Summer week 4

1. I have purchased a Groupon offer for an App course  it costs £45 instead of £499.....I need an introduction to this App world even if its just to understand the context more for designing pages for Apps.

This is the screen shot of the course its all online/using PDFS and there is an exam at the end.  I have said I want to do a little coding as I dont want to be come an expert at coding.  the more I understand the online worl the more I realise that there is a whole 'develper' industry out there and I am in a better position offering skills as a designer that coding!

I will keep blogging my progress on my Design practice Blog.

2. Also had a meeting with a Local Dance School in Marsden.  I am planning to design a 'look book'/ Prospectus for new students.  I plan to use this for one of the projects going into year three.

3. Another idea for a project is taking the Graphic Design/Album cover/Photographer research from Collection 100 and the After Effects module and creating an map/ infographic of all the research.  It was something i considered in Year one however the project became unmanageable with the timescales involved and I ended up focussing on Barney Bubbles.

4.  An evolving idea is researching the Banks/Finicial crisis to gain a better understanding of the impact of this on the British public... I found this competition brief on Occupy Design (through Twitter!)

http://occupydesign.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/exposethe1percent.pdf

5.  Twitter has been a revelation in terms of opening up an on tap source of daily inspiration.  I found this link to some ideas for Personal Briefs from Jonathan Barnbrook. 

http://www.edu.barnbrook.net/studentbriefs.html 

6.. Also some thought provoking reading about Art and Design free working, education and Critical Studies: 

http://carrotworkers.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/pwb_alternative-curriculum.pdf

I think at LCA we do address most of what is addressed in this however we could do with joining the dots more....perhaps considering the Crtical Studies with richard in the context of PPD and the real world of Design work...maybe get some debates going about this and considering the world of Internships/work experience.  John and Jane always encouraged us to charge for our work however it is disfficult when you first step into the Design world and you just want some experience.

Summer week 3

Hooray! YCN feedback

Summer week 2

Visiting D&AD New Blood....

Excellent day in London the highlight being a visit to Design Bridge, a fantastic Branding Agency in London.  Fortunately I went online and booked on this visit before going down as all the Studio visist were full.

We were invited to a meeting room where we met Christian Bird and some other members of the Design Bridge team.  Design bridge have studios in London, Amsterdam, Singapore and Mexico.

They presented some of their work and also passed around some Bottle packaging they designed.  The real highlight for me was on one of the style boards for The Matliki Coconut Liquer included the Ian Dury & the Blockheads Albums which Barney Bubbles had designed.

I actually asked who was inspired by Barney bubbles to which Christan said he was his favourite designer!

Tips from Design Bridge:

• Really get under the skin of the brand
• Feed your head
• Rich use of language and storytelling - Avoid cliches
• The power and meaning of things
• Search the archives/history
• Think about Emotional connections 
• Tactile qualities
• Build in personality
• Can get a job through competitions
• Ideas
• Be yourself

Leeds College of Art at D&AD

I only had one day in London and as a result found D&AD quite intense to say the least!  Some really inspiring work and great to see the varied approaches to exhibiting work.  Great to have tactile stuff such as books

These were the photos I took:

Summer Week 1

I have decided rather than create a blog for every occurence over the summer I will write a weekly blog not least because its more achievable.


What a fantastic week to start the summer:


YCN Commendation 


The Heinz Salad Cream collaborative brief has been selected for a Commendation so that means Kirsty and I go to an Awards ceremony on London.  Even better Claudia and Chloe were commended to for their Peacocks brief.

YCN Awards

The End of year show


Great to see the third year's 'turn it on' for their end of year show.  These are some of my highlights sorry the quality is not fantastic as they were take with my i-Phone.

Open publication - Free publishing - More lca

My second year results

Really happy that the hard work has paid off - 33.33% of the way to a First.

Meeting with The Space People

Meeting with Michael Freemantle at 10 Associates

Meeting with Janet Hagger at The Loftspace in Marsden

PPD presentation

Open publication - Free publishing - More lca

Spreading the word/ networking

In addition to the traditional methods such as websites, Social Networking and Creative Cvs I have also been using contacts I have made over the years.  Potential leads I have for some Freelance work include:


1.  XTG Hairdressing


I have known my hairdresser Faye for ten years.  XTG have had their current logo and premises for about six years and would like a rebrand.  I have offered to rebrand them and see this as a potential live brief to start in September at Level 6.  They are refreshing their premises in January 2013 so the timing works.  I had my first meeting with the partners who are three women.  This will eb a challenging client as I have three partners to agree designs with and also each is naturally creative due to the industry they are in.


At the first meeting they agreed to email me existing ideas/ aesthtics taht theyc urrently like to give me some Design Direction.


2.  http://www.propermaid.co.uk/index.php

I am contacting this company to discuss potentially designing a logo or some cake packaging.  The owners partnet is an engineer I used to work with at the Council.


3. The Creative Hub


Fred gave me this contact who is based in Marsden close to where I live.  Janet Hagger would like some branding doing for The Creative Hub.

At this stage until I visit The Space people I am unsure of how much time will be available to do any more work over the summer.  Also i want to make a serious dent in the Dissertation research.

Task 6 Spread the word

The web workshops have been useful to a point but I have not had time to apply the skills learnt to a 'live website yet.  I plan to take this forward over the summer. The workshops are in my design practice.


These were some initial scamps I have done:

Workshop with Lorraine

Content for website:

1. Home page - Logo, navigation, key piece of work(image), Name

2. About - navigation, Name, brief summary of design ethos/practice, personal, awards

3. Work - Navigation, images, moving images, Max ten examples, brief details, processes and print methods

4.  Links/inspiration - navigation, link to blog, Tumblr, Behance, collaborators

5. Contact - Navigation, email address, mobile no., linked in profile.

Scamp and feedback

The workshop was informative but also raised some interesting debates about content.  As whilst there are 'rules' to make the website as accessible and simple as possible there is also the element of what makes the design personal and unique.  We tried to convince Mitch he would have to find a way making the navigation stand out maybe by having it on the left.(he had it down in the bottom right corner!).  He wanted to create 'mystery' and interest however Lorraine was saying if you cant find what you want within three seconds the user would lose interest and move on. 

I have brought the Domain name twostringsdesign.co.uk through 123-reg and also the web hosting through one.com

So I did not hold back with contacting studios I have set up a  Cargo webpage.  This has been a useful foundation to actually designing my own website I have had to chose the layout and content I want to put up there.  I have branded the page using the Twostringsdesign logo.


The page is linked here:


This was the first layout template I used:

The images were to large and disappeared off the page.  Also I wasnt happy with the navigation menu as it looked untidy.  I went for a simpler layout with smaller images as below.  The navigation is very simple as you just click on an image or link to see more details

http://cargocollective.com/twostringsdesign

I addition I have a tumblr account and also have started using Twitter mainly to follow studios that I like or want to work with

http://twostringstomybow.tumblr.com/

https://twitter.com/#TWOSTRINGS