New blog adresses for the course!

more organisation, lets see how it goes:

Check the links on the right for the blogs, under a new email address now.

Updating blogger header

Time for change. I've had my old blog header for a while now, and adapted it throughout my blogs, here is the new re-design headers for, Jane's Box and Summer 09 blog...

Before...



After...





The new designs follow the idea of clean simple character design, to allow personality from my blog but not to draw attention away from the latest posts, hence the larger margin between Header and posts.

Jamie Delaney

I like Jamie's work interests and i feel the work he produces such as his publication designs fit into where i want my work to head. They are attractive and well considered. I am overly keen on his typographic work :D ahhh my love for type is growing. I appreciate traditional type faces but when i want to unwind from a project i'm currently working on or just want a break to try something different i like nothing more than sitting down with a pen and creating a few letter forms. I tend then to get carried away and start producing on illustrator... but hey its fun :P

End of year 2 evaluation...

In this evaluation

! Reflect on the relationship between your protfolio of work and your creative ambitions as a designer.
! Relate your own work to specific examples/areas of contemporary design practice.
! Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses against identified intetions and areas of contemporary practice.
! Clarify areas of design, skills development and professional concerns that you aim to investigate further from this point.
! Briefly clarify the relationship between your creative practice and your proposed dissertation.

my portfolio

The relationship between my portfolio and my creative ambitions are that i want to pursue design work for print. This year i have found after completing the digital media module I'm not interested in producing moving image based work. I still want to develop my skills in web design, but more for the layout of sites and the creativity and concept building, leaving the technical side to people who know what they are doing. After my interview with Design Junkie the feedback i received on this issue, was that the industry can be quite digitally focused and although they too are interested in print, and have a print based background being able to transfer those skills digitally is a must these days. So throughout the summer i am going to work on developing my portfolio to include screen caps of how my work can be transfered digitally etc.

The briefs i chose towards the end of the second year were because of the opportunity to develop designs for print based media. I was pleased to undertake a variety of ways to work in print, from the postcards to the mail shot and the publication design. This clarified for me that i like the diversity within print design.

The aspects in print i am most interested in and find appealing are: Layout, Type, Choice of stock, Audience and interaction.

I have approached Design Junkie for a placement over the summer as when i came across their work it was the type of work i felt i wanted to produce and be involved in.  I feel i can relate my own work typographically and layout to how they work. Here are some examples of the work they produce:

I feel my interest in type is developing as the more i learn about type and layout the more i want to pursue it within my own work. I still feel i have a weakness here but i am developing it to become more of a strength as i am interested in it. Here is a typeface i produced for the brief 10 things you should know...



I like works as follows, i feel looking and engaging with contemporary design practice feeds into my work and ideas...

I feel another weakness in my work is my layout of my portfolio. I feel i can be more creative with it and the feedback i have received has confirmed this, as well as the need to add more personality to my portfolio, create an identity or something for the front. I've had a few ideas, over the summer i plan to develop this. Here is an example of what I have been working on:

I feel my strengths are concept development. I think i have the ideas to create interesting and engaging design but i need to put more focus on clarifying my ideas and producing them to a professional standard.

My dissertation topic is linked closely to my design practice as it focuses on the use of grid layout in design. I will focus on analysing how the rules and system affect the communication of a design message. How the audience react to different use of grid layouts and also look at designers who rely or don't rely on the grid system within their work. I hope the information, research and knowledge i gain from my dissertation will aid my own design practice.

Design Junkie

Today i went to meet Jason Haigh the Creative director at DJ - Design Junkie.
I got to know about the studio and looked + talked about the work they produce and also got to show my portfolio and got some amazing advice from both Jonny Hotchkiss (the studio manager) and Jason. It was really nice to hear complements about my work outside of the university environment. It's a really nice environment to be in a cute studio and i could tell it was full of passion for design and lots of fun! Also sounds like hard work too :P but thats a good thing! I have to up my game now i feel. If anything this visit has just made me more excited for getting out into the industry and working alongside other designers to create awesome designs :)
I hope sometime in the future i get the chance to work in an environment like DJ offers, who knows hopefully they will consider me for a placement for the summer... fingers crossed thats for sure :D

give a hand to wildlife campaign | Design You Trust. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.

I love the concept for this campaign, not to mention i love animals... if i weren't a designer i'de be vet or something i'm sure, or just work in a pet shop :P

New Camera :D

Just bought myself a new DSLR camera, used Jonathan's Canon 450d for the O2 brief and just had to get one for myself. No excuse for not photographing my work now. LOVE IT!

Type Evaluation

In this module I feel I have greatly improved my knowledge about typography. To have a more specialist knowledge about type will greatly improve my future design work. I have a deeper understanding of how type can speak to us and can have a personality that gets the voice of the company or designer across to the audience. To develop this understanding I learnt how to use different skills and rules within type, like altering point size, is the type san serif or serif, change the leading and simply how having uppercase or lowercase can alter the message been put across to the audience. Further rules about hierarchy and ranging the text will be vital to me when designing, I feel confident now I can design with type and communicate more effectively with it.

Type is a huge area of design and I am glad I took this module just to have an insight into it, which is what I got. A few weeks ago I would have said type wasn’t my favourite aspect in design anymore, but looking back through all the work from this module and how much I have learnt I will welcome anymore knowledge about type because it will improve my design work. I have also realised I have an interest in grids and how type works within grids so I will keep on exploring this aspect in my type journal.

I enjoy keeping a type journal for my own reference and looking back at the opinions I had from the start of this module to the end. This documentation has helped me develop further areas of interest into design. I really want to go back and do some more letterpress in the future, taking my business card designs to be produced.
Having the journal as a continuous reference is good because I can compare and contrast what I feel has worked or not in the typographic world and consider this is my own work.

I am now confident with Quark, which is valuable to know in industry.

My weaknesses I feel are my knowledge on the history of typography; I will research into this and record it into my type journal. Knowing how type has developed and where typefaces have come from will aid my communication using type. I still haven’t got to grips with the anatomy of type yet, so I need to sit down and study this, so in the future I can discuss type in an effective manner.

Ways to strengthen my skills with type:

1. Continue to record and analyse my type journal, I will learn a lot from looking at existing designs.

2. Learn the anatomy of type to benefit my knowledge

3. Keep experimenting with typographic rules, learning the rules mean I can learn how to break them if I wish.

4. Don’t overlook quark as a piece of design software it is still used widely in industry so I will benefit form keeping my knowledge of the software fresh in my mind.

Petter Hanberger

NICE!

Frank Chimero

Had a look through Frank's website, seen the work before. Has some good advice too...