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.