31 Oct 2010

13th Street "Stationery of Horror"

Really innovative set of stationary I had completely forgotten about but Behance just retweeted it and I couldn't resist posting some images from it...























http://www.behance.net/gallery/13th-Street-Stationery-of-Horror-%28Design%29/440850

4Mations brief

Working on a new brief at college at the moment to design a logo, ad banner, flat website layout and an animation storyboard based around Channel Four's 4Mations series which was based around a season of animations. Just thought I would post a few of my initial logo ideas. Any input or advice would be greatly appreciated feel free...



the general consensus so far seems to be the black four out of the bottom four images as it seems to promote the number four the best, i still need to tweek it a bit and maybe try a few different colour ways as well as playing with type size a little. I will post some variations on Monday and also a couple of storyboards for the banner ad.

Nightshade exhibition


went to the Nightshade preview as part of Design Event in Newcastle on the 20th of October. There was a good collection of works all in monotones based around 'beguiling acts of violence and animalism, masked by childish playfulness, mysticism and beauty.' The pieces showed a diverse range of illustrative techniques as well as subjects making it interesting and unusual. To get a look at the artists and work follow this link...http://nightshadestore.bigcartel.com/

Droodlings an exhibition by Craww

Good exhibition preview at Electrik Sheep on the 14th of October, really nice work, especially the black and gold stuff, good times were had...










Images downloaded from http://www.flickr.com/photos/crawwdroodling/5097136912/in/set-72157625073524931/ but you really need to hit the link to see the whole photostream, lots more examples of Crawws work.

27 Oct 2010

Coffee And TV...

found this site with the nets for Mr and Mrs Milky from the Coffee and TV video... there is definitely worse ways to kill half an hour with a scalpel and some glue!




Adobe Photoshop Cook

Really nice parody of the workings of photoshop...




26 Oct 2010

Exquisite Corpse Preview, Newcastle

An exhibition bringing together designers and illustrators as part of www.design-event.co.uk







Exquisite Corpse takes it's inspiration from the surrealist parlour game of the same name, a visual game of Chinese whispers, where an image is created by a series of artists each creating a part of the overall artwork.

The exhibition brings together an international group of designers and illustrators who have had their visual conversations brought to live in a large scale graphical installation.

Exquisite Corpse has been curated by Newcastle based design studioSUMO  http://www.exquisite-corpse.co.uk/



19 Oct 2010

AD204 Art and Design Development.

This was the first brief of the year comprising of three mini packaging briefs. The first mini brief was over a week and the aim was to re-package a bar of chocolate geared towards a target market comprising of people willing to spend money on high quality produce. Initially the process began with brainstorming in pairs followed by a presentation to show our initial concept and ideas, from this point in our pair we decided to focus on different aspects of the design each, mine being to produce an illustration for the front of the packet, whilst my partner looked into layout and essential information. Following this we both started to develop the colour palette/typography/final layout as well as developing mock-ups of the packages so that we could check layout, type size and colour etc. Finally we made adjustments to the designs following the mock-ups and presented our final concepts. Overall this was a good part of the brief as it showed that we could push a rough idea to a fairly developed concept within a short timescale also it showed the benefits of working with someone else and playing to each others strengths to develop our ideas.
The second part of this brief was to re-brand an existing product either as a refresh of the design, a brand extension or to try and reach a different target market. For this I began with a spraypaint product analyzing the existing product and then looking at the products competitors and the target market. I then developed a concept focusing on the brands strengths of being one of the best artists spraypaints on the market and tried to focus on this as well as the more technical side of how the product itself dispensed the paint, developing this into a visual by combining a vector of the spraycan internal with the brand name. Also I wanted to promote the colour of paint contained in each can as this was not clearly marked on the original and I felt was an integral aspect of the product as well as being important to promote shelf presence. This rebrand was developed the same way as the first part of the brief however was undertaken as an individual and was finalized to a level where the concept could be presented at the end of the week. 
The final part of this brief was a two week brief to re-brand three existing baby products for the company Nuby, focusing on the constraints of a brief given to a local creative agency Different based in Newcastle.
The main aspects of the brief were to produce packaging which was modern/fresh/simple and natural and which held continuity throughout the range. The route I chose to take for this was to design the packaging with a more high-end modern feel, with the packaging remaining information free on the exterior with all of the important information contained within and on the base of the box. Once the concepts were realized I presented them in a crit held by one of the directors of Different. Overall feedback went well however i missed the point slightly with colour and should maybe have considered a stronger colour palette to give the concepts more shelf presence, but I will develop this further to hopefully tie in better with the brand.