Brief 5: Collaboration with Illustrator

For one of my briefs for Extended Practice I had decided to create and brand a shop selling specialist jams, chutneys, honey, oil etc., and after doing my research I had quite a clear vision of the brand. I wanted to find a way of combining the homey comforts that I associate with jam, with an upmarket aesthetic.

A friend of mine, Izzy, who is an illustrator on the Visual Communication course has a very distinct illustrative style, much of it continuous line, and I realised while I was thinking of how I wanted the brand to look, I was thinking of visuals in the exact way that she draws.

I wrote her a brief giving her the flavours and asked if she could draw at least ten images, allowing me to choose the ones I felt worked best.

I found working with Izzy to be really easy as I knew exactly what i wanted and I also had a rough idea of how she would interpret the brief. She worked very quickly and so had a very quick turnaround whenever I had asked her to make some changes to any of the images.

I would enjoy working in a similar fashion in the future, and due to my existing interest in illustration, I would love to work more with illustrators, and given the chance working more with Izzy would be great.

Brief 11: DBA Presentation

Yesterday we presented our concept and branding visuals for Capital North. While we didn't win, I was pleased with how the presentation went, given that we were two group members short. We were able to fill in the gaps and explain Joe's work as well as our own.

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.

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.