Photography Workshop

Today we had a photography workshop where we learnt how to photograph our work in future. We learnt a lot about light and shadow, we also got refreshed on how to use the cameras correctly.  I didn't realise how much equipment is used to photograph products professionally, it was useful to learn how to set it all up. I really enjoyed photographing the plants as a test, I will definitely be taking some photography and lighting kit out in the future to photograph my own work. 

Digital Print Workshop- Photoshop

Whenever you scan an image in or open one from a digital camera the mode of the image will be RGB. 

RGB Colour Gamet and CMYK colour Gamet

RGB is photoshops default colour mode 

When you change the colour mode from RGB to CMYK the colours on your document will shift ready to print, colours tend to go a lot more duller. We don't want to work on photoshop with great colour and then print and the colour is not what we expect. 

When you work in CMYK some features of photoshop aren't available, CMYK files are larger

View-Gamut Warning 

Gamut Warning- Turns the image silver and show us colours that are not going to look the same once printed 

to change large areas of gamut you can use levels 

proof colours- shows on screen how the image is going to look when you convert to CMYK but the mode of the image is still RGB, sometimes called a CMYK preview 

Work in RGB mode until you finish editing your image. Then convert the image CMYK mode and make any additional colour and tonal adjustments. Especially check the highlights and the shadows of the image. 

top icon on the right next to your colour choice is to do with printing and the second icon is web safe colours, by clicking them it will then convert them into web safe or ready to print

Using spot colours in Photoshop

Monotone inks- needs to be in grey scale first and then you can choose a spot colour, this ink is always changeable 

Duotone- both of the inks will mix exactly on top of each other when printing, it changes the overall tone of the colour 

By choosing the box next to the colour controls the amount of ink used, when moved around it can change the image dramatically, it works very much like the curves adjustments on photoshop, it allows you to stylise the image. 

The more inks you add the more expensive it will be to print, the technique can also be useful when screen printing 

Channels

using spot colour channels is a very common practice for screen printing to prepare the image

The spot ink appears a transparent ink, on the different channels created you can also add in text ect. 

 ink the ink gets more opaque the higher the solidity is, this is very useful when designing for print, you can see on screen how things are going to look even to the transparency of the ink 

when saving the image it is important that spot colours are ticked, it is best if you save it as a TIFF file for best quality

Studio Brief 4 Briefing- Augmented Design

notes from briefing 

-a print based advertising campaign for the website

-include some kind of interactive element to the campaign 

-explore what kind of applications are available

-link the two together, how the user sees the advert to then go and visit the site

-thoroughly test your work in context 

-digital files as well as the printed copies themselves 

-look at creative adversing in a broader sense, strategies ect

-relevance of gimmicks

Responsive- Wallpaper Research and Ideas

For this wallpaper brief the wallpaper must tell a story and be unique. For it to tell a story I think I want to make it more personal to me yet still be decretive. In the summer I went traveling so I decided to have a look through my photos to get some ideas for wallpaper.

Thailand, elephants outside the Grand Palace and the view from the train traveling through Thailand 

Lumpini Park Thailand 

Grand Palace Thailand

The detail on one of the temples in the Grand Palace 

The view from a shopping centre in Bangkok

Natural Waterfall in Thailand

Thailand

Tree's in Grand Palace Thailand 

Sunset in Fiji 

one tiny island just off beachcomber island, Fiji

Fiji

Venice Beach LA 

The view of the sky scrapers image taken from the top of the rock 

Grand Palace 

I had some great experiences while traveling and saw some amazing things, I would like to transfer my experience into a decretive wallpaper. I was thinking of having separate ones for each place that I admired, I think I want to make one on Thailand and the grand palace.

On bored panda I noticed some amazing mosque ceilings

http://www.boredpanda.com/mosque-ceilings/#post0

Responsive: Sella Bar

I have decided to enter a submission for the Leeds College of art Nest magazine to design an advert for the Sela Bar, a music and pizza bar in Leeds. 

http://www.selabar.com

Below I have looked at a few of their existing designs that they have on their twitter and Facebook. 

They are all bright, have use of bold type and quite illustrative. 

For the poster I would like to include the fact that it is a pizza bar, live music, and cocktails as I think these are the three things they aim for. 

The advert should represent the creative business as a whole and not be for a particular event/product. Incorporate whatever text you feel appropriate in the design, if any at all - although the name of the business and contact details [social media, web, contact number and address] have to be included.

The advert has to be B5 format and portrait. 

I started to experiment with some hand drawn type and the different ways to make the letters more decretive. 

Above is a scan I did of a quick sketch of some type, instead of making the type decretive I decided to make the background decretive and have the letters as negative space, I tried scanning it in before I did the whole thing as it was quite time consuming, once scanned it I didn't like it as much as when it was on paper. 

Above are some more type experiments, trying to make the letters feel like the words. 

Above is my final design, I will then scan this in and edit it in illustrator 

I decided to use red blue and white as they are bold colours and I looked at a few of sela bars previous designs and they do include a lot of red and blue so I wanted to keep with their theme. 

Above is my final design that I am going to enter into the competition, I decided to go for hand drawn type to keep it fun, I am happy with the way it has turned out, I have learnt quite a bit on illustrator from making this advert from making mistakes. 

Evaluation

I decided to respond to this brief to design an advert for Sela Bar to potentially be featured in the next NEST magazine, Leeds College of Arts student magazine featuring students work that will get distributed around Leeds. I decided to do this as I enjoy making posters and adverts and I wanted to create something unique. 

To start this brief I started to research Sela bar and their online presents, I have previously heard of Sela bar but never actually visited. While researching I really liked there previous designs, I like the retro look and colours used. 

I noticed while researching that they use bold type in a lot of the designs, I decided to use hand drawn type on this advert as I enjoy doing it and it is something I want to get better at and develop. I experimented by hand a lot for this advert and then started to scan my designs in to see which ones work best and how I could develop them. I only used illustrator when creating my advert, it is a program that I am not very confident on, but through making mistakes I have learnt a lot. I decided to use a small colour palette as I noticed in my research that the existing adverts that they have only tend to use two of three colours, I went for blue, red and white as they are bold colours. 

Overall I am happy with my design, I sent the design of to the editor of Nest magazine and the design will then get sent off to Sela bar and they will choose the best one they would like to represent their business. If I was to do this brief again I think I would of liked to start it earlier as I didn’t realise when the deadline was. I think I would of made something with digital type and experimented with some retro advert ideas.