Silken Touch (WBL)

Referring back to the Work Based Learning post I made earlier, the actual client that I worked for was called Silken Touch. This company consisted of two tutors in the college who have their own silk duvet importing business. A lot of others in the group had clients, but not 'real' clients that were going to use this and potentially make a lot of money from.

Myself and two other graphic designers worked on the identity for Silken Touch. The clients chose to use my logo design and the business card, they have not yet come to a decision on the compliment slip or letterhead for unknown reasons.

I questioned whether it made sense that we were doing this work for free, my WBL tutor replied and told me that our 'payment' would be that my work would actually be used. I went along with the flow but I still had my doubts.

Below are the designs that I came up with. The chinese lettering means 'Silk.'

Helvetica! (Essay)

Some of my classmates and even tutor believe that I have an obsession with this typeface; it's not an 'obsession,' I just like to use it because in most cases it works! If you remember a few posts ago, there I mentioned having to write an essay; I thought I would write a few lines about the Cultural Context module.

As pointless as most of this module was, I actually learnt a few things. The most important thing that I learnt was about Helvetica, granted it was my chosen subject to write about but I chose something I was interested in. I explored the story behind it, why people like it, why they don't, why its used and so on. The feature length documentary film designed by Gary Hustwit was a great discussion about Helvetica, and it was also good to learn about why designers such as Carson do not like to use it.

Below you will find my 2000 word essay on Helvetica available for your enjoyment. I enjoyed writing the essay, I am sure you will enjoy reading it and maybe learn a few facts!

Right-Click and Save As: Helvetica Essay

Magazine (Group) Project

Sometimes I do not like working in groups because some people simply to not pull their weight and then they complain when their designs are not being considered. I mean, come off it - you haven't even brought your designs to the meetings! From this I get the impression that they do not even care but at the end of the day, its their loss, not mine.

The graphic design team had to work with the Illustrators to design a magazine called Monkey Tracksuit which would be on par with the likes of Juxtaposed, I-D, ModArt and a few others. We had a total of 5 graphic designers and three Illustrators working on the magazine. The Illustrators were only responsible for producing drawings that were related to the subject and style of magazine. We had to design grid, a front cover, contents page and 6 single page and doulbe page spreads. The typography was designed by another graphic designer, which I had to apply to my designs.

We dediced to use my grid design, one out of three front covers and three of the single and double page spreads. The spreads are as follows: D*Face (Artists Spotlight), Fashion and an Illustrators profile. I was very happy with my outcomes, especially the front cover and the D*Face spread.

The page on the left is the single page spread, and the two on the right are the double page spread.

Conceptual Calendar

I had to design a conceptual calendar which was to take place in the London 2012 Olympics at Lee Valley. My first thought was that I had to visit the venue, I knew this would help me generate ideas (as it has helped me from a previous project - Film Festival). I immediately came up with an idea which i took into practice straight away.

I began by drawing interesting lines from the photographs onto Illustrator, this gave me an abstract illustration of the photograph. After this I began making this design look more like the photo by adding random shapes which I randomly placed. I then added my custom made calendar (I placed all the characters individually to get the design I needed). Lastly, I added the calendar month which I did not modify because otherwise there would be too much of the same thing going on.
I had to re-create the London 2012 Logo as it was impossible to source a high resolution copy, and I also re-created the Lee Valley logo, which I added a clever touch to.

I definitely enjoyed this project as I like to work with photography, abstract graphics and architecture (I was initially planning to go into this).

Below you can view the whole calendar, there are 13 individual designs. The calender will actually appear in a booklet.

(Please click for an enlarged version)

Brighton Covers

I found this brief to be quite difficult, it was not so much what we were designing, but what we had to work with. We had to design two covers for a Brighton Enviromental Magazine that depict the North Lanes, and the other was for the Lanes. We had to design these with our own photographs that we took when we visited Brighton. Ok, that sounds stupid but we had the worst possible weather, rainy, cold and windy which gave me dull images, that and I didnt want to get my £300 camera damaged in the rain! I did however pay a second visit out of my own time, this was on a bright and sunny day which gave me better photos.

As mentioned above, I found this brief quite difficult, it was also the first time I had worked with a lot of photography. Anyway, below are the two designs that I used to present as my finals.

Pointless Packaging

My tutor said that this would be a challenging brief for me - it most definitely was. In some cases I refrain from thinking 'outside the box,' because it's simply not needed, and a simple idea can be more effective, but this brief put up quite a fight before I got the right idea.

For this brief I had to design packaging for 1. A Single Orange 2. A Newspaper and 3. A Left Footed Shoe (I picked a Stiletto). Pointless right? Thats what I thought, but when I think about there will be occassions where I may have to design packaging for 'unusual' items so this is good practice.

I wanted to keep a consistent theme within my designs because I believe thats important to the companys image. I realised this from when I looked around my shop; Haribo, for example keeps a similar theme of packaging, but they just change the lower part on the front of the packaging is different.

Below are images for each of the designs I came up with. The actual final Orange is slightly different to this - the white background surrounding the typography is not there.

(Stiletto packaging still to come)

K to the A! (Kano Project)

This was definately a brief I was immediately interested in, what more would you want then designing the album and single covers for one of your favourite artists? It was definately going to be a very long breif, we were given over 2 months to do this - i'm not surprised as we had to design the album cover, 3 singles (of our choice), a special edition and a promotional item.

I started off by doing the usual, researching through websites, books, magazines and so on. I also paid a visit to Kano's hometown - Eastham, but I found nothing useful there at all but a good lunch at KFC.

The album is called 'London Town,' so we had to somehow incorporate the London theme, which was no problem because I came up with an idea pretty quickly. I developed this idea to a great extent (wish you could see the sketchbook), but I have used photos of London skylines and combined them with graphics equalisers to create a digital landscape.

The three singles took me a very long time as well; I religiously listened to each track of the album trying to understand the meaning behind the song, noting down all the lyrics that I felt were important. Once I had a bunch of ideas, I began trying to illustrate them and then combine them with the design idea I used in the album.

Here are the 5 covers (click for large image):