DJ's Old Stuff

[djsoldstuff]

A live project that I took on during the summer of last year as part of the Level 3 BTEC course.  We were all asked to do a postcard on ‘Brtishness,’ and given that I was doing other projects at the time, I didn’t get to spend that much time on this project.  Still, I am fairly impressed with the end result given the time spent on it.  I think that more could’ve been done with the design (perhaps mask the British flag pattern over the text and have the British Isles underneath the text), but I also had fun coming up with as many staples and stereotypes of each part of Britain to put into the piece.  How many can you spot?

[djsoldstuff]

AoC Sport National Championships 2016 (Flag Design Competition) - Live Project

During one part of the year, we were asked to design a flag which would be used to represent the West Midlands at a nationwide sports championship.

This is the final design, which I developed as a result of working closely through the brief (it had to use a certain colour palette: White, Navy Blue and Royal Blue, and it had to have a feature or two which would represent the West Midlands [in this case, the seven-point star representing major cities and the two twin peaks at the top and bottom of the flag]).

Overall, I am very pleased with the overall final design.  I worked very closely to the brief, creating a unique flag design which I feel represents the West Midlands while still retaining a modern personality.

[djsoldstuff]

Velox Sportswear Livery - Live Project

Now this would have to stand as one of my favourite live projects from my time in the college once I finally had a point of inspiration to work with.

At first, I was just doing some farly functional designs in black and red/green which I didn because I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was doing.  Then I showed the designs to Kevin, and that’s when he suggested, with the help of some designs that he had shown to me, that I look at the designs again and really go crazy with the theming.  That was when I went back and just began noting the equations for speed down.  Then it all became clear that I should take that path of inspiration.  So I began plastering it all over the outline in a way that suggested speed (it had the equations on the back of the suit as if to suggest that it left a trail of mathematical equations in its wake) and had done several different colour variations of the suit (including one which used carbon-fibre fabric as the base and had the letters embossed on the suit itself).  Needless to say, my favourite variation out of all three would have to be the white and light blue design because of the stripped-back simplicity of the design.

[djsoldstuff]

Points - Editorial Design

These are the final designs for an editorial design project focusing on a fictitious high-end (yet free; the revenue would be made up by advertising) magazine called Points which would deal in many different topics.  Our job was to design two different covers and double-page spreads around two different topics (I chose Future Gazing and Best Foot Forward).

Admittedly, this was a difficult project for me because it was all quite overwhelming at first. I had some basic design placement from the beginning, but it all looked rudimentary so as the project progressed, I was doing my cover and page spread illustrations in Illustrator and Photoshop with the help of photo references both from the internet and done by myself.  To do that and balance it with the design of the magazine itself in both instances had me thinking about layout and design to the best that I could.  That goes without mentioning the other assets I worked on (such as the titles, which I ensured had a white version to stand out against the cover background if necessary) or the fact that I had to ensure that the resolution was the best that it could be in print and on screen.

Looking back, I could’ve just stayed back to give it all a little more of a professional and high-end sheen (particularly the double-page spreads), but it taught me much more about how to use InDesign in the creation of publications such as magazines (e.g. placeholder text, text wrapping).  The spreads and covers themselves were of a highly satisfactory standard in my opinion, especially the front covers because they strike a good balance between their awareness of the contemporary issues within the magazine and the sort of elegant, imaginative portrayal of such issues needed to reel in the reader.

[djsoldstuff]

FMP - Royal Opera House - Final Pieces Here are my final pieces for the FMP brief that I had chosen.  The FMP brief was that I had to design advertising for the Royal Opera House targeted at 20-30 year olds with some form of cultural awareness with the intent of encouraging them to try opera and remove any preconceptions that they may have about it.

It would seem a bit left-of-field to approach a brief like this with the style like this, but I still enjoyed designing these pieces for the brief.  There was a sense of subversion in them by taking the connotations of certain terms (rock opera, comic opera, space opera, etc) and taking them to their literal conclusions. However, one major thing that bugs me about the piece was the fact that two of the pieces, while using different ideas, had the same comic opera theme.  I myself put focus on the ‘Soap Opera’ and ‘Space Opera’ ideas as well, but I realised that the former (showing a bar of soap and a human hand doing a duet) was a bit too childish to use for the brief and the latter (about a robot singing a lament about his existence while walking around a suite of pods encasing others just like him) just proved to be too complicated with the line art once I copied the pods and put them behind each other.  To be honest, though, i think I should’ve gone with the ‘Space Opera’ idea (just not as complicated) rather than having two pieces which are essentially one and the same as each other theme-wise.

[djsoldstuff]

Anti-Radicalisation Posters - Final Pieces This was a live assignment based on the increasingly common and dangerous problem of radicalisation.  The three pieces done here all share a central theme of the destructive nature of radicalisation and the locations in which this can happen.  Of course, so as not to target a specific religion, I decided to keep the nature of the radicalisation ambiguous on purpose.

I love how these pieces turned out.  The use of grey in these pieces came as an accident (when I scanned the work in, it automatically scanned the pieces as greyscale resulting in colour appearing as hues and shades of grey), but I decided to use the limited colour palette to hit home the serious nature of radicalisation.

[djsoldstuff]

Creative Walsall - Final Pieces These are my final pieces for the Creative Walsall Brief, where we had to advertise Walsall as a creative area in the West Midlands.

Looking back at this work. I feel like I was confused as to what I wanted to do in terms of what identity I wanted to do with the project.  On the one hand, there was the ‘Creative Heart’ idea which included a mural on the side of the Holiday Inn along the motorway, a structure in the town centre to direct people to significant creative venues within the area and the designs for interactive maps that would show off specific creative venues, shops and agencies in Walsall.  That stands in contrast with the ‘Hippo’ logo which would show off which places in Walsall were part of the ‘Creative Walsall’ campaign.  However, that is not to say that I didn’t like any of them.  I thought that I had come up with some great ideas, especially the prospect of an interactive map for all the creative landmarks in Walsall which would show off potentially unknown businesses to the public and other creatives.  I just think that I should’ve focused on one particular identity design rather than trying to do too much.  It was also a tricky thinking of how to properly utilise the town for this project, and that meant that some potentially interesting opportunities to use the town’s structure were ultimately missed.

[djsoldstuff]

A refined version of the original ‘Eat Healthy - Awesome’ idea that I had.  When I showed my original work to my tutor Steve, he made several suggestions: make the Vegamech’s face look less scary (e.g. perhaps by changing its face colour from red to something else) and present it in context, perhaps with a few extra drawings.  And that is what I did.

[djsoldstuff]

[djsoldstuff]

ROH - More Designs

Here are some more designs that I didn’t post in the last post.

The ‘Sensible’ idea would be split into several different ideas later on because the space looked crowded, the breastplates on the viking lady in ‘Language’ were supposed to be breastplates (though they do look a little dodgy) and the bottom idea was based on an initial doodle that I had drawn early into the project and wanted to represent the idea in a larger size.  Most of everything else (aside from the ‘Comic Opera’ idea which I drew up based on a suggestion of ‘looking at opera from a new angle’) was basically horizontal versions of ideas that I had done before.

[djsoldstuff]

Creative Walsall - Idea Development As you can see, there are many ideas that I have noted and developed here. Some were ones that pertained to Walsall’s culture and history (e.g. ‘Scrage the Surface,’ quotes from Walsall-born author Jerome K. Jerome, ‘The Creative Heart of the UK’) whereas others invite the audience and any creatives into Walsall’s creative underbelly (e.g. ‘Look Around,’ ‘High art need not be a purist pursuit’ and the many variants on pathfinding that I have explored all over the pages).  Others still are ideas that take advantage of modern technology to make it all interactive and speak specifically to the audience (e.g. projectors, TVs, even a few pop-up shops and displays that invite passing creatives to demonstrate their talent in public).  In any case, many different kinds of ideas have been explored here that pertain to orientation, route decision, route monitoring and destination recognition. These ideas will be developed further, but I am proud with what I have come up with for the most part.

[djsoldstuff]

Creative Walsall - Planning Before I came up with many ideas for the Creative Walsall brief, I did these two mind maps on Walsall, what creative sectors there were, the links and associations with Walsall and what forms the project could manifest itself in.  I think that the hippo in particular could be a great representation of creativity and Walsall for the important reason that its very existence came about when some local planners were looking for a ‘hip’ monument for the town and that’s what led to the ‘hippo.’  It may not sound like much, but in a sense it represents creativity as its most inspired when terms and ideas are explored to take these meanings to their logical conclusion (the fact that the monument would go on to be a beloved part of Walsall speaks volumes about the outcome of this spur-of-the-moment decision) and it is such an inspiration for that very reason.

[djsoldstuff]

Royal Opera House - Draft and Expanded Designs Not long after coming up with ideas for the campaign, I decided to begin doing thumbnails for the posters as well as website banners, social media posts and outdoor advertising (e.g. bus stops, street banners).  I did this for one of my identities at first to give an impression as to how all my other ideas would look as a whole.  Soon after, though, I was told to begin doing enlarged designs by Kev.  What I did from that point was do a base design to put other designs onto (this was for the posters themselves), photocopy the original design and do my designs in an enlarged format as how they would basically look.

Though the font in the designs looks inconsistent (I wish that I was better at rendering an actual typeface consistently), these are just rough designs and I am impressed with the ideas that I have come up with.  The ‘Spectrum’ ideas (inspired by the album cover for Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’) signifies not just the idea of modern genres of music being influenced by opera but also the fact that opera is a diverse ‘spectrum’ of subcultures and movements much like other art forms.  The other ideas were more tongue-in-cheek in their illustrations.  ‘Seats’ had what looked like an auctioneer selling seats to signify how cheap most seats can actually be, ‘Education’ asks the audience if they needed a scientific degree to enjoy science fiction to highlight that anybody can enjoy opera and ‘Language’ is based off the phrase ‘it’s all Greek to me’ to show that not all operas are incomprehensible for those that don’t understand let alone speak Italian or Latin.  I also came up with an idea which was more suited to horizontal orientation involving a pair of binoculars (reinforcing the idea of looking at opera from a different angle since they are much like the glasses worn at opera).

Overall, I am confident in the ideas I have come up with here and I only hope that they will act as a strong structure for my final work.

[djsoldstuff]

FMP - Royal Opera House (Draft Ideas) Here are the initial ideas I came up with for my Final Major Project.  The purpose of this was to design an advertising campaign for the Royal Opera House with culturally-active (read: those that attend theatre productions, concerts and exhibitions) young people in mind (around the 20-30 year-old mark).  As such, it had to turn common preconceptions about opera on their head and invite the target audience to consider opera.  I personally chose this brief because it was something that would’ve seemed outside my own comfort zone (because let’s face it: I am pretty much one of those 20-30 year-olds who is indifferent to opera) and would thus give me a challenge in design and ideas.

I wanted a sense of subversiveness and familiarity in my campaign, so what I did was think about where opera was being shown nowadays (you can watch certain opera productions in a cinema nowadays) as well as modern examples of opera and its influence (one obvious example was Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, but I also remembered ‘Cara Mia Addio’ from the soundtrack for the videogame Portal 2).  On top of that, I also looked into the connotations of the word ‘opera’ and what associations it had.  This tapped in to some of the designs which would take a certain word to its logical conclusion (e.g. a space opera = a robot having an identity crisis after discovering what it is).  Some of the ideas were absurd (an opera about a bar of soap lamenting being put out of a job, anyone?), but this was an interesting way of looking into these connotations and showing that opera can be more diverse than just fat ladies singing about death and love in Italian.

Another idea that I just wrote down, though, was ‘All Latin to you? We have subtitles...’ (based on the phrase ‘It’s all Greek to me’ used to denote confusion or just not having an idea about something at all).  Though I initially thought little of the idea, Kev saw the sense of subversion that I was looking for and suggested that I try tackling more of those preconceptions that way.  They also liked the ‘Perspective’ idea (it encourages the audience to look at opera from a different point of view alongside some sight-enhancing or augmenting devices such as a pair of binoculars, Google glass and a pair of VR goggles), so out of the ideas mentioned above I decided that I wanted to directly challenge the stereotypical views from young people towards opera.

As the third sheet below will tell you, I worked a fair amount on answering these attitudes directly and even made some space for some other design ideas that I had before.  I have a good feeling about where this brief is headed based on my feedback so far.

[djsoldstuff]

A doodle which was done as an extracurricular thing (I had some spare time so I looked for a doodle to turn into a digital drawing).  Taken from a sketchbook, drawn in Illustrator and coloured and shaded in Photoshop.

[prevenci-on-line]

Danger! Danger! 

danger-danger por lord dunsby en Flickr

[djsoldstuff]

Though this poster was made more recently, it does look like something that one would expect to see from 1950s America with all the illustrational techniques and styling used.  It all fits very well together with a style that is pleasant to look at and draws the reader to the information provided in a stark but informative fashion.

[modernizor]

[djsoldstuff]

This Dutch safety poster from the 1950s utilises both minimalist and realistic art styles, with a muted colour palette aside from the vibrant flashes of red from the sanding wheel.  This helps to emphasise the importance of safety (especially as the worker, while wearing goggles, isn’t wearing gloves and s keeping his distance from the sading wheel) since red is often a colour associated with danger and makes a stark contrast with the rest of the piece.