.

Evaluation

Screen Based Communication 2 has been one of the most challenging briefs for me yet. Although, I must admit I think that at the end of pretty much every unit. I’m sure, that with time, the scars will heal and my next project will become the biggest challenge I’ve yet to face.
Initially, I flew through the design process like a duck in water, but as soon as I was hoisted out of my comfort zone and thrown into the dark, eerie world of web design I soon felt the panic picking at the flaws in my design, and my self worth.
I’ve never been the most technically minded of people, and it always takes me a little more time to grasp a new computer programme that it should. As with Photoshop, Illustrator and more recently Flash, I only began to grasp the concept of the programme when it gets too late. I’m sure that if I were to take more time on this programme, perhaps take the effort to try to build another website I’d feel a lot more comfortable, and perhaps even begin to enjoy the dreaded Dreamweaver.
I started with a limited knowledge of how to make a use my website, but I managed to labour on through. With the help from countless online tutorials and HTML for Dummies books from the library, I managed to create a website somewhat resembling the design I had in my mind and down on paper.
One of the main problems I encountered was when I attempted to use java script on my site. I was desperately trying to get the script to work for a j query photo gallery, which just didn’t want to work. When I finally got it working, using the term working in the loosest possible way, it would only work with one half of my page and not another and just creating more problems than it was solving. By playing around with Dreamweaver myself I discovered the behaviours tool, and found that the last week of my life that I had spent stressing over this java script had all been in vain. I think the biggest lesson I learnt from this exercise in futility was not to be scared of my computer. Just by messing around with the settings and the programme available to me I managed to work the problem out on my own, with only minimal input from Google.
Another issue that has been plaguing my dreams over the last month was my significant lack of a CSS page. As I only have one page to my website, and that my styling can be found within the html page, I felt that adding a separate CSS page would be unnecessary. If I were to create a website in the future that had more pages that I needed to style I will be able to add a CSS page and am aware of how to link it to the html page.
Considering that at the beginning of this project I was completely unaware of how websites work, how they were designed, where they were hosted and completely ignorant of anything else to do with the internet except perhaps how to get to Facebook, I feel that my progress though this unit has been drastic. Although my design and site may not be the most complex and adventurous on the world, I feel it displays my work well and is easy to navigate for anyone who might want to browse through my work. I have worked to the best of my abilities and I feel I have gained a lot of valuable knowledge on the subject of web design and have got another Adobe programme under my belt.

Take a look: http://www.visualcommunication.org/leah_barnes

PAL 18/01/10

D&AD

Part of this course involves me completing a competition brief, either in a group or on my own. To stifle the daunting effect work tends to have on me, I have started on a brief with two of my closest working companions, known to some, but not all, as the two Sammies.

We have begun working on the D&AD graphic design book cover brief, where we are asked to redesign the cover of three failing H.G. Wells novels and from the list we chose: Tono-Bungay, Kipps and Mr. Polly.

Our first meeting consisted on Sammie Crane and I drinking tea and discussing ideas for the covers. We usually have very similar ideas graphically and find it very easy to work together. This time although our combined ideas were completely off the mark. We had managed to design a Penguin classic cover whereas the brief required the work to be neither Penguin or classic.

Luckily, when we arrived at Sam Harvey’s house with out obviously plagiarised ideas she slapped some sense into us, and we started looking around for more contempory ideas. We put together an theme that we were all happy with and a relatively short period of time, a foundation we could all take away and work on individually.

I think this group has such a successful dynamic is because we all respect each other both personally and as graphic designers, we all have fairly similar ideas as to what makes a good idea, and none of us are scared to share our opinions. When an idea is rubbish, there’s no beating around the bush and it gets deleted immediately. This helps greatly in weeding out the trash, leaving us with nuggets of pure gold.

See below the ideas thus far: