Former Students Lecture

Two of the BA Graphic Design's former students came in today to speak to us about what they have been doing since graduating last year as well as telling us about their experiences of the course itself. They both won awards at the end of year exhibitions and were entered into the 'New Blood' section of D&AD.
They told how important it was to get into college as much as you can as you could miss important information and being around other people is paramount to improving ideas you couldn't do on your own.
As they both got chances to exhibit their work in London, it gave them the chance to build relationships and contacts with people and show their talents to thousands of people.
Out of 2000 students Dan and Steve won one of the 40 awards given out which is a tremendous achievement.
This led to numerous offers of work which surprisingly they turned down. They explained they would rather not work on designing kebab house leaflets forever and would rather work on the bigger things. I respect this as it would be easy to take the money and they have decided against this.

They told us that, due to them always being together and doing the Colleges promotional work, they had received some negative comments and jealousy. This led to some bitchiness because it was always ' Ste and Dan '. This wasn't a problem for them because they were getting slagged of for doing good work. I have experienced this myself to some extent this year also.
Instead of accepting the jobs they were offered they decided to go on some placements with the likes of Thoughtful and The Chase and currently both are on placements with Mark Design and McCann Erickson.
They have had some poor interviews with people who have no appreciation for real design and they had no interest in working for these people
With so many people graduating each year from Graphic Design in the North West, Dan and Steve's advice to us was to build up contacts with people, continually improve your portfolio, enter competitions and try your best.

The talk was a very interesting insight into life after graduating as we often see fully fledged companies and don't see how people start from scratch.

Double G Studios Lecture

On Friday Grant Gilbert, of Double G Studios, gave a lecture on his life from National Diploma Graphics at Stockport College to the position he is in today. After college he went onto do a BA Graphic Design degree in Birmingham and from there he went onto work at Planet 24 for 3 years where he designed the phone and fax number boards. Not the most inspiring job but you have to start somewhere and make lots of tea!

He then moved to Channel 4 for 3 years where he worked with a bigger budget and on the C4 identity using lots of film and video. After this he had a couple of jobs including working at Attic in New York but 8 years ago he decided to be freelance as he likes to make new relationships and not be told what to do! Double G Studios is pretty much only himself but it sounds more substantial to clients and it makes it easier to recruit other workers but rather than sitting at home doing nothing he likes to sit within companies. At C4 Grant designed a lot of the idents and was responsible for getting lighting, cameramen, body suits and neons etc. He used a tent some lights and neon tubing along with some people to create a real eye catching flowing video and showed Graphic Design doesn't need to be flat. It can be Live Action. He has also done a lot of work involving More4.

More 4's logo was designed by Spin and Grant was told to bring it to life and add colour. After lots of wild developments and animations the result was simply the green logo on a plain black background. This reinforced his idea that Simple design is the best. 

Grant likes to take snippets out of the brief and exploit them. This can be seen when he was commisioned by the BBC to rebrand BBC1. The current logo was a red box with BBC1 in which was went to symbolise rhythm and movement but looked boring and not special enough for the BBC. He sought to make the logo softer and show the unity and coming together that the BBC want to achieve. He came up with the idea of circles which show unity and set about looking at how it could be used within a typeface and the idents. He decided to make the circle 'O'  in 'one' the centre of the screen. When making the logo they tried lots of typefaces but weren't happy so they had one designed specially by Font Smith which needed to be happy and rounded but not to modern. Then the points to be considered were how it looked with circles and how big to have it on the screen. This ended up taking 2 weeks itself! Also the Off Air promotion had to be looked at with posters etc. The ident circles were created using mountain bike circles,ring a roses and an animation of swimming hippo's aswell as a lot of others. The swimming hippo's caused a lot of controversy when they were highlighted when it was found out the BBC had used 1.2 million pounds in doing the rebrand and taking 10 months. Grant found this funny as the best projects get the most complaints.

Grant was also heavily involved in the rebranding of Channel 5.

He tells us that 70% of the time he is pitching work which can often be for free and get work mainly by word of mouth and repeat work. As the top TV companies all work together at the top his name gets around quickly so their isn't any rivalry or contracts. His favourite job was working with the Neons for Channel 4 as it all came together perfectly and he was left to his own devices.

Grant is currently a Foreman for the judges of the D&AD Commercial Awards and chooses the people who should judge this year's competition.

Age Concern Age Discrimination Posters

Last year I designed 6 posters for a campaign against age discrimination for Age Concern. This year my designs were used in Age Concerns newsletters in the UK. These newsletters went out to thousands of people and promoted NE-Design to a wider audience. As Age Concern is a good cause I let them use my work for free and luckily my design was used on the first page. I was also asked to come up with some more ideas to help with their future campaigns.

Crown Paints Trade Fair Poster

Recently I was commisioned by Crown Paints to create a poster advertising a themed trade day. In this case it was a French Trade Day. These days are held to drum up business and develop relationships with local businesses and decorators. I used old style fonts and block colours to represent the style I wanted to create. Luckily Crown loved it as it's a departure from the usual text based adverts they do normally. The day was a big success and I look forward to working with Crown in the future.

AWC Engineering Website and Identity

I am currently working, through my business NE-Design, on a series of projects with a large recycling engineering company called AWC Engineering. We are working together to develop a re-brand of the corporate identity, new stationery, business cards and a totally re-designed website. These are ongoing projects which are almost finished and will be in place soon. I have also designed the vinyls which are put on all new machines and sent off all over the UK aswell as abroad to China etc. In the future we are looking to design brochures and datasheets to help AWC gain a bigger hold of the market than they have at the moment.

DreamCreators Identity

A little while ago I designed a logo and stationery for a brand new web solutions business called DreamCreators. I now work with them for website hosting and web coding aswell as me doing logos etc for them. The idea for the colours and the logo came from the words dream and creator which lend themselves to fairytales which have angels and devils in them. The 'o' becomes a halo but it is highlighted red. This shows the angel and devil. The D & C when turned on its side with a serif font created a character/ business mascot of a devil. The business is currently going from strength to strength and we have worked together on a potentially massive School Webmail Solution which will be on a Separate post.

Tal Rosner Lecture

This afternoon I attended a lecture by the BAFTA Award winning Tal Rosner. He has worked with Animate TV and Channel 4 aswell as a number of other high profile companies.

Tal started off doing the same course as I am currently doing which is BA Graphic Design and realised he had a real knack for movement and rhythm which then lead him onto the translation of his graphic design to moving image. His Doppelganger video uses all aspects and views of trains, their destinations and stations in a unique way that turns them all into totally abstract imagery. As with all animations, he says, it has to have a beginning-middle and end and tell the viewer a story. He is completely self-taught with After-Effects as he likes to be in control and not have interference. His believes adjustment = intrusion.

Some of the projects he has worked on include Stravinsky- Concerto for 2 pianos which combined the elements of groundbreaking techno animation with the classical tones of the piano and they work well together. In his animations some of the backgrounds change whilst the foreground stays the same and vice versa which has inspired some of my ideas for my chosen animation elective. He has also worked on the title sequences for the hit TV series 'Skins'. Tal created 72 different versions before settling on the final film. This included ' secret frames' Rebellious images thrown in that wont be seen unless paused and looked at closely.

Tal liked to work with a grid system where if something goes to the right it will come back to the left etc so his work always had a certain structure. He also used repetition and tiling to give effect of zooming out and pattern. He told us about the technique of grading which is the editing of an already edited film where colours can be changed. Apparently a difficult process. Skins second series became more mature so the animation had to coincide with this and the film came out of the letters S.K.I.N.S. Tal is currently working on the 3rd series.

Tal was commisioned by Channel 4, along with 5 other film-makers to create an experimental video. He was inspired by this poem :

Calm down

what happens

happens mostly

without you

by Josef Albers

He is also influenced by 1905-1935 design and modernism and believes that this is making a comeback aswell as the Bauhaus and visualising music. He can come up with a concept at any time and create it without a brief which could then be used 2 years down the line.

Overall, I think his work is of a good standard and inspiring when it comes to doing my own animations and it shows the levels I will need to be looking at to succeed in industry.

As I have posted before, as a group we had to come up with some concepts and ideas to raise the profile of 'innocent' drinks. Luckily one of mine was chosen to be developed and turn into visuals.

These are some rough ideas of what they will look like. The idea is that the cap seal becomes a halo because of its shape and colour. It doesn't have to be changed so it wouldn't cost anything to produce and a very cheap, tacky advertising campaign could work very well for it. So my ideas are very cheap, basic and straight to the point. Hopefully they will get used at some point in the future. Above you can also see another idea I had about losing your innocents which can then lead onto maintaining, protecting, pleading ...your innocents which could be a nice campaign.

MadFest Club logo

Tonight I was asked by a club promoter if I could come up with a logo design for a new club night in Leeds called 'Madfest'. I needed to produce some ideas very quickly as he will be looking at these tomorrow and then I can hopefully design a full quality, final developed logo. I will put the logos up when I get chance.

Truth Lecture

This morning we went to see a lecture by the design company 'Truth'. They are made up of just two people, both of whom used to work for McCann Erickson which is a major worldwide advertising organisation. They decided to do their own thing after some of the jobs coming in weren't what they really wanted to be doing. Over the years Darren from Truth has designed many different fonts that have been used in famous publications and campaigns such as the masthead for Loaded Magazine. A selection of these fonts are Berliner- created 1996, Sodium - influenced by German Design, Bad Angel-experimental and gothic, Mechanic Gothic - best selling font, Nitrogen & Aggregate- both have 1 distinguishing letter, Amplifier-especially made for David Potts Album cover.

They have worked with a number of high profile companies on projects such as: 

AllSports- changing identity to black and white making it less sports cliche. 

Sony- textured credit cards with pearlescent look to highlight the changes Sony create.

First Advice- given 24 hours to complete a logo to go onto Man City shirts next day.

British Council- had to research a lot of colours as to not offend anyone in different countries.

Christies Embrace Mark- produced for free for the good cause.

Authentic Food Company- logo using stamped passport idea to show ethnicity and worls food pictogram.

Durex- packaging for sex aids which was more user friendly and easy to open as well as being discreet.

As Truth are quite a small company they have to commission a lot of work to other people. This, they say, is a good thing as it creates good relationships and can allow you to produce better work as you can choose the best people to do each specific job rather than producing an average result by yourself. They also obviously noticed a big difference when it came to suppliers and prints etc. Everything has to be done yourself when you are in business on your own and you cant just go to the cupboard to get sum pens and paper out. You also have to speak to the customers directly which can be quite hard as Truth explained. For example you hand something to a client that is red. The Client comes back and says I don't like red. You then have to explain why you have done it red and show the reasons for your choice to try and talk them around. They suggest we should always keep work that is wrong to compare it and contrast to show people why you have changed it or haven't. Aswell as this Truth say its important to futureproof and make sure any design you do won't be dated for a long time and can easily be updated if needs be.

Truth's philosophy is to 'Keep it Simple' and 'Less is More'

Competition Briefs-Table Tennis

Today we were given four competition briefs to choose from for D&AD and YCN. I have chosen the YCN Anomaly brief to work on as it is an open solutions project. Therefore I am not restricted much and can be as diverse as I like with my ideas. The brief is basically raising the profile of the sport 'Table Tennis' in any way possible and turning once a year players into five times a year players. There a no pre-conceived ideas here so I will be working to a totally blank canvas without a set budget or guidelines. Although not traditional ideas, they still need to be communicated clearly and effectively. For the next couple of weeks I am going to research into Table Tennis and hopefully come up with some good concepts.

Animation

Today I changed my elective subject from typography to animation. I had chosen typography to study at the end of last year and all lessons were already arranged. Last Monday I went into my typography but I realised that it was the wrong thing to do for me at this time. I had also been inspired by Matt Pyke's D&AD lecture which showed all these amazing animations and it's an area I have become increasingly interested in recently. We have been put into groups and I have been paired with James Clancy. The brief is to create an animated titles sequence. Myself and James have been looking at music and car videos for inspiration so far as these areas interest us and we think we can come up with some good visual work. At the moment we are collecting research and sketching out ideas. Next we will have to come up with a storyboard and then go and get our film and images before we put it all together in an animation