In Design Workshop

Speaking From Experience

Speaking From Experience

Speaking From Experience

I wanted to produce a poster that explained that our course Isn't like the standard Leeds Met Job where you're in six hours a week, this is like a full time job and you need to be here as much as possible. One thing that I've learnt is that within graphic design you can't slack off you need to keep current and up to date with whats going on in the world around you as much as possible. This combined with my love for the printing studios in college I produced this idea above.

Speaking From Experience

At the start of the course I specifically remember amber saying in a lecture that "This is teaching gold, It's a privilege to be here." I thought this would be an ideal quote to use because the standard of teaching on the course is exactly what she stated, plus its put in a fun way that represents the course as a whole. I wanted to keep my idea as simple as possible so I took the most literal image i could think would match with my type, that being some gold bars, then produced the design below around my initial drawings.

Speaking From Experience

Comic Sans is a subject that's very much talked about throughout the studio mainly because of Fred's Hatred for the typeface. Personally I couldn't see his beef at first but then i sat on illustrator for 3 hours trying to make a poster about why not to use it, and instead came up with a poster that explains how it will become your worst nightmare.

I am really happy with my outcome and sort of proved my statement right, I eventually gave up and used one of my favorite typefaces, League Gothic. I might play around with the colours to make the text stand out more or even make the imagery in the background a lot less literal.

Speaking From Experience

Another habit i tend to have when i get to college is drinking far too much coffee and i wanted to express this through one of my posters. Almost like a warning for first years that caffeine will become your best friend pretty much.

Colour Variations;

Speaking from Experience Poster Idea 2

One of my downfalls in college is that i tend to spend far too much time playing pool, however i thought this could be a really good subject matter to use for one of my posters because i often come up with ideas to use within my work whilst playing pool.

The design below is the final design i came up with, I like how the type flows down the right hand side of the page as it concentrates your vision and doesn't over complicate the design.

Speaking From experience

After producing my series of quotes i started to think about how my audience would view them and how they would digest what they are going to be reading. When i first arrived at the college I was nervous about meeting people and everything was very new so i didn't really know what to expect. If i was to bombard next years first years with scary facts about the course then this is more likely to put them off than to encourage them for the year ahead. I Wanted to keep my quotes humorous by at the same time informative.

I spotted a post on facebook from somebody on our course saying that it is not essential to buy a mac in your first year. Underneath another user had replied, yeah but it does make you feel good. I thought this was so so so true because At the start of the course I did exactly that. This was my new starting point.

Using Futura Definitely didn't work, the typeface just didn't flow nicely with the handwritten lettering at the bottom of my page in comparison to Myriad Pro.  However the blue is very eye catching against the grey and this could be a consideration.

Speaking From Experience.

I started to narrow down a series of quotes I was considering using, some humorous some course specific and some generally about advice within Graphic Design.

QUOTES

Course Specific

-You get out what you put in, so work your ass off and don’t have any regrets.

-Talk to people about your ideas-other people will think of something you haven’t.

-It’s not a part time job, get up, get in and be creative.

-A sketchbook is for yourself not anybody else.

-Don’t be afraid of doing things wrong, this is the key to progression.

-From this point onwards, graphic design is your life.

-Blog, Blog, then Blog again.

-Fail, fail again then fail better.

-No matter how far you push your work, there’s always room for improvement.

-If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking.

Humorous

-       This is teaching Gold.

-       It is not essential to buy a macbook in your first year, but it does make you feel good. 

-       For the next 3 years caffeine is now your fuel.

-       Comic sans will be your new best friend. 

-       If in doubt, go play pool.

-       Say goodbye to procrastination, the studio is your new home.

-       Signing in is like picking your nose, it’s tedious but its worth it. 

-       Time isn’t wasted when you’re getting wasted, just not the night before Fred’s 9.30 lecture. 

-       You can’t polish a turd, at the end of the day it’s still a piece of shit.

-        

Inspirational Design Quotes

-Math is easy, design is hard, it’s a privilege to be here.

-Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

-Good design is obvious. Great Design is transparent.

-Design is where science and art break even.

-People ignore design that ignores people.

-Designers are meant to be loved, not understood.

-Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.

-The secret to creativity, is knowing how to hide your sources.

-Harmony is the greatest artistic aim within design.

-Your final outcome is a journey, not a destination.

Feedback from Crit Friday 13/05/2011

-My idea needs to progress to being more than just a series of posters.

-Consider another outcome possibly. Or how you are going to present your idea.

-5 to 10 posters apparently won't have enough impact or show I have thought about the effect they will have on my audience.

-A new idea to consider is producing a poster for the 30 day period i have had on this brief, so in effect a poster for everyday of the 1st years 1st month. Im thinking they could be a series of 30 A6 framed posters that could be mounted on the studio wall or in the lobby on the way to the GD department.

Speaking From experience...Developing my Ideas

After speaking to John on Thursday i wanted to jump straight in and start produce something more visual than just collecting research. I started by taking the one message that i thought was most important and had helped to guide me through my first year of graphic design that being some of the first words we heard in a lecture on Day one. I thought this would be a good starting point for my project to progress.

FROM THIS POINT ONWARDS GRAPHIC DESIGN IS YOUR LIFE

 

I started by hand drawing my lettering onto an a1 sheet to scan in and work from. Aligning all the letters was a difficult task and i found my end result wasn't as accurate as I'd hoped.

Variations of my hand drawn Type;

I wasnt to happy with these variations because the letters just didnt seem to flow as well as i wanted them to. 

I took the quote i was using and started using a simple typeface such a Futura to play about more accurately with my layout.

After hand drawing a few Ideas on paper i then started to produce my design on illustrator.

Here are a few of my final Ideas.

I am quite happy with my end result at the moment, especially in blue. The message is direct and communicates a valuable point, however it still needs tweaking. i think it was a bad idea to use paper textures as this is become more and more generic everyday.

Speaking From experience....Other Quotes

A series of other quotes I have Collected from online sources to help me to gain ideas on what theme i want my quotes to relate to.

http://www.graphicdesignblog.org/graphic-design-quotes/

http://www.1designsource.com/quotes.html

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

— Charles Eames

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.

— Brian Reed

There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence.

— Massimo Vignelli

People ignore design that ignores people.

— Frank Chimero

I’ve always held to the belief that the practice of creating compelling graphic design occurs not by employing the principals of a democracy, but rather, that of a monarchy.

— Thomas Vasquez

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

— Joe Sparano

Every designers’ dirty little secret is that they copy other designers’ work. They see work they like, and they imitate it. Rather cheekily, they call this inspiration.

— Aaron Russell

The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.

— Marty Neumeier

Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.

— Scott Stevenson

Design is where science and art break even.

— Robin Mathew

Good design goes to heaven; bad design goes everywhere.

— Mieke Gerritzen

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.

— Bruno Munari

Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.

— Robert L. Peters

Design is the search for a magical balance between business and art; art and craft; intuition and reason; concept and detail; playfulness and formality; client and designer; designer and printer; and printer and public.

— Valerie Pettis

Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.”

— David Craib

Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.

— Juan-Carlos Fernàndez

Don’t design for everyone. It’s impossible. All you end up doing is designing something that makes everyone unhappy.

— Leisa Reichelt

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.

— Ellen Lupton

The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture.

— Jeff Smith

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.

— Edward Tufte

Design is intelligence made visible.

— Alina Wheeler

Math is easy; design is hard.

— Jeffrey Veen

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order.

— Victor Papanek

Design trends online change more often than the wind, and slightly less often than my socks.

— Suleiman Leadbitter

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.

— Paola Antonelli

Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.

— Tate Linden

Design is not the narrow application of formal skills, it is a way of thinking.

— Chris Pullman

Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

— Fabien Barral

Design is about making things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter them.

— Matt Beale

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

— Steve Jobs

I’m convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.

— Carrie Phillips

Behavioral design is all about feeling in control. Includes: usability, understanding, but also the feel.

— Don Norman

Good design must be defined by appropriateness to audience and goals, and by its effectiveness, not by its adherence to Swiss design or the number of awards it wins.

— Drew Davies

Being a famous designer is like being a famous dentist.

— Noreen Morioka

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.

— Robert L. Peters

It’s art if can’t be explained.
It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation.
It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation.

— Wouter Stokkel

You can’t do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously.

— Wim Crouwel

I love the comment, “You must love designing for a living.” At that point I usually start to laugh or break into uncontrollable tears.

— Andrew Lewis

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.

— Tom Peters

Designers have a dual duty; contractually to their clients and morally to the later users and recipients of their work.

— Hans Höger

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

— Milton Glaser

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

— Sir Alec Issigonis

A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.

— Leo Frankowski

For me, design is like choosing what I’m going to wear for the day - only much more complicated and not really the same at all.

— Robynne Raye

Design is a means toward accomplishing the end goals of serving markets and generating profits. Furthermore, design is an element in social responsibility. Good design allows “form to complement performance.” The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: how they work is how they should look.

— Thomas F. Schutte

Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.

— Colin Wright

Many desperate acts of design (including gradients, drop shadows, and the gratuitous use of transparency) are perpetuated in the absence of a strong concept. A good idea provides a framework for design decisions, guiding the work.

— Noreen Morioka

I would show my my jobs to my mother, and she would always say the same thing: “That’s nice dear.” And then she would say, “Did you write it?” or “Did you do the drawing?” or “Did you take the pictures?” I’d always answer “no,” then I realized the problem. My answer was then, “I made this happen. It’s called design.”

— Brian Webb

Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.

— Dan Brown

Technology over technique produces emotionless design.

— Daniel Mall

I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.

— Mark Boulton

A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.

— Brenda Laurel/p>

The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.

— Massimo Vignelli

If design isn’t profitable, then it’s art.

— Henrik Fiskar

Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because that idea wasn’t theirs.

— Frank Chimero

A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words.

Speaking From Experience...Questionaire

After getting a few responses from certain members of the class I continued my investigation by asking people what they thought was the most important thing they have learnt whilst being at the college. I designed the questionnaire Below and handed it around the course to get some other responses.

Responses:

Michael Mooney: "Look Onward at what everyone else is doing and do the opposite, your finished resolution may be shit but at least it will be different to everyone elses and you will be recognized for your alternate approach."

Charlotte Bourke: "Talk to people about your ideas- other people will think of something you havent"

Sam Edwards: "Its Important to keep a balance between socializing and graphic design"

Mitchel Weaver: "It's not a part time job, You have to wake up everyday and be creative."

Ben Harwood: KISS "Keep it simple and stupid."

Charlie Crosby: "Reward yourself outside of college depending on what you've done in college."

Sadie Thompson: "Blog, blog then blog again." "Start blogging from day one, learn to enjoy it because you're going to be doing a lot of it! Embrace and learn from criticism."

Max Gregory:"Don't be afraid of doing things wrong, this is the key to progression."

Yafet Bizrat: "For any language to exists, there must be an agreement between a group of people."

Speakinbg From Experience...Questionaire

I want to work my project around peoples advice after experiencing their first year on Graphic Design. I want to gather short snappy quotes that would be inspirational to read whilst at the same time being typographically engaging and visually intriguing.

To gather my research on quotes/pieces of advice I could use I sent out a couple of posts on the LCA graphic design repping board on facebook to see whether i could get any responses.

Speaking From Experience, Concept, Content, Delivery

In Design Workshop

I tried by removing my the jumper from my illustration as i thought that the head was the strongest part then added some eyes to give the fox a bit of life. I then played around with the images in illustrator looking at different ways of arranging them with my type.

I am happy with my final result, however I found it really hard to get into using In design in comparison to understanding Photoshop and illustrator. Definitely need more practice. I tried to keep the layout basic but still visually interesting, so that the readers eyes are caught by the image in the middle then follow the text around the rest of the page.