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: