The Pen Tool

As i am still developing my technical skills, Illustrator is one of the programs i am less familiar with, so i have decided to play around using the pen tool to start off just to get a better understanding of how i can use Illustrator to the best of my ability.

Contemporary Studies Essay

new logo ideas

After a brief chat with Guy about how i can improve the logo and overall idea i decided to look at other ways i can represent london better. This is just an example of a very quick idea.

Saatchi and saatchi

From looking into different designs of the tube and river i came across some interesting images and began to look into Saatchi and Saatchi, a global advertising agency, from doing some research i found that they were responsible for the design of the oyster card.

Thames river research

When i was looking for imagery of the river Thames i came across some examples of how other companies have tried incorporating the trademark bend in their designs.

I also came across some playful designs using the Tube Map and different stations to outline different animals.

Screen printing poster

As the final part of our envelope brief Ashley and I decided that we wanted to screen print our poster, which has been a great end to a project, as i have only screen printed once or twice and is still a learning curve, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it! Here are some images we took whilst doing it.

Combined Elements brief - refined

After my last design idea's for this brief, each of us were involved in a group crit. The concept of my idea was seen to be clear and the main thing to improve was the logo, which i agreed with, here i have tried ways to make the symbol of the plate and spaghetti more lifelike by using images instead of drawing them on the mac. My initial stage was to take further pictures, this time of the spaghetti and plate separately so i could then bring them together on the computer. I then began trying to make the spaghetti look compatible for the logo.

I started to look at different colours and shades for the spaghetti to see what would look best.

I wasn't too happy with the way the plate or the river looked so i decided to play around with the brightness and contrast of the plate and then following the advice of making the spaghetti more than just one strand. i did this initially by taking photographs again as it gave me a better incite as to what it would look like.

I then looked into layering the spaghetti strands on the computer to give not only the impression of more than one strand but also a wavey image like water.

Final idea.

Design for Life

Another program that i have been watching closely over the past few weeks is 'Design For Life' a series that follows a similar style to the Apprentice, whereby Philippe Starck, one of the most famous leading product designers of our generation has invited 12 aspiring designers to complete a series of tasks, eliminating those that don't deliver. He is offering a unique experience to do a 6 month placement at his agency in Paris as the prize. Although the program is based around product design, i find it really interesting to see how the students come up with their design concepts and develop their idea's. 

David Attenborough : Life

I have decided to put these clips in as the new David Attenborough 

documentary has just come back on the BBC, called Life. Although 

this is not design specific there is something hugely inspirational 

about watching these series. The way in which animals work, collect 

and think like humans, is fascinating. For an hour its brilliant to just 

switch off and consume things that you never knew existed or could

imagine. Unfortunately the clips were a little big for the page and 

scroll slightly off! But watch them!!

The 4th Plinth Presentation

Today Laura and I presented our plinth idea of returning the Trafalgar square back to its former pigeon glory days, we did so by having a clip of pigeons in Trafalgar running on loop in the background and spoke about how we generated the idea, the research behind it, and the reasons for it. Laura made some cut-out stand up pigeons (shown below) which we stuck in various places around the room!

Mike and Adam enjoying the pigeons:

Fleet Foxes - Mykonos video

A combination of a love for Fleet Foxes and a really qwerky animated 

video.

Essay Plan

'Speak to your dad' day brief

Above is a few quick examples of how some of the adverts may look. we have not been given a deadline for the project so we were unsure whether to develop the idea so i have just mocked a few further examples. The idea behind these are to engage the audience in memories of father/son moments. I have chosen football as a focus as its something most people can relate to.

Another idea we had was to use the grandpa from the simpsons to indicate that most fathers have a father too with statistics underneath.