Friday 15 October 2010
"Significance of Numbers"
Tuesday 11 May 2010
Saturday 8 May 2010
Thursday 6 May 2010
Wednesday 5 May 2010
a few snaps of my final book for my PMP!
Saturday 1 May 2010
an insight to the jist of my book...
I decided to design, photograph and write the equivalent of a self help book for students. To create something that would be read and kept by students, I needed to create something dynamic without seeming pretentious, I included humor to make sure it was something students would read. The reasoning for this book occurred to me after having a series of anxiety attacks at the beginning of university. My current housemate has a real problem with anxiety as well, which can stop her from attending her job and family gatherings that are situated outside of Bournemouth town. Since researching into this a lot more I found a lot more problems students go through that end with students quitting university. Unlike most self help books, every page of this book was written by a student. This book will not save your life. It won’t get you a seventy on your dissertation and it certainly won’t guarantee you that hot piece of ass over the road. What it will do, is make you look at your day as something to savour. Read it and you will realise that the annoying pulsating pain in your neck is not going to be the death of you after all. In an ideal world this book would be found in the welcome pack students receive before stepping up from college to university. My target audience is students ranging from the ages of 18-30. My aim is to help students when they are feeling down, homesick and generally just have too much to handle.
Monday 29 March 2010
Sunday 28 March 2010
D&AD
Thursday 25 March 2010
On the hunt for type
Friday 19 March 2010
Thursday 18 March 2010
Simon Page
VICENTE GARCÍA MORILLO
Thursday 11 March 2010
Wednesday 10 March 2010
Tuesday 9 March 2010
Ok so embarrassingly this made me chuckle
Info graphics
Some blogs that have been inspiring me and filling up my spare time
Wednesday 24 February 2010
Tuesday 23 February 2010
Sunday 21 February 2010
The use of a blog
Friends of Forest Holme
TOP FONTS OF 2009
Metro- D&AD
Folio Talk with Emma from Aquent
Emma then went on to our portfolios, she had examples of good and bad portfolios and it was very clear who then would hire on the basis of just those, every piece of work we do should have a story behind it and we should not be afraid to tell it, this needs to be shown in our folios: what the client wanted, what I persuaded them to have, who was in the team, and what came out from the brief. You must always open your portfolio with a strong piece of work and have a strong piece of work at the end and one in the middle, to keep them interested throughout. This is so that when talking about your work, you can talk positively and with a constant pace in your voice. Another thing Emma made really clear was to never put a piece of work in your portfolio that you don't really like. If you are negative about it in anyway then the person you are showing it to will pick this up also and wonder why you are showing them the work in the first place. Also always ask for feedback after showing the client or potential employer your folios. Emma also mentioned getting your work photographed in context a well as showing the flats, this ads depth to your portfolio and shows the finished outcome or your design.
All in all this talk was brilliant I stayed alert throughout and will be looking forward to seeing emma again next year.
Learning agreement-PROFESSIONAL PROJECT
My proposed vehicle for assessment is to design info graphically, a campaign that will be placed in areas such as universities around the country, towns with students, doctors surgeries etc. I will design and create a map, this map will potentially show the students that are stepping up from college to university and current students how to overcome the problems they encounter during there time at university, whatever their problems maybe. Juggling work and university work, depression, anxiety, shyness, hangovers/drugs and many more tend to be a common problem that near enough every student at some point in time will encounter. This can affect either their grades or their social life at university making them unable to live their lives to their full potential and achieve their goals. My aim is to give students a map of how to overcome and deal with these issues they may face or be facing. Choosing this topic and final outcome will help me kick-start my career in the direction I wish it to go. My dream job would be to work for a company such as "Saatchi and Saatchi", possibly the best global advertising agency in the world. I am really interested in the campaigns they have come up with, especially "The Basics for Life" campaign they designed for People in Need. This ad campaign is attention grabbing and highly effective and was the reason for me wanting to pursue a career in this field of advertising.
Wednesday 17 February 2010
Anna Steinberg
What to ask when first given a job:
- client contact details
- deadline
- subject, theme, what they will use it for
- ask where they've seen your work to establish the promotional techniques that are working.
Acceptance of commission form:
- create a template
- one for every job, keep for your records
- send the form to client with terms and conditions
Money
The fee is a difficult aspect of being a freelance designer. Negotiating a figure can be awkward but Anna assured us that we would get used to it.
Motivation
There are many distractions, there is no boss watching you work, when juggling projects and looking for work you have to be self-motivated.
Organisation
Here's a link to Anna's site. The painted illustrations are quaint, I like her style of illustration.
http://www.annasteinberg.co.uk/
Monday 15 February 2010
San Serriffe
I happened to find this "interesting" joke whilst browsing on the Metro online newspaper (research for D&AD), most of you will see that the names are references to typographer's terminology. This joke was printed in the Guardian for april fools day but a huge number of people fell for it, aided perhaps by the fact that the paper roped in many legitimate advertisers, including Guinness and Kodak, to play along with the gag. The Guardian's office switchboard was apparently flooded with phonecalls from gullible people wanting more information on the fictitious islands.
Any way just thought Id share that with you guys before going into detail of what i've been up to the past month or so..
Im thinking the D&AD competition brief is a good place to start, basically we had to Create a transport advertising poster campaign and strapline that cuts through the visual noise of the everyday commute to promote Metro newspapers. We have collectively as a group come up with a concept that hopefully answers the brief. We decided the Metro needed a personality, the idea we came up which is, using info graphics, illustrate the other uses of the metro i.e. using it as a crowd dispersal device, using it as an umbrella when it rains etc.. we are still in talks about a strapline, which at this point in time is becoming very hard for reasons unknown, the strapline needs to reflect the slight witty humor we are going for with the illustrations but we are very concerned about making it cheesy, as whilst doing our research on the type of person that already picks up the metro, we found that the people that don't, tend not to due to being embarrassed by being seen with this "gossip mag" we are working on this today so I will keep updating on our progress.
This is a pdf we created quickly for our presentation with our initial ideas.
Dr Anna
advertising.. For Monday I must decide on a working title for my essay and choose my images and key texts.
Tuesday 9 February 2010
Charles Bukowski-also inspiration for my Professional Project
I feel I can relate with a lot of the poems he wrote, this one especially:
"There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you."
Firstly, when people read this they automatically think deep and depressing when I read this I see myself, I am not a deep or depressing person in the slightest in fact i'm possibly the exact opposite. Yet I can sometime feel trapped/ anxious and not have a clue why!?
What is anxiety? I have been asking myself this for a while now, I assumed there was something missing in my life weather it be a person or a journey I hadn't yet foreseen, I have now come to the conclusion, its my lifestyle and where my priorities currently lay... I feel a shift in balance is in order for me to shift this horrible feeling!
Monday 1 February 2010
Something that put everything into perspective
Sunday 31 January 2010
How to think-Ed Boyden
When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.
1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.
2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works. (I often need a 20-minute power nap after loading a lot into my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee. Knowing how my brain operates enables me to use it well.)
3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.
4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day. The act of making the plan alone is worth it. And even if you revise it often, you're guaranteed to be learning something.
5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things. Then, find the things that are not dependent on anything but have the most dependents, and finish them first.
6. Collaborate.
7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."
8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. That way, when you return to something you've done, you can make it routine. Instinctualize conscious control.
9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world. Much of creativity is learning how to see things properly. Most profound scientific discoveries are surprises. But if you don't document and digest every observation and learn to trust your eyes, then you will not know when you have seen a surprise.
10. Keep it simple. If it looks like something hard to engineer, it probably is. If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler, do it. It will work better, be more reliable, and have a bigger impact on the world. And learn, if only to know what has failed before. Remember the old saying, "Six months in the lab can save an afternoon in the library."
Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out? I just use a word processor to schedule all my events, tasks, and commitments, with resolution fading away the farther I look into the future. (It would be nice, though, to have a software tool that would gently help you make the schedule higher-resolution as time passes...)
The second practical note: I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.
- Ed Boyden
Monday 18 January 2010
Screen Based 2 (My website) and link to the "Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist" PERIOD.
Evaluation
So I have finished my website and I am very disappointed with the outcome, I did over 10 potential designs and I would say at least five of them where better than the one i used for my final. I found this project very hard to get motivated as Im not at all interested in becoming a web designer in fact I find it very tedious and limiting. It comes natural to some people, and I am not one of them. But I can honestly say im glad its over and one good thing came of it, I have a working online portfolio of my work. It was interesting to learn how things work and I will be improving my skills in dreamweaver in my own time to get a better website up and running before I head into the working world, and learning these skills have help me do so.
Thursday 14 January 2010
kelly's cleaners
These are what I have been given to work from. I thought maybe I could use it for another live brief.
I have not yet started as I only got the E-mail last night and I have been working on re-designing my website because tomorrow is crit day and the hard drive fairies have come and stolen mine! In which contained all of my work to date...Im sure as soon as I've done another night with no sleep working on getting my website ready for tomorrow they will give it back to me as this seems to be the way it goes for everything in my life at the minute. Im blaming my lack of togetherness on my super busy Xmas/New year working all the hours god gave us. But I do no UNI should come first.