James Carty

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The brief for this project was to create branding for a festival so I decided to do a percussion festival as I’m a drummer and thought this would be a good theme to focus on and separate my work from a typical music festival. I found that coming up with a name for this festival was extremely difficult, and after weeks of deliberating, I decided to dive straight into creating a visual language -  hoping that eventually an idea for a name and logo could be derived from it.

The visual language I came up with for creating the percussion instruments was based on percussion icons that I drew over in Illustrator and filled in to create workable shapes’ these shapes were used in the construction of all aspects of the percussion instruments I drew, and hours were spent making sure that the design was consistent whilst making sure they are easily recognisable and distinguishable. A couple of the consistent designs that are most notable include the squiggly line graphic that I created using the anvil icon flipped on it’s side, and the two-tone reflection effect. Colour selection was also another painstakingly tedious task and at first, I thought I couldn’t come up with enough distinguishable colours but eventually it worked out.

The festival itself was planned to be one aimed at three different target audiences; the first is general audiences ideally aged 16-55 who may never have had the chance to try out a percussion instrument; this is something that hit close to home as lack of space was the main reason why I couldn’t practice playing the drums as much as I wanted to growing up – other reasons for general audience could also be noise level an cost. The second target audience were musicians who would probably get the most out of the various live performances that would take place at this festival as opposed to the workshops aimed at general audiences. The last target audience group were people from the various countries associated with each instrument from around the world, which will give them a chance to understand the history and culture surrounding many of them.

Once I had established the visual language I moved on to designing a logo for a festival that I didn’t have name for yet; I realise this was an odd approach to take but it was the only thing I could do at the time. Playing around with the shapes from my visual language, I created nice looking ‘N’ logo which I used to also create expanded versions of the logo. I tried to come up with a name beginning with the letter ‘n’ be found it to be quite limiting, so I delved into phonetic options and found the word ‘endeavour’ to be a suitable option that encompasses the attitude that I wanted my general target audience to leave with. I chose the Hallenstadion in Switzerland as my venue of choice as Switzerland is home to the hang drum – a relatively new and unheard-of percussion instrument.

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Title Sequence

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Alien Animation

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Belmont Video Advertisement

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This is an example of sound and movement that I think is very effective. What I like about this scene is how the score aids the fight choreography and makes Faora’s attacks and movement seem more devastating. I also appreciate the little details such as how the marching snare in the score is isolated when the soldiers are introduced to the scene.

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The goal of this project was to create a piece about a topic that you’re passionate about. For me I decided from the very beginning that I wanted it to be related to health and fitness as my own weight loss journey is one of the most life changing decisions I’ve made and maintaining a healthier lifestyle is a topic very close to my heart.

The initial idea I had was to run an ad campaign to get people to eat healthier and exercise, but in retrospect it was far too broad, had no direction and has been attempted countless times before with little effect. In order to truly have an effect on my target audience I had to narrow down the scope of my project and focus on a topic that I could use to draw in a specific group of people.

At this stage of the project I needed to put together an idea quickly, so I decided to focus on diabetes as I’m already educated on the subject from my previous job and obtained valuable knowledge about the benefits of a low carb diet. The most diagnosed age group for diabetes is 45-64 so I decided that this will be my target audience and created target audience mood boards to get a sense of my target audiences’ recreational activities, diet and interests. The images I gathered help me to get inside the head of my target audience and I felt like both my male and female target audience would be willing to listen if they’re given the facts from a source that looks trustworthy.

The next step in the ideation process involved researching the various risk factors, symptoms and complications associated with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes; this was so I could figure out how to make my target audience care about how their diet and learn more about the subject matter. From here I decided that focusing on diabetic neuropathy as facing amputation would be a harsh reality for most people and the target audience research lead me to believe their livelihoods would be negatively impacted according to their hobbies and interests.

I started off the design by creating the tabloid spread and placing filler text in an arrangement that was aesthetically pleasing and readable from top to bottom, so that the pages could be distributed in the form of an email newsletter or published online. The text wasn’t the focus of the design, so once I had the filler text in place, I proceeded to figure out how I wanted to display the information that I gathered from my research.

I created the layout in InDesign and used Illustrator to create all the graphic elements myself, with the exception of the world map and map of England. The dendrite of the nerve cells would’ve been hard to produce naturally so I vectorised a tree and used the different branches for a touch of randomness.

Taking the perspectives lecture on colour into consideration, I chose to use the colour red as it is typically associated with danger and I felt that it communicates the importance of message on a subconscious level. I chose yellow as an accent colour instead of green so that the design maintained a warm tone and kept the colours slightly desaturated as it was going to be printed in a newspaper; if I used vibrant colours it would’ve looked out of place against the black-on-grey body copy.

I think the most successful part of the project is how I made sure to only include relevant information and display that information without cluttering the page. I also strayed away from using graphs and in order to avoid making it too scientific, as I thought imagery would resonate more with elder half of my target audience and would be less likely to cause confusion or be misinterpreted.

In hindsight I think the overall design is missing a background element of some kind; I feel like the infographic could’ve benefited from having something behind it as it seems a bit flat and empty in some areas of the page.

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Semiotics Debate Overview

Today I took part in a debate on semiotics in which I was pitted against it. One of the contributions I made was when the opposing side brought up the argument of semiotics existing in nature; I disputed this argument by expressing how we’re capable of much more than animals and the development of social constructs enable semiotics to serve as a catalyst for prejudice. The example I used to explain this is how movies and television have depicted people with tattoos as troublemakers or members of a gang; I then explained how this association is embedded so far into our culture that people with tattoos can find it difficult to get certain jobs, especially those that require them to represent a brand or high level of professionalism.

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SapientRazorfish, previously known as SapientNitro, offers ‘digital transformation’ through marketing, digital and & strategy consulting and technology services. They’ve been helping clients thrive in this new digital world for the past 25 years.

This company claims to be human-centric, and aim to help companies better understand their customers. They’re inspired by three customer-centric beliefs;

1_The opportunity starts with understanding. 2_It takes reimagining and realising. 3_It’s just cosmetic, until it’s systemic.

SapientRazorfish have offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Dayton, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Toronto, Washington D.C.

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From what I understand we were given the task to choose a poem and create a poster to advertise the poet and visually communicate the meaning or a underlaying theme of the poem, using some of the key principles of graphic communication; including balance, proximity, alignment, repetition, contrast and space.

The work that I designed was meant to publicise the work of a poet in celebration of World Poetry Day on the 21st of March, so I made sure to design the poster in a way that made it engaging for both poets and the general audience.

The first thing I did when I found the poem was to analyse is it, and it was a simple poem, so it didn’t take long to understand that the theme was about deception. The poem ‘The Crocodile’ by Lewis Carroll is written in the style of a children’s poem, but leads the reader into reading a slightly darker story about a crocodile deceiving its prey, despite the seemingly optimistic overtone.

The best idea I came up with was to create an illustration in the style of children’s book because I felt that it was the only way to portray the initially child-friendly appearance of the poem and include a visual representation of the crocodile itself. Another Idea I had was to make the poster look like the front cover of a children’s book, but it turned out that the type would be too large if I wanted to display this poster in an A2 format or as a part of a large digital display. The best solution was to stick to a more traditional poster layout and attempt to add include some viewer interactivity via motion detection or lenticular printing.

I started the development of the poster by sketching a crocodile character similar to the style of illustration that you would typically find in the children’s book; the eyes and nostrils of the crocodile were intentionally drawn on the visible side of the its face, so that its entire expression could be presented along with the full length of its snout. After I was done with sketching, inking and applying colour, I shifted my focus towards the written elements of the piece, and at this stage of the project I settled for using the title of the poem and the poet.

Initially my plan was to use hand lettering for the type but I found that it made the poster seam amateurish, so I decided that it would be best to introduce a solid typeface to ground the design into something more professional in appearance. When it came down to picking a typeface, Futura was my first choice and I felt that it worked, but it didn’t really have the child-friendly characteristics that I was looking for, so I decided to switch to the rounded variant of Swiss 721.

It was at this stage when I recalled something that was said in a text & image perspectives lecture about how text should either anchor an image or relay information, and I felt that the poem name and author weren’t powerful enough pieces of information to relay on their own. I then had the idea of simply writing the word ‘smile’ which could be received by the viewer differently depending on which variant of the poster they were looking at; I liked this a lot better, because it looked a lot cleaner and gave an instruction to viewer that would draw them in to discover the name of the poem and poet in the bottom right.

This development sparked and idea of using technology that I knew already existed, to switch to the second variant of the poster after detecting the viewers smile. Sony use a piece of technology in their phones called Smile Shutter™ to capture images just as the person in frame smiles, so that same technology could potentially be used to for the poster. As a back up precaution, a motion detection system could be put in place to activate the second poster if the viewer didn’t smile after a specified amount of time.

I chose to sketch the illustrations digitally using a drawing app called Leonardo, as I would need to eventually digitalise the sketches anyway, and the fact that you can resize and move around layers saves a lot of time. Leonardo is one of the best drawing apps you can get for the Surface Book in my opinion and Adobe Illustrator was the obvious choice when it came to the poster itself, as I could easily manipulate multiple artboards.

Overall, I think the end product was successful, considering that this was the first time I had created digital artwork. I did have an understanding of the process from watch speed art videos in the past, but I had never actually attempted it until now. I think that the shadows on the illustrations a crucial to making the final design work and I think the typography is fine, but the nature of the poster couldn’t really allow me to delve into that side of things too much without making the poster feel cluttered.

I feel like the second Illustration could be much more detailed than it is, and is limited by my drawing ability; I feel like I could have added scales and forward-facing claws, but I wouldn’t really know how to make it look good. I do really like the way I used colour on the business cards to show a relation between the stanzas and the posters.

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While I was attempting to sketch this illustration I struggled with picturing how a crocodile would look from this angle, so I looked back at my notes on a previous time & sequence perspectives lecture, and was reminded of the work that the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced in 19th Century the movement of people and creatures to be analysed in ways never seen before.

I used this image or a crocodile with it’s mouth open as a reference, which made sketching it much easier, and produced an end product that was as close to life as possible.

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This Risograph print was create as apart of a 30 minute workshop that required us to rip pages out of magazines and newspapers and glue them together.

The task itself was a little too chaotic and rushed for my taste, but it was useful to learn about another tool that I could potentially use in future projects; I’m still not entirely sure what benefit there is from sticking random pages together, but perhaps with more time and care I could create something a little more refined.

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Design Fundametals: Monoline Logos (Part I)

These are some screen captures of a live stream I watched, in which they showed pages from a book called ‘Monograms and Alphabetic Devices’ by Hayward Cirker.

This was the beginning of a monoline logo design fundamentals course that stressed the value of going back and looking at older designs instead of trying to create something completely new.

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These are the photos that I took for the Arkitekt magazine, before and after I edited them. The editing involved basic colour correction, cropping and - in the case of the image I used on page 3 - skewing in order to make the image appear unaffected by vertical perspective.

Images taken on Samsung Galaxy Note 4