DESIGN: 'Save The Date' wedding invite

So... A few weeks ago my wonderful sister got engaged. Charlotte (my sister) and her now fiance Dan are both music fanatics, they met through a shared love of the music they listen to and it has been a vital part of their life together ever since.

So as the news of their engagement filtered through Charlotte had asked me to design their 'Save the Date' card, which acts as an informal invitation before the main invites go out later in the year! They had a very clear idea of what they wanted, which was to emulate the centre label on a vinyl with the track information replaced by the information about their wedding. The label they wanted to resemble was one of The Beatles LP's which had the infamous green apple on the back to highlight Apple Records. They sent me over a list of things that they wanted on the label and I set to work.

It wasn't the hardest thing to do as I was following a clear design from a range of LP's but the pressure to design something that Charlotte and Dan would be proud of and proud to announce their wedding date on was a daunting task! I made sure I got continual feedback from both of them and gave them a range of layouts for them to choose from, which allowed us to reach decisions quickly and efficiently! They both seem happy with the way that it has turned out and it's been great to do work outside of university set projects.

London Pasta Festival

Due to the amount of work we have had i have only just began to look at the Combined Elements brief again, where i combined London with a Pasta Festival. I felt my idea had been strong but was having problems with the logo and the overall execution of the idea. I started by looking at logo designs that incorporated a circle or were based around an oval shape. I particularly like Paul Rand's abc logo and the one below which is the logo for the Fashion Centre created by Pentagram.

I also took a trip to Borough Market in London to have a look at how packaging enhances a product and what impact the logo or advertisements have on the look/feel of the product.

I have began a selection of ideas of how to recreate the plate (the idea of the plate) and started to introduce typography to start to see how that will work.

What i found was although i like the idea of type creating the plate. for the purpose of the logo the type becomes unreadable at such a small size. I decided however to take this idea further and explore how it could work as a poster or a campaign. The information surrounding the river could be made up of either names of famous italian restaurants that line the River Thames or famous central London food markets. After that are a few logo ideas.

The project is still very much on going and I am thinking of creating more images with real pasta on a large scale using iconic images of London (such as Big Ben, red telephone boxes, black cabs, the tube etc)

Photography Suite

As we are in the process of designing out portfolios two project that I needed to photograph properly was the cube I made for the Door(way) brief and the newspaper front covers for the Water brief. To do this i spent an afternoon with Graham the photography technician. Up until this point I had had little to no experience with photography or a photography studio. However Graham was able to assist me to take some nice photo's of the two projects.

Below are the front covers for my 3 newspapers:

Below are the images of the cube I made:

Book Cover initial designs

From looking at a range of different research i have started to come up with my own design ideas for the covers. Using contemporary colours and interesting shapes, My initial feedback from this is that i have to make the designs more relevant to the story, therefore keeping the same style but with more meaning. I decided to look further into the story lines for each book and looked at ways to edit my designs. Below i have started looking at 'Kipps' and the idea of climbing the social ladder! I am trying to make the designs more self explicit like James Joyce's work

FINISHED CUBES!!!

My Cube:

Richard's Cube:

Naomi's Cube:

Mike's Cube

Our research door:

Final stages of the cube

I have started collecting the imagery for the inside of my cube and begun to apply them. I have done this by carving the outlines out of thick card to keep it steady. then added sections that prop the images up. I have then staggered them in layers so from the front it looks like one picture but from above the sections are clear.

Making the cube.

More mock ups

Here is a very quick mock up of how my box will be structured the lid will open with hinges to reveal the inside of the box. I want to have the outside of my box plain so that all the focus is on the imagery inside.

Mock imagery for cube

I started sketching some rough idea's of how the box could look, or what i want the background to look like, my initial idea is to have cartoon style buildings in the background with pictures within the park

Using Flash

Here are some of my creations on flash whilst at STEEL.

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.

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.

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.