The Teapot Lighthouse

On Thursday, I went to Real Projects like normal; but this day was not like all the others, in fact it was a lot better due to a few additional activities. Firstly I get in to be confronted with wire-framing 2 websites of which I needed to show 3 pages from each; this in context was a lot easier than the afternoon.

Upon coming back from lunch I’m told that someone from Event was coming in for a catch up on the work produced; this immediately became quite frightening but exciting at the same time as I have not had any involvement with clients before, and then I get told that I will just be sitting in on the meeting to see what it is like, ‘wipes brow’ with sigh of relief that I’m just watching.

Change of plan, we get in to the meeting early as the client has turned up, we get into the meeting area and to begin with I’m asked to present My work to the guy without any additional input from the team, to be fair it was my design and I can explain it a lot better than the guys at Real Projects but, it threw me off. AFter the 10 seconds of shock I get into the pitch; which went really well, I pointed out the logo that I liked, the client agreed, I then presented the 2 colour-way boards and the general consensus was that version two was the better version and that he liked the yellow and green combination.

The logo is now almost signed off as either the yellow or yellow and green version in the sleeker fonts.

Continuing on from this I went through the corporate style website as the other one had not been spec-ed up. The layout was very simple and the content was basic at this stage as we have not received any of the actual info; so I have to make up snippets of text as I very much dislike ‘Greek’ as placeholders. As I say, the websites are very basic and with minimal colours, shapes style and information but the layout is there at this initial stage of the design.

On the home page you have a summary of the website, this includes a large image of the event and some snippets of whats to come; on the Video page you have a simple 2 column layout with the video window on the left and the information on the right & the Teachers page is mainly text-based but I wanted to make the entire website visual so I have implemented an images column on the right.

The way in which you identify the current page is by the coloured bar that runs down the side of the navigation bar on the left. Although I could not show the client the fun site I’ll upload a snippet of this for you to see the idea.

Unattended the exhibition with my Girlfriend, Kirsty Bell who was one of the artist on show, her piece “Where’s the Great” featured 3 cup and saucers made from fabrics placed on plinths, 2 of which were knocked over; this was the title in action where the point is saying that British heritage is tea and by them being knocked over it represents the fact that we, as a nation have lost the right to use the word Great in Great Britain.

The cups themselves had been crafted beautifully, from the size of the cups to the sticking that visible, the final pieces were very nice to hold but I feel that they weren’t as bold as they could have been in order to take advantage of the space given and the room that they were placed in, bolder, larger cups could have set a striking center piece for all that walked into this area.

Red Tea Cup and Saucer

Blue Patterned Cup and Saucer

Cream Canvas Cup and Saucer

Although attending for these reasons I personally liked:

A big canvas painting that featured a woodland scene; the brush strokes were beautifully crafted and the composition complimented its arrangement – Charles Daborn, who not only provided this painting but was the live music for the evening, the selection of songs and melodies made the event come alive and helped to alleviate the awkward silences that surely would have occurred in such an environment.

A large portrait painting that was photo realistic, where at first glance you can be fooled into thinking that it was a photograph and even on a closer look you feel that your own eyes are tricking you, but it’s not, the painting has been crafted with excellence and precision – Amy Rogers

A large cloth with an architectural piece drawn on with what looks like marker pens and fine liners, the basic shapes that are highlighted by the flourishes of colour and line make this piece one of my favorite as it is about architecture and structure within urban environments – Graeme Crorkin

A collection of small hand sewn images about the blood donations process, I think that this version is very much noteworthy for their honest depiction, design styled look, carefully crafted stitching as well as the way in which all colours have been eliminated to highlight the blood-red in a single frame – Charlotte Carver

A large canvas that has been attacked with different colour paints, that have been highly watered down, the canvas was held up and the paint was dripped down and this created the lines that you see, a huge grid like formation with no coherence but bundles of character and is very pleasing on the eye – Andrew Pointer

A medium landscape painting that can only be described as swirls in flames, the paint had been applied thickly and then with a small blunt object areas had been moved around to create movement which just looked amazing up close as it did from afar – Ruth Stanley

And the most inspiring piece was a pair of larger drinking robots; the idea is amazing the execution was flawless, well almost and the placement caused the robots to have shadows that were just as good as the real metal object. The duo continuously raised the cans to there square mouths before putting it down again ready to repeat the process, which was and definitely will be mesmerizing to all onlookers – Guy Copland

The worst part of the exhibition was the time in which I turned up, this being thirty minutes into the private view meant that, on Pancake day I was late for the stack of pancakes that were on offer, the carrots didn’t really make up for this but it was a nice snack none the less. The event went really well and the turn out was a lot more than expected, which meant that in places at times there was more people to art work and thus very hard to manoeuvre the gallery space.

On a side note, the drinks set up before the doors open looked like art work on their own.

Today is the first run of the Poetry Clinic here at the Norwich University College of the Arts, a scheme that gets people involved with other courses and to enhance peoples literacy skills.

Summary

As you walk through the door you are greeted with a messy, studio filled with objects that have been collected, in the far corner there is a fellow student dress up like a typical secretary, with laptop, filing tray and the standard grey folders that have the doctors notes in. As you sit there filling in the very brief form you can hear the doctor with patients as there is not a door between the waiting area, the place with a few red chairs that promote you to sit up straight, for fear of back injury.

Once you are called up you go into the doctor’s room and start to explain your symptoms, real or made up and the doctor will talk to you about things so that there is a diagnostic so that the specific medical treatment can be applied, in my case these were “Poetry Pills” which contained 2 short poems which are charming and somewhat enlightening.

The experience is worth the 30 minute wait and the idea is very well executed, despite the lack of proper organisation, and there is going to be additional sessions which will include alternative prescriptions, Poetry Tape, Poetry Bandage, Poetry Plasters, Poetry Pills and for those moments that no one wants, Poetry Blue Pills. I will be attending additional sessions when they become available with the thoughts that the layout and structure will be improved past this

It’s that time of the week again where I pretend to be a ‘real’ designer; where I’m actually in charge of a project and my opinion counts for something that might affect some Norfolk teenagers, and inspire a new generation of children/ adults to visit galleries.

In my last post I uploaded a version of the logo that I’m working on, but I now have the actual version submitted to the client and a new version created out of the response.

The 2 versions shown here are the original (top), and remake (above).

I personally believe that the original version is better due to the bolder ChunkFive font and the combination of two script fonts in the word “Faith”; whereas the revision has a sleeker more contemporary look that has a similar weight among the 2 key words. When the logo is ‘finally’ approved by the entire panel of judges then the branding commences along with the website.

Currently I am working at Real Projects, a Norwich Based agency, where I am in charge of “the Art of Faith” branding, an exhibition happening later on in the year. So far I have spent a full day in the studio working on this project as well as being inducted into the way in which the agency works; a similar way to that of TSO, another one of my Work Placements in Norwich.

During my first day I spent a lot of time working out what the brief was and what the client really wanted, and whether or not they had any specific requirement, the only one mentioned within the design brief was to use the existing colour scheme, which luckily for me is 13 different colours and full use of any tones.

The project is not the most creative, but it is a real design brief that will go live shortly; the main thing that I want to get out of this is the experience of a commercial environment. seeing as the project has been going on for a few weeks now and the initial info has been sent out the logo/ branding had to have initial logo’s done within the first 6 hours of last Thursday, a tall order for student who would normally get a few weeks solid on a similar project, I did come up with 25 proposals but I only felt that one of them was good enough to get through the client, but in the end me and RP decided to send off 2 versions for approval.

Hopefully this logo will be approved on Monday and the website can then be designed accordingly, but from what I have heard NCC like to have input.

Seeing as I only liked one of the two proposals I have only got a thumbnail sample of my favourite to upload, which does mean that the images are low res and colours might not look exactly right. ALL comments are welcome.

Updates to come as I get them.

Previously…

_{{from the Bleeding Cowboys Fury Post}}

I am the designer of the Discord Music Promotions identity and most of their publications, as part of this I have to speak to the manager and get the bands logos….

“Disaster strikes…. why oh why do all the metal & rock bands that are low-key use ‘Bleeding Cowboys’!?

I see that it is a nice font; but they all use letters that have swashes that overlap each other and generally just look shite. Now i mentioned this to one of the bands that sent me the logo, and said that I’d look into their logo and tweak it so that it doesn’t just look like the other half a million that use the same font. This was ok but when I showed them the new one they all voted for the simple ‘just typed‘ typographic logo.

Is this a cult where you HAVE to use that font to be successful in the music business?, NO, be original and think a little about how your first communication with the business world will be, the floods of these sort of logo’s positively annoy the hell out of me. At least use a different version of that letter so that you don’t end up with overlapping grunge beaten up distressed swashes that can and ultimately do end up with irregular images being formed for no reason other than ‘following suit‘ and pure down right laziness.”

Recently I didn’t get time to design the latest poster which you can see on the website, the manager himself designed it, so the level of creativity is not exactly there but I suppose the main info is. I will be getting back into that designing later on.

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I designed and coded Drive with David, which has recently gone live and is doing well, the user interface has had many positive comments.

_{{from Driving Website Update Post}}

“As no one know I have been working on a website for a driving instructor; the template is rather simple and the layout is modern and practical, there is nothing special about the coding either. All this said I feel that the site works really well for its demographic and is really easy to navigate around the site.

Today I found out that it was going to be going live, Yay, but there has been a technical problem which saw the site become a directory list, nay, I have since contacted the owner and now I’m going to try an upload to get the site working to its full potential.”

_{{from Drive with David goes Live Post}}

“The website is now finished and live, from the earlier post you know that I had some designing problems with linked CSS files but I have since, fixed this problem.

My CSS is working, the spell checker has been done and the content is new a web design and not one of those driving websites.”

I have some plans in process for this site as it is seen as my flagship design but I haven’t got round to implementing these yet, so watch this space for updates.

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During the summer of 2009 I spent 3 weeks at Blue Hat Technologies (now the yolk), which are a team of web developers.

_{{from the Work Placement Post}}

“I’d previously met John, managing director, after a web-based lecture earlier in the year; the first few days were, boring where not a lot happened but this was acceptable seeing as I didn’t know any of the web coding that they use so I was on set up and updating email accounts/ blogs for the up coming Twestival.

The Twestival stuff that I was involved with was the lower end of design that I have previously done, the lack of design software was a BIG problem for me, only having internet access and Photoshop CS3 made layouts and text very difficult to work with on the slow machine.

The designs were ‘ok’ and I think that I can take them now and improve on them for the future.

The Best part of the placement was learning some HTML / CSS and web-based information with Tom Clark, one of the guys on the development team; he managed to help me create a fully working, easy to update site using new coding techniques and skill in 3 hours spread over a few days, this for me was fantastic! The site is going to be used once finished and I can’t wait to post a link to it, for the person that reads this. Blue Hat are very good at what they do but I wouldn’t get them to organise a charity event in 3 weeks.”