Goodbye 2010, you shall be missed.

So a lot has happened in the last year. Too much to write down all at once, long lunch, lots of project, and oodles of growth in my own understanding of design, and only six months till the curtain falls. Oh deary its been a rush. Still, Christmas has come and gone and I am feeling refreshed enough to tackle some new things.

First of all two YCN briefs. TWO? You cry? Certainty! Why? Well it's something to do, and it's something I've wanted to do for a while now because both projects are going to be fun. I know it. Well I say that about most of my projects. But this one is a certain.

Boost - Project re-braining. A standard brief, which I why I like to do "unstandard" things. You'll see trust me on this! *wink*

And something that caught my eye only the other night

Sega - Celebrating 20 years of sonic. Oh that does make me feel old this brief. But I couldn't pass up the opportunity in celebrating my favorite super sonic hedgehog. Oh the nostalgia of playing old cartridge games. Sonic and Knuckles can over your fantastic blu ray games any day.

So two projects with the opportunity to delve into something outside of the box a little. I'm thinking of expanding all the ideas here. Maybe film? New digital graphics? Ohh the idea in my head. Still you boys and girls shall have to wait and see.

Lets just say I've been watching far too many things made by Edgar Wright, damn that man deserves more awards in being awesome in so many ways.

And in other news - If your into the strange and the things that are a little bizzaro - I suggest you look up "Anamaniguch" and even if your not. Do it! I'm listening to their first album "Power Supply" and I couldn't be having more fun listening to some classic sounding retro tunes. Call it my Christmas present to the people out there that follow me.

So, to everyone out there, I hope you didn't eat too much, and I hope your not still hung over. Enjoy your new year and I hope to get lots of placements by the time I get back to college, and even while I have mumbled and groaned through this last year with the rain, the heat, and the missed buses. I enjoyed every second. (Well not every, but you know what I mean). Roll on 2011. Because as Back to the future has shown me, we only have 4 more years until hover cars/boards self tying shoe laces and 3D jaws....

Oh, never mind then.

Happy new year everyone!

More updates!

So as the outside word resembles Hoth (snow beasts and everything) I've been taking the time to look back on some of my past work. Mainly that Cabe stuff. One of the posters I never really liked got left out in my posting of lots of work. Really there where a lot of things that where visually wrong to me, probably any person could walk past it and see that it looks fine but my own sense of male tinkering came into play and made it better.

It was origonally the token landscape poster you sort of have to come up with to express how your design works in another format. Well something I like to try and do anyway. To cut a long story short, it didn't feel right. So after some careful editing I was able to put this together and the result feels a lot more confident. Though that said I am tempted to totally rebuild the posters from the ground up, they are still lacking that something. Still, we'll find out what it is and if it will get changed after Christmas. 

Second, on the list of updates is a fun T-shirt design. I love t-shirt designs, with places like Snorg Tees and Truffle shuffle (places I spend faaar too much time on) you get to see such nerdy and cleaver humor.  It's great expressive stuff to look at, and they get the wheels turning on coming up with my own ideas. 

For the Student review nights we always have to wear T-shirts with a quote about something we have learnt. Actually I did learn more things about myself this year than I suppose I have done about graphic design. Apparently;

• I will try any idea once no matter how crazy it is. ( it's only related to graphics, don't go there...)
• Have enthusiasm for the most mad ideas. (Still in graphics.)
• I am the go-to guy for the nerdy/photoshop stuff in the class. (This I can't deny really.)

Anyway, t-shirt. The rules are simple, what we learnt and it mainly has to be typographic. Easy as Pi. I borrowed a page from Carson's book, only because I like the extreme silliness of the idea of writing an entire article in a magazine in dingbats. The quote, "Have fun once in a while" (lovingly typed in Helvetica) is really exactly what is says on the tin/t-shirt. Sometimes graphic designers can get a little stale and repetitive, sort of like what happened at Long Lunch with David Finch (more on that story later). But my supposed above mentioned qualities just give me that little edge that I think will hopefully stop me from becoming one of those tired designers of the now that loose their creative play. 

3. (Golly gee-whatever this is a long post) Tattoo design. 

A few weeks ago before the ground became cold icy and hard we got a brief for a tattoo design. The specifics? 

• Must be typographic
• Must be discreet 
• Must use the whole quote

Aside from that we got to have some fun with the idea. The quote was "We are the music makes and we are the dreamers of dreams." Most of you know if from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory. However others know it comes from the poem Ode Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy. I'll save you all the copy paste of the poem since it's only that one line we are looking at. 

But here is the near final design of the tattoo. 

In theory that should work. A small contest will be held on the night of the review, and the winner? Well we have a guest attending the review that night, a bit of a tattoo buff, apparently he selects the winner and gets it as a tattoo himself. Fun times. 

Personally I am not of the people that enjoy tattoos, (needles urk) I don't mind getting them, but I draw the line at getting sharp pointing things jabbed in me for the sake of art. 

And the final word of the night since this post has been going on so long, I try to keep them short but so much has been happening I'm finding it hard to keep it short!

A little while ago I went to see one David Fitch at a Long Lunch, the so called Godfather of design was there, the creator of the iconic Top Shop, the man who's teams worked on branding Innocent Smoothies aaaand....it wasn't about that. 

To be honest, the lecture was dry....very dry. It was all mildly interesting things, but when you start delving into the phycology of shopping dating back to medieval Germany you've lost me.  It was a little like going to the Louve and instead of looking at the Mona Lisa instead you go look at the tacky brochures for the local history tour. There was also a lot of talk about the stock market...and I mean a lot. 

So I will admit a little bit of a let down, the highlight was admittedly finding out who designed Top Shop, which was a mildly interesting story about it being the first of it's kind in design/fashion/construction. But it was one of fewer highlights. If you where there and can argue differently, fire away but really it wasn't for me. 

So I think that wraps up this post, it's a long one but I think we all survived. Hopefully I can now get on with our new brief. Boost Energy Drinks. I'll let you know how that one turns out. Until folks, laters!

This poster I hate...

To be honest. I love this movie. It probably was one of the best films of the year by far. But one of the things that annoyed me the most was that most of the posters for it actually really don't sell it well. It's probably down to trying to sell what the film is.
But really, there is just something so very wrong with the surrealness of the poster, of course it's trying to convey the idea of the dreamscape being nothing like the real world. But actually I think its a miss really. Having the cast all scattered around like that upside down and at odd angles is more than confusing. And the generic cityscape for all of the strange surfaces that they are standing on is again. Well a little confusing to say the least. The thing is that it doesn't use the elements that we are given in the movie. There are so many visual strong points in the film that could have been so easily adapted to a posters. In fact there are a lot of fan made posters that really do drive in a connection with the film. This looks more like it was for a Bourne-esc movie, the disjoined imagery and the sharp whites on other more faded tones feels evocative of all of Matt Damon's flash back scenes during the movie.

Aside from the disjoined imagery its doesn't actually give you something to look at. At first you want to look at the word Inception. But then you see the collective group of people's faces, and you want to look at all of them, but you can't look at them in a can't look at them in some sort of way that lets your eye flow over the page. Arrgggh! POSTER MAKE UP YOUR MIND!

It really misses the point of good poster design. Maybe I pull up a good poster and what it sells, and more importantly how.

But it's not all bad! I found a poster that isn't as bad as the other one. There are a few things I take issue with. The spacing on the word Inception is faaar to wide and the cast list could be moved down. But this does help better capture the idea of the film. The tag line works better at selling the idea, the cast is given to you in typical Oceans 11 style, everyone has their own point on the map, their pose and positioning illustrating their importance within the role of the film. Dicaprio takes point as he literally is the point man, Gorden-Levit has the large BFG on the left, illustrating his stance within the film as a man not to be messed with. Really this holds better elements than the previous film poster. But I could still pick it apart for the same elements as the previous one.

For a film that was so damn good you would have thought it would have had a good poster...makes you think what else suffered from the same effect.




...

Aww man Lucas...no Jar-Jar....

Daykin Graphics logo.

So here's a smart little dot of graphics. The near final logo concept. A long shot away from my original idea of 8-bit and what not. But I still think it's fun. All the colours can be changed around to better accommodate it's 'surroundings'. And while it is not the uber final design I can honestly say that this has to be the strongest identity I have produced so far!

Personal identity.

Slowly getting there with the design, need to tweak a few things here and there, but I think it's looking pretty solid. Need to change out that horrid font with something of my own design. It's nasty and all the kerning is wrong. Bleh. 

Going to try and incorporate some sort of cog motif into the sides or top.

So it's a step away from Super Mario bros 3 and a little more Bioshock. But as identities go I think it's stronger than what I have made in the past.

Also you guy's can now follow me on twitter! I caved and got it. Go find me. I dare you -

Bazookoidben@twitter.com or something like that, just go look up Bazookoidben. 

Super Poster bros

Hey Pizanos, this is kinda fun!

And if you actually doubt it, I can tell you it works.... in theory. Ain't it fun when design like this crops up? Makes you remember the fun times, and help Nintendo make more money from the virtual console downloads. Booh-ya! Go exploitive marketing!

Personal identity? Who me?

So, the latest in the long line of designery stuff is a personal identity! This should be interesting, I'm not exactly sure where to start, but I am sure this could be very interesting, a small little personal identity splashed all over this page? Could be fun.

Been thinking of what to do, styles to use, right now thinking of a mix of type and illustration, as I don't get to do that very often, and it could be a fun little way of expression myself with the added dimension of really showing who I am in my work.

So research, going for a bit of a retro theme, so it's going to be a night in of rubix cubes and playing Super Mario land 3....

...what? Isn't that how you guys do your research?

Words of wisdom posters

Somewhat related to the words of wisdom video, these where a selection of posters made for the class that was going to become first years. For this project, I went with a strong WW2 with the recently unearthed Keep Calm And Carry On posters serving as a strong influence.
Printed on special kind of paper it produced a very nice aged effect. I should really dig them out, they are a joy to look at.
This was really a fun experiment into textures and materials. Given that it was a smaller quicker project, without a fixed brief we had a little more elbow room to fiddle about with ideas and such. And here is part of the end result. (If I ever do find the originals from whatever portfolio they have hidden themselves away into I promise to catch a few photos. These digital images do them no justice at all!)

Perfect Day

Another poster campaign, this one again was a fun one.

It's a little trying to sell the "Perfect Day" to someone, more so in Scotland where the negatives outweigh the positives sometimes. So for this project I decided to look at ways of just teasing people with famous Scottish icons to entice them to go to Scotland in the hope of seeing more. It's really the opposite of a poster designed to show you what you can get, the idea here is "You have to come here and see if for yourself."

Scoopy

This probably leans closest to the strangest project I have worked on, the product was Inflata-scoop. A product designed for catching dog poo in an inflated bag.

Well it was so bizarre I just had to take a whirl at it. 

My concept for this project was a little silly, but an enjoyable idea. 

Back in the 50's all sorts of ideas where being made real, hover cars, helicopter cars, jet packs, it was this era when any silly idea could seem plausible. So I thought, why not give it a 50's feel? So I did, but I pushed the idea further to give it a little more depth allowing for some more artistic elements to shine though, I eventually settled on a strange grunge/retro 50's design. It was a strange mix, but I seemed more pleasing than simple colours. 

The tag line "Because Sh*t happens." was just simple honest, as a dog owner myself, I know what it can be like when your out walking and then... It was something other dog walkers would remember, and most importantly be able to relate to. 

The design itself would be used on simple lightweight paper packaging, the product was incredibly small and so therefore didn't require a major amount of packaging, and I decided like most pet food and hygiene packaging that should be kept simple and just be a small paper carton with a cut out for the handle. 

Monster Much poster campaign

This was a fun little project that we where tasked with some time after christmas, the idea was to bring monster munch back into the world somehow.
I opted for the big social gathering of movie nights, where everyone would have snack food, of course the snack food of choice being Monster Munch! It was a challenge and a half to get a working idea on the go, but the main idea is linking movies with Monster Munch, the eventual idea was just to have movie posters with quotes and clues, some obvious, some not so, this was part of a contest where people could win prizes online. All part of the "getting people to take part" concept that so many companies like to do these days, the internet and such groups as twitter and facebook making this so very easy and fun to do.

See if you can guess what the movies are!

Words of Wisdom

A project given to us to produce over the summer holidays concerning the first years. By now we where all sort of second years in the class, so we all had to produce a video that helped us give our own personal words of wisdom to the new first years in Graphic design.

It was the first time I had properly worked with abode after effects to produce certain movements with the images and text animations, however it is a good learning curve and I hope to learn more with it as time goes on.

Cabe brief

Our first major brief for the year. It was from Cabe Space, the concept was to try and get people to use more of the open park space within the UK. My solution, to use circus themed posters just to give the feel of theatrics and a grand nature for something I feel we all take for granted.

Introduction.

Welcome to this blog. It's a small hive of little ideas and projects that I've collected over the last few years as a graphic designer in training. A sort of personal digital gallery as you will. And in working my way to the halfway point in my time at Telford. I think its about time I had something to show the big boys and girls in the industry really what I can do.