Day number 2, Bauhaus and Zoo.

On the second day we were up bright and early again (after another nights drinking and an aborted attempt at going out to a club) and headed for the Bauhaus. This was the part of the trip I was looking forward to the most after seeing the itinerary, as I felt it would have the most relevance to design. I was impressed with the gallery, in particular the photography by Andreas Feininger, which was absolutely stunning.

After the bauhaus seven of us headed off for the zoo, finding it after eventually gleaning directions out of a poor confused german bloke...

"excuse me, do you know where the zoo is?" "huh?" "the zoo??" "say it slowly..." "um, zoooo?? Animals?" "Oh!! The zoo!"

The zoo was absolutely incredible, better than any I had been to before (although we're hardly spoilt for choice with zoo's in Cumbria) and we spent a good four or five hours in here, before heading back to the hotel.

That night we ate out at White Trash, a quirky german bar/restaurant with an odd menu,

"Fuck off fries, anyone??"

Before heading back to the hotel for another night of drinking, resulting in the seven of us that went to the zoo going out in search of some nightlife. After heading towards Alexanderplatz we asked a German couple where to go, which resulted in yet another confusing conversation; 

"Excuse me, we were wondering if you know where there is a good place to go out around here?" "Ja, white trash." "We've already been there tonight, we were wondering if there's anywhere good to dance?" "I think the weekend ist gut?" "We're not here at the weekend, sorry, do you know anywhere good for tonight?" "Ja, ja the weekend is gut" "Nooo..." Turns out the club was called The Weekend, and it was 15 floors up one of the big buildings right in the centre of Alexanderplatz. After eventually finding it we had an epic night, German techno all round, the novelty of indoor smoking, and some luxury toilets which frankly, amazed us. (Free perfume, hair products, hand cream, and a black marble decor).

Berlin, baby! 17th - 20th March '09

I'd never been to Germany before the trip and really didn't know what to expect from Berlin. I was really looking forward to this trip as I hadn't had a holiday in three years and couldn't wait to experience a new country. I also had a feeling it would be a good bonding experience. 

After a long and eventful journey (for some reason during the plane landing I thought I was going to die, perhaps due to the fact the pilot seemed to want to drop us hundreds of feet at a time with no warning, so my stomach was literally in my mouth) we finally made it to the hotel. I was expecting some kind of shack seeing as the trip was so cheap, but was pleasantly surprised to find a decent hotel, complete with reception area with a bar, music, computer and the knowledge we could bring our own booze there. After going in search of food and finding a freshly made pizza and beer for 3.50 we got down to business in true Brit abroad style. Namely drinking games. Next morning, after much hilarity and probably more alcohol than is healthy, we were up bright and early and left for the Jewish museum. My favourite thing about the Jewish museum, aside from the architecture of the building itself, was the 'Fallen Leaves' exhibit. This was made up of over 10,000 solid metal faces on the floor, some large and some with baby-sized proportions. This had a really eerie feel to it, as the echoes of the metal faces clashing together as you stood on them ricocheted off the walls of the enormous room that contained them.

Type Design

I've just realised that I haven't made any mention of the type design workshops I've been doing. Basically, we've had a visiting lecturer called Sally Castle coming in to teach some of us how to design a typeface. Sally gained her first job at Pentagram as a second year student purely on the strength of a typeface she designed, so maybe this will be more useful than I anticipated. Basically we began sketching out designs on to tracing paper, then scanned them in and used the FontLab Studio program to start drawing our letters. Although time consuming, I'm quite happy with my type design so far. It needs a bit of tweaking, but after printing out a 'waterfall' (a sheet filled with my typeface, getting larger and larger) I found my font scales down really well, in fact it's still just about legible even at 5 points. The image is of my rough draft before I scanned it in. I'll upload my final typeface once it's finished.

Mmm...Type Radio, Now We Are Talking!

The dust has barely had chance to settle on our flash animation, and here we are again, at the start of a new unit. This is another unit I was anticipating, as I've seen some of the second years type radio articles, and was highly impressed with them. 

So far I've picked Vince Frost out of a hat (yay!), begun the laborious task of transcripting his interview (I can only seem to remember about 3 words at a time, so that involves a lot of stop/starting) and done a couple of sessions of InDesign (definitely better than Quark, in my opinion). So far I'm feeling positive about this unit. Magazine design is definitely something i'd be very interested in doing, and what better opportunity to see how well I can do it. 

I must say though, if I hear the words 'ya'know' one more time I may well throw my Mac out of the window. These words seem to make up 80% of everything Vince Frost says, and it's starting to wear very thin. That aside, he does seem to have quite a dry sense of humour, which is keeping me slightly amused throughout this task.

I guess there's not much else to say at the moment, so i'll leave it at that for now.

Hamish Muir

Today we had a lecture from the typographer Hamish Muir. I wasn't aware of his work until I heard about the talk, but after getting a bit of last minute research in (basically in the half hour before the talk) I found I did recognise some of his design. I must admit, I wasn't overly keen on most of his work, but still tried to keep an open mind. I must say I was quite pleasantly suprised with the lecture, I found it quite interesting. These are the notes I took;

• Bournemouth College of Art, 1975 - 1976
• Bath academy of Art, 1976 - 1979
• Basel School of Design, 1980 - 1981
• Moved to London in 1985, started the company 8vo with two others.
• As a collective they treated type as image, all in the days before computers were used for design. They designed everything by hand, layering up paper until it was sometimes 20 sheets thick.
• The company name, 8vo, came from the printing term 'octavo'.
• The most important lesson Muir learned was to always work full size.
• You don't always have to have 'big ideas'. Small ideas/responses often work the best.
• Unica, typeface commissioned by Haas. Mix of Univers and Helvetica.
• As a company they created the Octavo International Journal of Typography, which was a very limited edition series of 8 journals, some of which cost up to £200 for an issue.
• Muir regards Wim Crouwel as being the best typographer ever.

Animation; Done!!

Well, i've finally finished my animation, after weeks of stress and several episodes of Flash rage. I feel this has been one of my strongest units so far and I'm pretty happy with my animation, although I wish I could have added some music to it. I had a song picked out, but then heard we had to seek permission from the artist to use it, and I had no idea how to do that. I'm going to get that done though before uploading my flash to my online portfolio (which doesn't actually exist yet). I'm also going to go on to create the other two statistics, and have an intro scene which is used to navigate between the three stats, using buttons.

Aside from the usual difficulties I have picking up new software I felt the most difficult part of the unit was learning to think in moving images, which is something i've never done. I feel I've picked this up now though, and definitely want to use flash again, both in university/working world projects, and personal projects.

All I need to do now is create an advertising banner, plus a website/portfolio for my ABC. 

Visual Elements

I'm going to animate the chalkboard at the top so the text appears as if being written. The 'bin' and 'yogurt' are visual elements to illustrate the statistics, and the 'UK' is part of the animated text.

Red. White. Blue.

The Flashing is going pretty well so far, we've been doing a 3 hour session every Tuesday night, and hopefully I should come out with an ABC qualification in Adobe Flash by the end of it. I've already decided how I want some of my animation to look, and have begun storyboarding. I'm going to call my animation, 'Why We Shouldn't Waste.' These are the statistics I have found;

• If somebody throws away a newspaper every day for a year, they will have wasted the equivalent of a 35 foot fir tree.
• If someone throws away a coke can every day for a year, they will have wasted the equivalent of an aluminium wheelchair frame.
• £10 billion worth of food is thrown away annually in the UK, including;

         - 5,500 whole chickens each day.

         - 440,000 ready meals each day.

         - 1.6 million yogurts each day.

The style of animation I want to create will be mainly typographic. Any visual elements will be created typographically, e.g. the dustbin will be made up of the word 'bin'. As the main statistic is based in the United Kingdom the colour scheme will be mainly red, white, and blue, and I may possibly use the Union Jack in it somewhere.

So far i'm concentrating mainly on the food statistic, as this can be broken down into a further three, and after storyboarding it I feel it may take as long as a minute to animate this section. As the animation has a maximum length of 90 seconds I may run over that if I animate the other two stats. I'm just going to crack on with the first section now, and see how that goes.

Unit 3: Screen Based Communication 1

It's finally here; the unit I couldn't wait to get stuck in to. Since starting the course I have been looking forward to learning Flash, as it's so unlike anything I've done before. So far I've found the brief slightly strange; the animation has to be based on a statistic, and has to persuade others in to your way of thinking. I suppose I'll have to get used to working to working on strange/difficult briefs at some point though. 

   So far I have been researching existing animations, my favourites being the typographic film quote animations I found on YouTube. I've also been researching every kind of interesting statistic I can think of. I think I could be on to something with a wastage/recycling route I took; apparently £10 billion worth of food is thrown away annually in the UK, and the statistic is broken down further into how many yogurts, whole chickens etc. is thrown out each day. I was also thinking of looking in to what could be created with the stuff people waste, e.g. if somebody throws away a coke can every day, how long would it take to have wasted enough aluminium to make, say, an aeroplane?

Visual Thinking: Final Outcomes

Much to my annoyance I can't seem to get my work to upload in it's normal colours, no matter what I do with it. However, these are two of my final outcomes for the project. The one on the left is a further development of my final mock-up, using photo's I had commissioned by a Photography student, when I found out I wouldn't be allowed to use AIB's photography studio's as I hadn't had an induction. I removed the amnesty candle from the final design as it wasn't my image, plus I thought it looked a little out of place floating in mid-air. I had the full case study on the board to support the main statements, and detail how the audience could help Amnesty with cases like that. The design on the top right plays on the 'trial' theme. I had the model hold the board out to the side as though being photographed after arrest.
<--- This is my T section advert, which is obviously quite difficult to see. The image in the bottom part is one of my models holding the board with the amnesty logo and website on it, looking down at the floor with her legs curled up underneath her. This was my favourite of all the outcomes.

More Mock-ups...

Once again blogger has decided to play with the colours on my pictures, but I guess you get the gist of them.
The image on the left is the mock-up I took to PAL for the crit, where I received some positive and constructive feedback;

• Exchange 'the' for 'a' as the is too excluding.

• Find a way to highlight the word 'rape' as it's the strongest word on the page. possibly do it the same way as 'adultery'.

• Lose the capital letters on the tag line.

I then went on to create the image on the right, having made those changes. I feel that this piece will be very effective once I have a set of photographs to use for it.

Wouldn't Happen To You. Shouldn't Happen To Anyone.

<-- This is another of my mock-ups, however, I think I'm actually going to run with this idea.
I have come up with the tagline 'Wouldn't happen to you. Shouldn't happen to anyone', and although the image is a shoddy one off google images, I feel the poster has potential once doubled with my own images.
Basically, I want the poster to be something teenagers can identify with, as the kind of hard hitting facts I've been researching are so far removed from anything the typical British teen has had to deal with it could alienate them from Amnesty's work. Therefore, I'm going to photograph people the average young person could relate to, then couple that with a high impact fact/case study, plus the tag line, hopefully resulting in an campaign that highlights the differences in the lives of British teens and those abroad, without alienating the target audience.

A World Gone Mad.

This is a 5 minute mock-up of an idea, which for some reason Blogger has uploaded in this fetching blue colour rather than the Amnesty yellow I designed it in.

The idea behind this came from something Barry Tempest (Mr. Amnesty) said during his talk.
He told us that whilst campaigning for Amnesty he has encountered many cases of people not understanding the fundamental concept behind the charity, human rights. One lady in particular told him, 'Oh, human rights, I don't agree with that' obviously getting human rights confused with the kind of political correctness gone mad that is all over the tabloids. I decided to take a light-hearted approach rather than going for shock tactics, and drew up this cartoon of two office workers inadvertently brushing against each other, with the female character taking this to be 'sexual harrassment!' I basically wanted to portray the character blowing an innocent mistake out of all proportion in typical if maybe slightly exagerrated 'PC gone mad' style, with the tagline 'In a world gone mad, find time to care about the things that really matter.'

I have decided that although I quite like the simplistic, cartoony style of the ad, it doesn't tell the audience what 'the things that really matter' actually are, and I don't feel they'd be inspired to join Amnesty as a result of seeing this, therefore it misses the entire point of the brief.

Preston, Lancashire

I woke up early one morning whilst visiting my brother at his house in Preston, and was hit with a sudden burst of inspiration after seeing his back yard through the window.
I felt the barbed wire against the stormy sky conveyed a sense of bleakness, and poverty (Quite accurately as Preston itself is a rundown city, and my brother lives in a student house with a prison at one end of the road and the red light district at the other. Lovely.)
Obviously, the barbed wire also relates to Amnesty International's logo.

"Spend More Save Less"

'Spend More Save Less' was a one-day brief to design an A3 poster encouraging people to spend more in order to boost the economy. We split into small groups and had until the end of the day to come up with an ad. Our day began with sitting in the arts bar with a coffee and going through a pile of newspapers in order to gain greater understanding of the economic crisis. We then bounced ideas off each other as a group, which resulted in us struggling to narrow them down into one final idea as we had so many to choose from. The final outcome from the day definitely needed a bit of tweaking, but I feel I gained quite a lot from the workshop. It was a good way of getting into the right mindset for the brief, and the process of brainstorming ideas as a group was very beneficial, as when somebody came up with an idea it sparked off ideas from the rest of the group.

Unit 2 - Visual Thinking

We've now been set brief No.2, Visual Thinking. For this unit we have to;

• Gain greater financial support for Amnesty International by raising awareness of its work, and enouraging people to either donate or bequeath to the charity to support it.
• Target an audience which will include people who rarely or never donate to charities currently, as well as people who already donate to various charities when they feel the need to do so, and prefer to donate by choice and not instruction.

• To encourage more people, particularly the young, to become members of Amnesty International.

We have to achieve these aims through a 'transport media campaign', basically an Adshel bus stop poster, and the T side of a double decker bus. This unit is really inspiring to me as advertising is an area of graphic design which interests me. I guess this will be the best opportunity I'll get in university to find out what it would be like to work in the advertising industry.

Although I know Amnesty International is a human rights charity, I'm only aware of them because of the Secret Policeman's Ball. So far I have done some fairly broad research on Amnesty as a whole, what their history is, what they do as a charity, what campaigns they have used in the past. I'm finding it really interesting so far. I have also begun the word association task, which is more difficult than I anticipated, now I'm on to the sentence compiling part of the task.

Next I'm going to continue with the research plus begin a bit of ideas generation.

Bookbinding

This is the front of one of the books I made during bookbinding workshop. I quite like the technique, maybe less impressive than the japanese 6 hole binding technique, but I will definitely use it again for hand-rendered designs.

More Letterpress Images

Letterpress

These are a couple of my favourite images from the letterpress sessions we did. After some initial skepticism down to the fact I couldn't see how manually setting type would be any better than doing it digitally, I ended up really enjoying these sessions.  The printmaking I did for my ABC qualification at college was very time consuming and laborious, whereas letterpress was relatively quick and easy but produced impressive results. I liked the way the results were imperfect, as it gave each piece character.

Text and Image, done!!

<----------  Low quality reproductions 

of the key and front cover.

After much consideration I came up with a winner of an idea for my book resolution. I created some map-like imagery to use on the cover and contents page and used Quark to lay out my text and images, with a mainly black and white colour scheme and colour coded key consisting of a row of coloured semi-circles running down the outside edge of my book. Each section had a different colour relating to the contents page, and the corresponding semi-circle would be replaced by a splat mark throughout that section. I printed onto the back of each page a reverse image of the key to keep the pages flowing together. I bound my book with two thin strips of black card, using the japanese 6 hole binding technique we learnt in the bookbinding workshop.

I feel this unit turned out well in the end, though it definitely could have been better! I guess i'll just have to make sure I hit the ground running when we start the next unit.