Brief 3 Alphabet Soup Typeface- Harrys final Typeface

After the crit I began to take the feedback onboard and started to design again. Here I printed the alphabet off and placed tracing paper over the top and started to design. I wanted to get more of a bold feel so I changed the font I wanted to work with and went with Futura instead, this was a lot easier to manipulate, as I felt the other one was too thin. 

Here are a couple more design sheets I have worked on, ideas that have came to me since the crit. I wanted to stick with the theme of structure, architecture and the grid that his favourite graphic designer uses. I started with very simple ideas by just making the actual letters three dimensional  but I found this very dull and it needed more context. So going back to the idea of structure and grids I started to sketch out some ideas, I used graph paper to explore the idea of graphs, but i felt it almost had too much structure and was quite dull and as if it had been done before. I went back into looking into grids and Brockmans style and the grid system. 

 " The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee.

It permits a number of possible uses and each

designer can look for a solution appropriate to his

personal style. But one must learn how to use the

grid; it is an art that requires practice. ”

Josef Müller-Brockmann

I set the letters and glyphs out 7x7 so they would fit on a piece of A2 paper. I decide to go for Futura in a italic form because he is quite a layer back person, and relaxes a lot listening to music. I have also chosen Futura because he stated when I questioned him that it is his favorite font.  

Glyphs- 

1,2,3- I chose to manipulate these as I felt that I just needed to display that I could manipulate more than just letters and can do numbers also

!- I chose the explanation mark for his love of music and festivals, and how music is usually quite loud like the explanation mark

#, &- I have chosen these as a representation that Harry is a social person, the # represents the commonly used # within social media and the & shows that he loves to be around people 

Here is my final design on tracing paper, this was my stongest design as it has the most meaning behind it and looked the best visually. I have put Futura in Italics because of his laid back personality, there is a small grid around each letter as his favourite designer is Josef Muller-Brockmann a man that focus' a lot on the theory of grids. Also I found out from when I first questioned him that his biggest fear was 'not living life to the full' I found this interesting and to represent this fear I sketched in the typeface instead of having it block black to show that as his fear. 

Here I have used the typeface I have created to design the name tag for Harry. I simply traced his name on a piece of paper and manipulated it in the same way, I have done it 4.5cmx9cm format, and stuck a safety pin on the back so it can be attached to his clothing.  

Overall I have enjoyed this project, if I was to do it again I would of produced alot more designs before the first crit as I feel I couldn't get much good feedback from the two designs I created, however because I had such few designs I got some great ideas. I found it difficult to start designing at first. Also before I produced my final alphabet on tracing paper I would of done a mini crit to get peoples opinions. If I was to design the whole typeface again I think I would of made the letters actually laid back instead of forward/italic as from the crit people felt it didn't represent being laid back. Link to crit:  Typeface crit 

Photography- Own Photo's

For this brief the main thing I want to consider is the image, from looking at photo frames in the shop the main eye catching thing is image if it has any. I have looked through some of my own photography that I could use. Here are some examples:

Here is some older photography I have done, I did this photoshoot for a vintage look, I think these photos would look good in photo frames for Next or House of Fraser or something, however I think they might be bait too cheesy. 

Here are another couple of photo shoots I have done in the style of different photographers, I think these sort of photographs would look particularly good in Urban Outfitters or Topshop, for the teenage and older audience. 

Nigel Tomm Photography

Nigel Tomm is one of my favourite photographers, he does alot of fashion shoots and crumples the photograph and creates these pieces of art. Each photograph is crumpled differently and they are all unique, that's what I like about them. 

Above are a few examples that I tried out with a couple of friends, I have crumpled the photo in different ways. To do this I firstly took the photo in a studio, printed it on thin glossy paper so it could be easily scrunched and light would reflect off the creases. Then I scrunched it up, put it under the light box and re photographed it.

I think this technique works well and is very eye catching, the concept being behind this is that everything is so digital nowadays and people tend to lose photographs and never actually make the effort to print them off. So I would do this in a frame to show the loss of the image, as if it has been scunched up and thrown in the bin, forgotten about and lost.      

Type Journal- Shops

Character- Simple/ Minimal

This is such simple type on the American Apparel logo, but I think it works well, it also reflects the clothes well as they are also very simple yet effective deigns. I like how they have took out all colour and just used the Helvetica font it is very basic but will never go out of fashion and wont need to change it/ rebrand. They use the font Helvetica throughout their store on carrier bags extra, and by using one simple font everyone can instantly recognise it as American Apparel that's why I love it.

Anatomy- Bold 

This type caught my eye as I walked past this coffee shop in town. I love the vintage style of it and how they've decided to put the type in white with a black background, it reminds me of a chalkboard. It works well how they've put three fonts together as well, they don't clash and work well together. Overall its bold but still subtle and clean. 

Brief 2: Illustrator Development

I need to develop my 10 initial ideas from the previous brief into one full alphabet by choosing to develop one of my designs and illustrating it.  From the crit I found a lot of people liked the leaf idea, how humans would not exist without the aid of plants, also I personally like the ghost idea as i think i will find it easiest to design into a full alphabet. 

Here I have developed the Helvetic alphabet abit more as I found that I wouldnt be able to do alot with the normal one as a full alphabet. I delevloped it to make it fatter, and to keep to the space theme. 

Then taking the leaf idea I then experimented with leaves with leaf rubbings and scanning them in and experimenting in photoshop to look at the veins in a leaf in more detail. I then drew out the whole alphabet and experimented with my three favourite ideas, I quickly found this alot harder than i orginally thought. I found the alien one doesnt work well as a full typeface as the eyes dont fit well in the letter 'i' and 'j'. 

 I enjoyed experimenting with leaves and seeing the different patterns they produce when you manipulate them differently, I think this was a useful exercise. 

Here i wanted to see the ghost type as a full alphabet, so i redrew the original out and added the ghost features, I think this has worked well. I like the cartoon theme to it, it feels quite illustrative and child like. 

I also wanted to see the leaf rubbing thing in a full alphabet so I drew out the full alphabet again and rubbed over it with wax crayon and leaves and cut the letters out and scanned them in. I love this as a design, to develop it on illustrator I think I might draw the letters out and add the leaf rubbings in, however I'm not very advanced in illustrator so I think I might find it tricky. 

Brief 1 Alphabet Soup- Design Skills

Today I have had my final crit, here are my final ten letters that i have come up with, working with the word 'existence' and the font helvetica. 

From top left 
a / leaf - the first thing i noticed about the 'a' in Helvetica was that the eye of the 'a' looked like a leaf, this was perfect as human can not exist without plants as they produce oxygen.
o / planet- for this one i kept it simple and just added a planet ring around the 'o' to represent the existence of other planets, saturn is the only planet with a planet ring. 
p / ghost- here i went for a cartoon style for a ghost and put it into the letter 'p'.
b / rocket- to keep in with the space and universe theme i decided to put the rocket as the eye of the 'b'
o / alien- here i took the eyes of the alien and put them in the 'o' this is to represent whether people believe in aliens or not. 
e / humans existence- humans existence on the planet and universe is very minuet so i have shown this by making the eye smaller in the 'e', also i have moved the eye and placed it where the earth is in relation to the solar system.
i / stars- from the crit people liked the idea of the universe and the existence of stars that you are looking into the past, so here i created an 'i' using stars.
x / hell- here i replicated the unknown existence of hell with some simple devil horns.
a / time- this one i wanted to show the existence of time in someway, so i edited the Helvetica 'A' and tried to make it have a medieval theme. 
j / mermaid- here i have tried to replicate the existence of mermaids by adding simple features to the letter 'J'.

Overall, I think they work well as a set, there are some stronger than others and ones I prefer. I think the rocket and star ones are my weakest, but I like the simplistity of the 'a' leaf and the 'o' alien eyes. 
The final crit was useful, as they all liked the idea of the leaf 'a' and think I should develop this further, and look into the veins of leaves when I start to think about digitalise it. However I have asked a few other people including my flat mates what they prefer and they seem to think to go with the alien theme, i need to experiment which would work better for the next brief to digitalise them. 

Breif 1: Development

Today I have started to develop my ideas into a typeface. When I first got the subject of 'existence' initially i was baffled and confused on to were to start, but i feel if i research further into the subject i will develop my ideas a lot more. 

Here I created another mind map, where i looked into existence more thoroughly. Also as i was looking into the subjects i started to look into basic shapes of ideas that i had, i did this because it would give me some ground to work with when i did start to design my letters.  After creating this mind map I then felt that I was ready to start designing my letters. 

Here i started to experiment with the first concept I had of using the space them, going down the route on the existence of space and the universe. I decided to put the axis on the O as the planetary ring, i think this was a subtle idea, however I'm not sure i could follow this through with a lot of letters in the alphabet  So i then went on to but the planetary ring around the O, making it more versatile for other letters. I think this has been effective. Also i look some inspiration from the Nasa logo for the red ring, and you cant really go wrong with black, white and red. 

Another experiment I tried and loved was the idea of some alien eyes within the shapes, I experimented with upper and lower case letters and moving the eyes, to develop this idea further I think I could experiment with making the eyes bigger and smaller. 

I love the simplicity of this idea, the idea behind this is that we as humans are small in existence in terms of the universe, so i made the eye of the letters smaller. Also i moved the eye in position of where earth is in the solar system. 

Here i wanted to display the existence of time, I couldn't think of many ways of doing this, so i attempted to make it look mediaeval in some way but just editing the basic helvetica A. I don't think this has been very successful, but i like the idea behind it. 

I like the idea of the existence of mermaids as a mythological creature, here i chose a feature of the mermaid, being the tail and added to the end of the letter t, i think this has worked well however it does sort of remind me of a whale. So from there to make it look more like a mermaid i decided to added the wavy hair and put the font in italics to experiment further, i think this has worked well but think there maybe too much detail to it now as i wanted to keep it minimal. 

 When i was looking at the letter a in the helvetica font the first thing i noticed was the fact that the eye looked like a leaf. So I then went with the idea that humans wouldn't exist without the power of plants providing us oxygen. I really like this concept as it's not obvious but it makes sense.

Here I did a cartoon style P, that i intended to look like a ghost, for the existence of ghosts. Ive asked a few people and they cant see the ghost in it, however i think it looks quite cute.

As another quick experiment I wanted to portray the existence of hell. To do this i simply put some devil horns on. I think this has worked quite well and think i could develop this idea further onto other letters as it could be quite versatile. 

How to... Designing and Crit

We are designing our booklet on indesign as this is the easiest program to create it on. I have never used this program before and I have learnt quite a bit already. As a group we needed to deside on fonts, so we headed on to dafont.com 

We wanted a hand drawn theme so we needed a font for the titles, we all agreed to go for 'brain flower' showed in the image above. We all loved the tall thiness of it, and we thought it would fit the look we were going for. 

Along with the the main title font we needed one for the main body, at first we couldnt agree as a group, we needed something simple and ledgeable, that could be read in a small format, as the booklet is only going to be A6. 

We all did our own pages, I did the pest places to jog and cycle, the contents and the best gyms in Leeds. We all had our own tasks and split it equally, Roz did all the illustrations as we wanted to keep to the one style. We moced it all up and got the pages in order ready for the crit, all the colours weren't put in place, but we wanted to listen to our feedback first. 

Crit 

Above are the notes i made from the crit, we got some useful feedback. They seemed to love the whole idea as a handy book and thought they would find it useful as a student. They complemented us on our in depth feedback and loved the clean finnish of the whole booklet. They said that we could possibly take it further by making some sort of forum for students to keep healthy because they have realised its not actully cheap to keep healthy while studying. As in design they wanted brighter colours on some of the pages as they felt were abit dull, also they wanted some sort of illustration on the recipe pages as they found them abit plain. Also with the recipe pages they wanted to see a content wheel of whats actually in the recipe, and maybe a traffic light system as on some of the packaging in supermarkets. 

The other groups problem was 'how to stay creative' I think we provided them with some useful critism of their postcards and posters. We found that they all looked really good but  they didnt really serve a purpose. We found that designing an app or something interactive would of solved the problem more than a pretty postcard, but their over all design was great. 

Changes from crit 

Here is a few pages from the final copy, we took the criticism on board and added more illustrations to the pages, chose better colours to go with the theme of each page, and calorie wheels on the recipie pages. I think the criticism was really usefull as the overall look of the booklet looks better now and is even more informative. 

Presentation 

While the changes were being made from the crit me and Jess also put together the presentation illustrating the key points of the overall booklet.

          Research categories

• We split this into categories of eating healthy, budgeting and how to keep fit, as we felt that there were a lot of things we could go into
• We looked into a variety of information that we think is relevant for students on a budget, for example the cuts of meats and which are cheapest
•  In pairs we researched further into the categories we chose. After collecting initial research, we grouped back together to narrow down the information enabling us to include the most significant points within our booklet 

                Target audience

•       This booklet has been created with fresher’s in mind and students new to Leeds

•       Can be used as a helpful guide to these students that are new to living alone

Format

•       At fresher’s fair we collected a lot of leaflets, posters etc. But we found we all took the most interest into the booklets of information

•       We decided to make it as a handy A6 booklet, keeping it informative but with an informal tone to try and communicate to the audience without boring them. We almost want to educate the students and give them useful information during the first year

Fonts

•       We went for a hand drawn theme but we wanted to keep it clean and fresh, we chose a font called brain flowers for the headings and calibri for the main body text to keep it simple and easy to read, the fonts were effective as we got positive feedback during the group crit

Purpose

•       We wanted to inform the audience without sounding to formal, or overloading the audience with too much information

Crit feedback

•       After the crit we got some useful feedback, such as we needed to add more illustration to the recipe pages as they felt it was abit plain for students

•       They found it good how we got loads of research for our content before we started to design the overall product. We made sure that we gathered enough research to successfully inform the audience of the points we are trying to put across

•       If we wanted to develop this idea further, we would make something interactive such as a webpage, some sort of social network blog or an on going mini magazine

Overall I have really enjoyed working on this project, I have picked up some valuable skills on in design as I had never used that program before this project. I enjoyed working as part as a team as we picked at our different skills within each other. We managed our time really well, until it came to printing at the end where it was a major rush, but we have learnt from this and it had been a valuable lesson that we should leave more time for production.