No messin...

Over the last few weeks I have been addicted to the Shardlake books by C.J. Sansom, meaning doing anything else has been extremely difficult.

Today me and Claire made the first mock ups for the D&AD brief. We decided (somewhat grudgingly at first) to return to the idea of 'believe' and 'lie'. Heres what we have done. I'm quite pleased with them (the white spaces at the bottom are for a logo and maybe some kind of a strapline)





The 'lie' would be cut out of the bottom one, so that you could see through the letters.



Here is the identity that we came up with, its based around the asterisk (claire's idea)

I started making a typeface before christmas. It was based on the type from crumpled up supermarket receipts. I got about as far as 'r' and gave up, because I think that grunge typefaces are a bit stupid (if you want distressed type you should distress it yourself). The other day I decided that I might as well finish what I started. So anyway, here it is. If there are any first year national diploma students out there, this one is for you (I used to be all about grunge type faces in the first year of my national diploma).



I also made a really simple typeface out of squares that I used for my website (which I'm now changing). I think that this typeface could work well if I put some more work into it.



Oh yeah, good news. I got short listed for the End of Year Show Promo competition. Both of my ideas got shirt listed, meaning that out of the the 3 people that got short listed, I'm 2 of them. So yeah, I'm pretty pleased with that.

Thats about it for now.

x

The hairs on my chinny chin chin...

You may need to give it a minute to get up to full speed

The competition is hotting up

I have spent the last week or so working on two competition briefs. The first being the Ogilvy Brief for the D&AD competition that I'm working on with Claire - check out our blog. We have to promote the idea of listening instead of just hearing, using only copy. We have kind of being going round in circles, but we finally decided on our concept a week or so ago. Our concept is chinese whispers, so we have been looking at the way that the truth can become distorted through rumors.

The first think that I started investigating was how the word 'lie' is part of the word 'believe'.




I did this, however I think that is is really tacky, and I'm sure something similer will have been done before.

So I started looking at the term 'grapevine', which apparently originated during the American Civil War.

One of the first things that people think of when they hear 'grapevine' is that song that Marvin Gaye sang - "Heard it through the grapevine, not much longer will she be mine....", and I thought 'but what if he heard wrong?' I think that it would be good for the copy to be written from Marvin Gaye's girlfriend's point of view. It would go something like this:



It would work both ways - he's misunderstood that she is going to dump, and she has misunderstood that he's not gay, his name is Gaye.

I also thought that the campaign could be called 'The Grapevine Campaign'(I've just realised that I spelled it campaigne...). Here is an initial logo design:



The other competition that I've been working on is to design the art college end of year show promo stuff. It has to fit in with the other promo work that The Consult does. The deadline was yesterday, and they announce the designs that have been shortlisted on Thursday. If I get shortlisted I have to make a short presentation, and then the winner is announced in April (I think).

I started doing one design, then decided to do another, but finished them both and entered both of them (cos ya never know).

Idea 1

This is the Private View postcard. I wanted to make something that could be used as a stand alone piece, but would also advertise the show. I tried to show the hard work that goes into the end of year show.


I simplified the imagery down on the poster for the Public View, to a bleeding pencil (if this idea wins, which it probably wont, i want to retake the photos because they are rubbish.)

Idea 2

This is the postcard for the Private View. I wanted to explore how far I could take the type layout, yet keep it readable. I think that this looks quite good, and it really forces the reader to engage with it.

This is the Public View poster, which is essentially the same thing but simplified down so that it can be read quicker.

Fingers crossed, I could really do with winning £500....

Joel suggested I check out Vince Frost, which I just have done, you should do the same - frostdesign.com.au

I presume that this is the piece of work that Joel was talking about:



Not Bad, eh?

So...yeah...

I seem to have been working constantly yet don't feel like I've achieved much.

I've mainly been working on my DVD interface. I have tried to 'liven it up' a bit my adding more colour and more doodles, and i think it looks much better, and is more childish.

Heres a couple of screen grabs.




Heres the working intro



and a couple of transitions between 'pages'





My website isn't really going too well. I'm having issues with Dreamweaver, but hopefully it wont take too much longer to get up. I think that I've decided that I don't like webdesign too much.

Me and Merlin are going to enter the competition to design the promotional material for the college end of year show.

Here is an initial idea (it needs a lot of work, but hopefully you can tell what I'm trying to do). I was thinking about the vast amount of work that goes into peoples final major project.


I think that it could be really interesting and would hold peoples attention - if i did it well enough and if the copy describing how the various pens broke was funny enough. However, it may be difficult to make it say 'end of year exhibition'.

Thats about it. You should checkout www.jamphat.com/rap. Merlin showed me it, its really funny. It describes itself as 'rap represented in mathematical charts and graphs'. Its the only time I've ever wished that I knew more about hiphop...