Dada Posters

I have started to look at Dada posters as inspiration for the final part of the envelope brief. This is to create an A2 poster including certain pieces of information from our final character story. I think the dada posters are a great source to look at as they were all made using the cut 'n' paste style, including imagery but largely typography, highlighting certain aspects with the use of colour. I think tackling the brief looking at collage options gives us a lot of different avenues to look at not only with the black/white and colour element but also with the materials we use, looking at the possibility of screen printing the final piece.

A day at Thoughtful

I was given the opportunity to visit the Thoughtful design team for a day to help with a project they were doing. The day was really enjoyable, and flew by. James, Stuart and Chris were very friendly and welcomed us into their studio with open arms. We were able to talk to them about their experience with the Thoughtful 6 (a placement which included six 2nd year students working on live briefs for 6 months) and where they stood with further projects with the college and the idea of expanding the team. I asked them questions about their work load and how they delegate their responsibilities, it was clear that James worked mainly communicating with clients, printers etc spear-heading the design team, with Chris and Stuart concentrating on the designing. What was really nice to experience was how they worked throughout the day, mainly individually yet coming together to discuss idea's and to finalize design decisions. Overall the day was really enjoyable and a nice taste of how a design team operates, they were very appreciative of the work we did for them and hopefully they will consider us for work in the future.

Below is the thank you email I sent to Thoughtful and the replies:

Design Idea's % Brief

We have been given a project to study a statement that gives percentages that sum up a Graphic Designer. The % rage from realistic things such as 70% - dealing with people to unrealistic things like 0.5% mice. We were given some examples of how other designers solved problems including statistic style information. We began to think of how we could, as a group of 4 look at communicating this information with a twist. We had the flexibility of grouping some of the smaller percentages together, below are some initial idea's:

This was an initial starting point where i thought about how this information would usually be displayed, e.g. a pie chart. i thought of other ways i could display the same message but using other objects. i soon realized that the apple did not represent design and therefore the idea would not communicate the correct message so i tried the same idea with something more recognizable to a designer.

Another idea i had that steered slightly away from the brief was the notion that a graphic designer largely spends 80% of the time generating idea's and 20% on the computer creating it. This i found an interesting concept and decided to depict 'generating idea's' with a tea cup. when i think about generating ideas i associate it with being in a relaxed environment around a table or on a sofa drinking tea and brain storming, bouncing off each others idea's. Below i tried the chart approach to convey that message.

Another idea that we had that would be interesting to progress was turning it into a sound project, looking at the different percentages and seeing how we could represent them using design equipment such as the scanner, printer, Mac icons and create an abstract piece of sound. using the percentages as references and turning them into seconds.

% research

I have been having a look at how the different percentages can be visually displayed.

Design Idea's - combining elements brief

A day brief we were given was to explore how to combine elements of an event and a place. Below are some initial scams of idea's we'd had during the day.

Found Magazine

I have always thought Found Magazine was a fantastic idea, the opportunity to have a sneak preview into someone else's life, not only makes for excellent reading but also fulfills that nosey parker attribute that, lets be honest, many of us have. It is based solely around people sending in notes, letters, photographs, doodles, pretty much anything that is interesting and 'found". It is set out in a cut 'n' paste style, predominantly in black and white and brings together the random items chaotically but effectively.

For the final part of our Envelope brief we have, in our pairs been asked to create a poster which retaliates certain pieces of information about our character, i have been looking at 'Found' for some inspiration as the first section will be in draft and largely in black and white using photocopies etc. I like the use of hand written information or where a type writer has been used, i think it could make our piece really effective.

The Envelope - Part 3

I had now produced two pieces of writing about 2 different photographs, my partner, Ashley had done the same. We were then asked to read our responses and combine the best elements from all 4 pieces of writing to write one final piece about one of the photo's. choosing one preferred story and adding to it.

We eventually chose to base the final one around my second story, draft shown below:

Our final piece: