Project 4: The Design Process

For the next two weeks, we have been looking at "the design process", this involves, poetry and calligraphy, fonts, grids and layouts, abstraction and colour meaning, research and information, 3D prototype labs and illustrating stories.
The idea of this 2 week session is to gain an understanding of the basic fundamentals of graphic design and the ways in which it can be applied to our work.

I have already looked at the 3D prototype labs which involved using a laser cutter to create a final piece and an InDesign session which I found hugely enjoyable.
The InDesign session had its own seperate "mini" brief to create a poster based on a film called "The 33" which is due for release in 2014 and focuses on the chilean miner disaster of 2010. The reason for creating a poster based on this is the vivid imagery which emerged related to the incident and also the fact that there is no existing film posters for this film (at time of writing).

I found both of these sessions extremely enjoyable and they enabled me to gain more knowledge into different processes of graphic design which I will be able to apply to my work in future, I look forward to experiencing the remaining 3 workshops next week.

Below is my finished film poster for "The 33":

 

Project 3: Manifesto

This week, we were given a brief to create a personal manifesto based on aspirations and experiences.
I chose to look at racism, although not directly relatable to me and neither an aspiration, nor an experience to some extent for me, I believe racism is something which everyone can relate to somehow, whether its something we have experienced ourselves, something we have put others through, or something which we have witnessed on tv or in a film.
Racism is a problem which everyone has seen or heard about potentially on a regular basis and therefore I chose to express this theme by looking at one of the most inspirational, history changing speeches the world has ever seen, "I Have A Dream" by Martin Luther King Jr.
The speech itself was not my main focus to begin with and I chose to focus on the phrase "I Have A Dream Today" although the meaning was lost without the entire speech to add purpose to the sentence. I then created designs based on both the "I Have A Dream Today" phrase taken from the speech and the entire speech itself.
This lead to a very intriguing poster-type manifesto which my tutor really enjoyed during the crit session with my fellow classmates.
The poster draws your attention with the bold background text which in turn makes you want to stop and read the entire text which is overlayed on it. (See Below)

However, overall, I feel I did not explore this brief as thoroughly as possible and instead settled for a basic idea which had a striking outcome despite its simplicity. I aim to explore my ideas in my depth in future projects to give me a solid basis from which to create more interesting and captivating work.

Below is my final manifesto:

Project 2: What Does The Group Say? Graphic Film

For the second project of the Graphics Pathway, the brief was to create a graphic film based on a specific word which we were given by our tutor. Mine, in this case, was "Juxtaposition" and this project also allowed me to express my creative ability alongside fellow members on the graphics course in a group scenario.
After getting off to a slow start and much deliberation about the general direction and ideas surrounding the theme of the film, my team decided on creating a sequence of scenes based around the most basic definition of the word "juxtaposition".
This allowed us to create a series of short scenes which contrasted certain elements of life, including "young vs old", "fear vs courage" and "male vs female".
Overall, I feel this project worked well in terms of the group dynamic and the final outcome, however I believe, my team skills need to be improved in the way which I pitch my ideas to the rest of my team and my team management skills, given that we have not designated a team manager for the duration of the project.

For the second part of this project we were asked to create a poster which is representative of our film.
I simply chose a scene from our film and applying minimalist styling, added the word Juxtaposition to the bottom right corner, this allowed for people to question the poster and make the connection once the film had been viewed which I believe was effective, in that, people were interested to find out what the film was about in order to understand the poster. Therefore, both element combined helped to explain one another.

Below is my finished poster and link to view the short film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA9-GMjD1Kc&feature=youtu.be