Business Cards

As the degree show approaches I have been collecting and ordering the various elements I need to make my exhibition. One of the things I ordered were my business cards, which arrived today. I had been investigating into business cards for some time as they have been on my to do list for months, but finally ordered them last week from uk.moo.com.

I have used MOO a few times before, most recently for my postcards, where some of the prints had been smudged. However, when they arrived today they were neatly packaged and the print quality was really clear and vibrant. I possibly went a bit overboard and ordered 200 so there would be plenty for the show.

I wanted the design to be simple but incorporate things that gave an indication of my style. The design is simple and clean but includes elements of texture; a prominent feature in my own work.

You can get 10% off your next order at uk.moo.com by using this code.

Found Designs

Since I got my iPhone earlier this year I have been taking photos all the time. I never normally carry a camera with me or even profess to be good at photography, but being able to take a photo of a great piece of typography or illustration can be a great reference for future design projects.

I find things that I like everywhere; on parcels, in Tesco, the Frosties box even inspired some design work for this project. This is a few of the examples I found while out.

Brit Project

In my experience as a graphic designer I have learnt that there will always be one project that you dislike, no matter how much you do to it will always be "the one you don't like". This project is that one I don't like.

The project itself is about making and breaking stereotypes of Brits and looking at the achievements of British people in the field of sport, music and engineering. At the start of the project I had a vague idea of what I wanted but I knew it was going to be typographic based as that was a part of my portfolio that wasn't developed.

As I got into the research and development everything was going great until it came to designing; nothing worked. For ages nothing was working. Until eventually I pulled it together into something just in time for the hand in. Although I don't like the project, it was a useful exercise it experimentation, research and refinement (which I did loads of). Hopefully this project will act as a lesson to myself to stop and come back to something instead of just trying everything to get it to work without thinking about what it means.

Haven Brochure

I have been really bad at updating my blog lately because of the run up to final third year deadlines. Later on today I will be handing in my double credit module for which I did two briefs; British brief, which I will blog about later, and The Haven brief which I have mentioned before here.

This is one of the artefacts I produced for this project; an information brochure. The Haven is a small breast cancer charity that offers a complementary service of treatments. The real issues they were having were not being able to contact the relevant target audience, which was not helped by poorly designed information packs. As part of this brief I redesigned an element of their information pack and created some illustrations.

Haven Illustrations Developed

A few weeks ago I mentioned the development of some illustration work needed for my charity project, found here. I felt like the illustrations needed some editing to give the project more "personality" as the images seemed flat and lifeless.

After purchasing my new toy; a bamboo graphics pad last week, I have been working on the project to give the illustrations more life. The pad was fairly easy to get used to in terms of vector based drawing, and after some practise the sketches were slowly improving.

It is essential that the illustrations added to the project as opposed to being purely aesthetic, allowing the reader to understand the content. Each object represents an area of the brochure; from diet and exercise to support, all with an accompanying illustration. To give the project a tactile nature I scanned in various items of clothes to insert into the initial sketches; I used anything with an interesting texture, found, stolen or borrowed. These are a few of the designs in progress.

Letterpress

Letterpress is an old technique that requires a lot of time to produce a successful print. I have attempted letterpress a number of times, a few weeks ago I went along to another workshop as experiment for another project. The effect achieved by manual letterpress far surpasses any digital replication, so it's a great addition to a final piece to reflect the time and consideration taken over a project.

Letterpress does require a lot of patience (which I don't have) but the effect produced is worth the time taken. The experimentation shown here is the initial practise which will hopefully develop into a cleaner designs.

Finished Ruban

I've spoken about "Ruban" a few times in other posts that i've done (here and here) explaining the concept and what it requires. I really loved doing this project because it was inspired by some amazing design pieces I had seen in IDN, and it was great to actually do something similar myself.

The project was planned to last two months, but due to other commitments, as both myself and Abbie are final year Graphic Design students, the project only lasted one month. However, in that short time we managed to produce a range of pieces which can be used in our portfolios.

I would like to add the project to my portfolio and present it in a similar way to the work on Society 6, as a graphic illustration project. These are my final four images that I came up with.