503 - Project report

Project Report

1.  Reggae Poster

I chose this brief because it’s open and creative, I have also listened to some reggae music prior to the brief, I also have Jamaican Friends. 

Prince of Reggae was the name I gave Damian Marley, I did this because his father is renowned for being the ´King of Reggae´, so I though the name was fitting.

Reggae is associated with the drug use of marijuana; I tried portraying this fact, with my poster design in an appropriate way (this being harder than first anticipated). I have used an image found during my research of the Jamaican flag in bright intense colours fading into smoke. 

I also used images of the singer found during my research, but then edited for the use of my design.

The explosion of colour used as part of the background was also an image edited.

The idea of drug use is also represented by the optical illusion (mirrored effect) created by the positioning of the images of the singer, trying to create a ’trippy' - high delusional effect.

The lion is a Rastafarian reference to their Lion of Judah which means ´King of Kings´ therefor I made my own lion illustration to go with the coloured smoke. 

If I had the chance to start the brief again, I would set myself bigger goals. I believe I could have explored new techniques and tried new styles, although I am pleased to have explored using transparencies, working with darker tones and explored new typefaces.

I usually use a lot of colour in my designs, but this time I aimed to explore making certain areas stand out more than others, to intensify the colours.  

One of the problems I faced was that I made my design landscape but then had to change it to portrait for my submission. I made a few changes in my design so it would fit into a portrait format, another of the problems I faced was that the format of my submission was incorrect and I was unable to submit but this problem was later resolved. I would have liked monoprinting or screenprinting my design, but the competition was only for digital submission.

I had to find and test a range of typefaces until I found the one, which I believed, was the best fitting for the representation of reggae. A fun and bubbly typeface.

2.  How to be a woman

The choice of working on this brief was due to its interesting book title and having imagined it differently to its original book cover.

My aim was to achieve a colourful, feminine book cover design. 

With the use of the background and its intense, bright colours, the use of white transparencies alternating the background patterns and the use of soft tones, make the design appealing to the audience eye.

The message I wanted to get across with the design was purity, self-respect, and beauty and portrays the image of modern woman. The female mind is represented in the ‘explosion’ of colour.

The illustration of the woman inside an oval came from the idea of representing or producing the idea of 'an old/retro neckless’ with the figure of a woman.

The white outline used to bring the face out was one of the problems throughout the production, some people found the face structure feminine but others who found it masculine.

The use of different styles combined, works well, I made a digital final product of my book design with the use of a new program, which gave a satisfactory final result. This was helpful and gave me a real idea of how my design would look like on an actual hard cover and with the possibility of being sold at a bookstore.

I tried making the hair, rose, and a skin tone of my illustration look like it has been made with the use of paint and creating movement and layers.

The problems with in the producing of this book cover design were small, exploring and deciding on a feminine typeface, deciding the structure of the front, back and book jacket, Making a pattern within the background with the white transparencies. 

The name of the author is used in bold on the front cover and book jacket to give the author more recognition to her novel.

The making of a book cover isn’t new to me, in level 4 I had the chance of redesigning and screen-printing a book cover, it was a new experience to me back then but something I would like to keep exploring and doing in a future.

3.  Secret 7

Secret 7 is an open and easy brief to chose due to large variety of decision making. 

From a variety of songs, the only one I recognized was John Lennon’s ‘Imagine all the people’.

Imagine was the song sang by a different year group on united nations day back at school.

My design portrays the human race, different cultures, and different environment across the globe. Black background to represent space or create the effect of the look of a vinyl with the white circles around the illustration.

The tears represent hate, sadness, and darkness ‘crying’ out from the world.

My aim was to represent the world uniting as one, following the songs lyrics.

Experiments were done, idea in mind but different options, decision making.

How many eyes, lips, heads to make? 

4.  Wrap recycling campaign

This brief was chosen due to its importance in todays culture as a subject of matter. I have grown up doing a lot of volunteering, back at school community and service was a mandatory lesson. The projects and topics explored gave me a brief knowledge of the issue today, fundraising events and creative activities helped guide me into what to focus my poster campaign on.

It also brought back a lot of memories.

Creating a campaign to inspire and motivate university students to recycle was new and challenging, the other reason behind choosing this brief.

When beginning my informative exploration on areas/aspects that represent recycling, I first had to narrow the idea to a smaller subject area.

I decided to base my poster campaign on the reusing of plastic bottles. Something we see, use, carry around and buy all the time and then just throw away.

Something simple to use, safe and for any age group.

My target audience are the students at Leeds College of art, but it can be presented to younger kids and adults outside the university and cause the same positive effect.

I made a questionnaire about plastic bottles and asked 20 university students for their opinion and knowledge. 

I decided to make a logo that isn’t stereotypical to the subject of recycling but yet gets the message across. This helped me choose which creative ideas to focus my designs on. The images used of the final products created with reuse plastic bottles were obtained during research, but then edited for the use of my design.

The logo is constructed of a picture of earth, because its where we live and is what we are killing due to all the pollution we are producing /contamination, deforestation, not using renewable powers…

I made a layer/out line that goes around the image of the globe, this was to represent or get the idea of flora/nature across. Flora as the protector of earth, a shield or layer.

The use of the small symbolic 3 arrows that represents recycling and its cycle was used to make the logo connect to the purpose of the campaign. 

I named this campaign creativeminsya given that all the students at LCA are creative, open minded and thinkers. ‘ya’ is after my name, to make the branding strategy for this poster campaign personal and create a direct connection with the students.

My posters will be hang around the university for students, teachers and any members of staff to see and learn from them.

 The language used in the poster designs, was kept positive, simple and clear for the target audience.

The brief asked not to make anyone feel guilt or attacked for not recycling. The structure of the posters is kept the same in all 4 designs, with the top dark blue column with the campaigns ‘slogan’. On the bottom column the recycle now and wrap logo and website links.

3 different examples of recycling with plastic bottles are given, making an original gift box, making your own jewellery stand and making your own creative plant pot.

Green, blue and white are the dominant colours used in the posters, given that they are the most ‘peaceful’ colours and represent ‘thinking green’ and ‘peace’.

The poster structure was influenced by the set of posters examples given by wrap on their existing campaign.

The interactive brand guidelines were simple to follow, easy to find what I was looking for, explained in detail the problem, how to solve it, how to start the brief and steps to follow, gave helpful examples of other poster campaigns and tips.

The feedback obtained from my final outcome, was positive and satisfactory. 

If I had the chance of working on this again, I would change my research topic, make a new set of posters and produce a new logo.

Social media was used to get the message across, a Facebook page and twitter page were created. The hashtag #creativemindsya was initiated.

5.  Orchard P.I.G

Our illustration member of the team chose this collaborative brief.

The team was constructed by 1 illustration student and 2 graphic designers.

The group and work seemed to work at first, but then some problems began to occur. Billy and I found ourselves working alone without our illustration student, we created a chat to share our work and to help us make our decisions as a group. After many chats with Billy about how to resolve this problem, we spoke to one of the tutors who helped us make the best decision for our problem. We spoke with the illustration student several times about not sharing any work with the group, showing up to our meetings and the lack of communication and to explain to him the conversation we had with our tutor, so he decided to drop out the group a week before the deadline. The problem was resolved, but we should have made the decision a lot earlier than what we did. Another problem was that our styles were too different and were too hard to combine, Billy believed my work was too illustrative and I believe his work was too safe and it didn’t push any boundaries. Billy gave me a few tips on how to be more graphical, I also helped him with trying to design things that are riskier and more adventurous. I didn’t some research and began to design my logos for the new creation of the brand ´The Notorious P.I.G´. I made three different final illustrations; the first being the angry pig, the sleepy drunk pig and the happy drunk pig. At first we were unsure if to redesign the logo of the pig or not because the brief was so open, later deciding to take the risk to redesign. When deciding on the logo, I preferred the angry pig as the brands new image and Billy preferred his, so I tried combing our designs, but he still wasn’t convinced, we were running out of time and taking too long to decide on small things. This brief seemed impossible to finish on time, but we managed to. We weren’t very happy as a couple with what we had produced, but we met the deadline on time and showed problem solving. Neither Billy or I enjoyed this brief too much, we chose it because of our third member, but after he left it was already too late to change brief.

Research wasn’t hard, we all looked at different cider brands and aimed to find the most contemporary fashion designs and share them on the group chat.

The 2 best contemporary designs were from ‘londoncraftbeerfestival’ and ‘edgebrewing’.

An idea I had been working on was to use 3 different pig illustrations to represent the 3 different flavours the Orchard P.I.G offers.

My angry pig was made to represent B.I.G ‘Biggie’ the rapper. I got given this idea when we first went over the brief and read the name Orchard Notorious P.I.G and read on the new image they were aiming for.

‘Notorious B.I.G – Notorious P.I.G’.

The design was too cartoony and masculine to use so we decided to work with Billy’s design.

In the majority of album covers biggie is wearing a crown, given that he was the king of hip-hop.

I then moved on to researching different cider packaging and tested a few.

I chose to work on the 4-cider pack, having 3 different colours representing each flavour following the data given in the brief.

But this was decided to be too confusing, having 3 illustrations of pigs, a logo representing a pig and 3 different packaging colours blue, green and red, was too much and confusing for the rebranding of the campaign.

 I used the bottle pig’s section from the brief where they have 3 different ciders,1. Reveller - medium 4.5 % vol2. Charmer - medium 6% vol3. Truffler - Dry 6% vol.Following the colours used by Orchard pig on the poster to represent the flavors, I did it to represent the flavours.