Brief Changes

While my work has been steadily progressing since the start of the year, I have found that some of the briefs I set myself may not be entirely appropriate in terms of my portfolio. I had previously thought that I would complete these briefs in order I wrote them to make it easier to keep track of them all, however, I didn't end up doing this and instead jumped into the briefs that I was more excited about doing.

Because of this, by the time I had completed a few of them, I wasn't as keen or excited to do the others. As well as this I actually found that some of the briefs I had written were very similar to each other, and while I found it important to show my design interests in branding, typography and promotions in my briefs, the subjects didn't have to be so similar.

In light of this, I have eliminated some briefs and am working on replacing them with ones more applicable to my practice, which will give me some variation in terms of outcome, for both my submission and my portfolio.

Manifesto Presentation

Leeds Print Festival

Last week I went to the Leeds Print Festival to listen to established designers talk through their knowledge experiences and processes. I listened to a few talks from some designers but the ones that stood out to me were those from Alec Dudson (Intern Magazine) and Ben Freeman (Ditto Press).

Alec Dudson spoke in detail about how he ended up doing editorial design work. I was interested to hear his opinion on the impact the digital age has had on the magazine industry, and how specifically independent magazines have been affected.
He went on to explain his concept for Intern Magazine, and how he based it around the idea of internships, inspired by internships he had previously done. He has turned the idea of interns on it's head, paying people in that community to exhibit their work, and essentially giving interns recognition for their work which they otherwise would not even be paid for.

Ben Freeman has previously come to give talks to our course and on our methodology. To be honest I was quite confused by the work we did with him and didn't entirely understand the idea of it. Because of this I was quite keen to hear him again, perhaps gaining some clarification on the work we did with him.
Similar to the talk he gave us, he went through his background and how he unexpectedly ended up where he is now, and went through the specialisms of his company, most accurately described as a publishing house.

Brief 11: DBA Trains and Taxis

I spoke to the rest of the group before starting my train and taxi designs, and we had decided that while Leo would work on a new logo, we still wanted to have these silhouette style shapes on the logo. From this, I thought it would be interesting for the trains and taxis to reflect each individual city that they ran in.

I found some images of the skylines from each city, and outlined them:

It was difficult to follow the skylines exactly due to the quality of the photos I was using, but as this was a proposal, I didn't think it was necessary for the outline to be totally accurate, as, if it went into effect, new photos would be taken to do this.

Hull:

Liverpool:

Manchester:

Leeds:

I used a vector outline of the trains and taxis for the mockups, as oppose to working from an image of a real train and editing the work onto it as I felt it wouldn't give the same sort of impact.

The layout options for this design were limited as it has to be landscape, and to make sense on the train it would have to sit at the bottom. I extended the length of it below, but this meant that the tops of some buildings would be cut off.

Instead, I added a platform at the end of the image that would extend to the end of the train

After doing this I also decided to add another larger platform extending from the door as this would effectively incorporate the logo into the silhouette, in my opinion allowing it to stand out more than is the logo fell on the white space.

I used the same aesthetic for the taxi designs, as I had proposed to the group that we incorporate a system of tying the trains and taxis together, perhaps offering a discounted taxi fair with the train tickets and vice versa.

I thought that this would prompt the public to use this mode of transport, and make the brand hugely recognisable around these cities and across much of the north.

Leo had finished the logo and sent it to me to incorporate into the designs.

Leo had not done any negatives for this logo, so I concluded it was best to eliminate the silhouette platform by the door of the carriage. I also worked on altering the colours of the designs to better fit with the logo.

Final designs:

The final designs we chose were the ones in which the colours worked best, as the silhouette itself is quite a striking image. The colours of the silhouette were reflected in the colour used for that city in the logo.

Brief 11: DBA Crit

On Monday our group met in the morning to gather the logo ideas we had worked on last week.

My logo:

The group was keen to use the idea for my logo, but it was a unanimous conclusion that the S shape was slightly out of place when presented in conjunction with the other letters, which as a whole were much more angular. Leo spent some time trying to find other options for the letter S in this sequence, but given the curved nature of it, it was hard to make it work all together.

While Leo did this, I tried some variations on layout and colour.

I also thought that this logo would work well on a larger scale, so if Capital North were to expand to other big northern cities, this concept could also expand. Below is an example of how other cities could tie in with it, showing the addition of Sheffield, York, Doncaster, Birmingham and Newcastle.

We took my logo to the crit with DBA today to ask them what they thought of the concept, and of how the shapes worked together.

They agreed that it was going to be difficult to make the S work given it's shape, but were keen on the idea of using shapes to represent each city. However, they made the point that it was maybe not necessary to use so many shapes, arguing why have three shapes per city when we could simplify it with one each.

We took this on board and Leo decided to take over the logo designs, and we each assigned ourselves areas to work on over the next few days before meeting again. Leo was to work on the logo, and the environmental aspects of the brand, Joe would do the poster designs, Anna the ticket design, and I planned to to do the train and taxi livery.

Brief 11: DBA

On Monday we were briefed on designing for Capital North, a system of public transport which would run through a few of the big northern cities.

We were to organise ourselves in to groups of four or five so I went into a group with Leo, Joe, Anna and Jake.

Much of our group spent the first couple of days very preoccupied with some other briefs so we decided that over the week we would each come up with some initial logo ideas, and get together again to choose one that we were all in agreement with and we could work from.

I started by playing around with the letters, and finding a way of tying C and N together, and tried some other ways of incorporating the letters of Hull, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool together.

[images]

The idea I decided to develop further was an image based on the negative space of the letters in abbreviations of the names of the cities.

These first versions I found weren't distinct enough and due to the varying shapes of the letters, they didn't fir that well as a series so I tried some other variations on the shapes, only making them slightly recognisable as their letterforms, to try and find ways that would make them fit together.

Below is the combination of shapes I chose to show the rest of the group. The first is for Capital North as a brand in itself, the following are varied logos depending on the city it's in.