Esther Walker : A bit of context

When deciding what route to go down with the branding for Esther there were a few things that really caught my eye. 

1.

 2.

 3.

 4.

 5.

6.

In genreal I have been seeing a lot of these retro styled pieces of design, more specifically within branding. There are some really nice pieces around, here are a few of my favourites.

1) With almost all of these designs there is a similar pattern, the shapes and motifs used are all quite similar. The type is nice on this, it's quite a simple logo with simple elements but put together it makes something that gives a distinct impression of being several decades old. (Apart from the web address obviously). Unknown designer.

2) Again, the same as above really. The shape is quite similar to the above, circular. But it's what goes on inside the circle that makes it interesting. More specifically the immediate shape inside of the circle.(By Taste of Ink).

3) This is my favourite, and probably the one piece that has led me into the design direction I am following. It's so basic, but it's so good. It's for an ice cream bar, there is no image to show this but somehow it still looks perfect for it. Unknown designer.

4, 5 & 6 ) All quite similar in terms of form and style. Again, the overall effect of the visual is the same. This is exactly the same sort of kitsch, retro feel I want to give Esther's brand.

Thomas Howes Web design

I struggled to do much development for Tom's website (apart from layout grids and masses of coding and organising files) because he knew exacctly what he wanted and I agreed, I did show him some examples of the sort of site I could create for him but he politley declined. Instead he showed me some examples of websites he likes.

One big similarity is the cleanliness of each site, they are easy to navigate, organised and easy to view images. 

1) French - http://www.tapedcopies.com/work.html

2) Kill Pixie - http://www.killpixie.net/home.html

3) Olly Moss - http://www.ollymoss.com/

Tom Howes Branding - Stationary ideas

There are some brilliantly designed identities around at the minute. It's noticing these over the summer that made me want to give it a go for myself. Although I love image making I really like some of the type/layout as well as the colour and composition on these examples;

 1)

2)

3)

 4)

5)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1&2) Identity for J.W. Hall builders by Abby Brewster. The mixture of typefaces is something I really like and want to try out myself. I love the two patterns used in the stationary, they're quite different but work as a whole and tie the identity together. It would have been nice to see the envelope pattern used on the back of the business card (the one with solid black) but apart from that this is a really nice set, it looks quite luxurious for just a two colour identity but the little detailing makes it that little bit more special.

3) It was this folded business card by Dan Cassaro (or maybe a little book cover/card wallet, I'm not sure) that gave me the idea to make Tom's branding a bit more eyecatching by using a block pattern. As I mentioned above, the bit of detailing a pattern can bring something to life.

4) 'The Great Gatsby Business Card Print
Chapter four of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby reads like a VIP guest list of the Jazz Age. Taking inspiration from those pages, this poster is comprised of the business cards and personal stationery of the movers and shakers that attended Gatsby's parties in the summer of 1922.'

The trend for making something new look old always appeals to me (Nostalgia in design is my dissertation subject) so I was drawn to this, especially the array of nice type. Without even knowing who each business card is designed for you get a good sense of character just through the colour, composition and typeface used. This communication through visuals is important especially in branding and identities as it can be the first impression a customer or potential employer will get.

5) I love this because it's ultra modern, ultra slick, bold and attractive. All this when essentially it's a very basic composition of shape and type as well as being in black and white. I knew for my design my budget would be tight and I was starting to worry about pulling it off on low funds but this proves good design doesn't have to cost the earth. Branding for Stack architects by The Consult

book design: solving a problem

I've been worrying a bit about how my book fair books will turn out because I'm so skint. Especially because I wanted to make about fifteen of them I knew it would be pricey but I calculated the cost of printed and hard binding each book (A4 square format) and IT IS EXPENSIVE. Too expensive. So, in the quest to make something cheap(er) but still lovely there were few solutions that I liked until I saw this. Who thought rubber bands could look so lovely? 

I'm definatley going to be 'binding' my books like this - I might look into buying some coloured bands to make them a bit more special, but I like how they are then just like big postcards. Good idea or not? 

I have no idea who did this, so if anyone does let me know! I love it. I think I mentioned the astonishing volume of amazing wedding invites I've seen recently, this one goes into that category. And it uses one of my favourite typefaces (adelle basic- right at the bottom). Nice nice.

Now then, these are just lovely. A bit twee for my taste, but overall theres a nice mix between hand made and professional finishes. I love the 'fennel pollen' speech bubble shaped bit, that could almost be there on it's own without the surrounding bits, just some nice simple type to tie in all the essential info. Still cute though.

Cats, dogs (and other animals)

Tom Edwards. I saw his illustrations a while ago and whilst browing through his flickr recently I saw his lovely animal illustrations. The cat, specifically is sort of what my cat and dog illustrations are looking a bit like at the minute. My illustrations will have the same kind of whimsical, colourful, free hand sort of look to them. I'm going to be drawing mainly with watercolour pencils and coloured chalk. I have a tendancy of worrying when I draw that they will come out too erm...child like. I enjoy drawing for myself, I don't show people these drawings because they are so...abstract? I suppose. Anyway, my point is that although these drawings bear a  similarity in my own personal drawings (media, textures, subjects etc) Tom Edward's is really very popular, and people seem to enjoy what he does. I'm rambling a bit now, I will come back to this post and make sure it makes more sense.

Kim Ga Young's rabbit is so lovely! I saw this ages ago and although I'm not too fond of the rest of her work this is a lovely technique or illustrating animals. I know some of my animals will be quite colourful so when I saw this again I thought it fitted in quite well with the style of illustration I am producing. It's also a very cute rabbit.

Verity Keniger has quite a varied style which is refreshing for someone like me to see. I like her tigeress and the colour and texture she has put into it. Colour and texture are two fairly important things in my cat and dog drawings so it's good to see how different illustrators use these two different things. Very good.

Bits and bobs I have found...

 1

 2

 3

 4

5

6

7

1) This is one of the things where I sit and try and figure out how it was printed. Zoomed in, the shapes look sort of embossed (this probably isn't the word for what I'm trying to describe) Anyway, this made me remember some nice old print pieces Lorenzo brought in last year. I'm interested to learn about how print processes more (like the hand done print processes) because I think they would suit my work, but I don't feel confident with them/know what to do with them. I don't even know the words for lots of print processes, which is a bit shameful. I tried to re-create some of the pattern on my first attempt of my business card, but it just didn't work (something do do with it being too detailed and badly printed for the size of card maybe). I love the colours and patterns and even though they are wedding invites (there seem to be a lot of amazingly designed wedding invites floating around at the minute) I think the imagery could translate well to a lot of other things. This sort of style is something I want to work with more, and have been consciously been trying to work towards so far this year.

2) This was my main inspiration (hate hate hate that word) for my dad's veg label range. Funnily enough I have been looking at more and more image and type based work, and despite still being into drawing and image making I feel far more comfortable working with this sort thing now. I think designing the lables for my dad made me realise how much I enjoy working with both. It's the shapes around the type in this piece which caught my eye, I like how they re type but it's very visual with all the little icons. 

3) Another example of some type which has caught my eye. I like how simple and elegant it is but it's not boring at all. Maybe it's the colours on the stock? Black and orange is a bit weird but it works well.

4) Again, just a lovely bit of type. (all this type fancying is a bit worrying) I like the layout and the variation in sizes and typefaces.

5) Really, same as above. I also like how the type is printed straight onto the box. One thing I'm not sure about is using red on egg packaging. It makes me feel a bit squeamish.

6) Oh, number six. Wonderful. This is the sort of work I would like to be producing. I love how a bit of design can conjure up such a 'feel' about it. I don't know if this makes sense, but like...I have no idea what business/club/cafe/restaurant/shop this was designed for but I get a image in my head instantly just from looking at the branding etc. I suppose if what I imagine is close to what it is for in reality this must make it a pretty good bit of design. 

7) I'm not sure if this is something I would want to try my hand at, it looks fiddly and I'm not good at fiddly things. I do love the idea of making a story book this way though. I wrote one of my ten briefs based around this image, it was to make a big pop up book of gothic fairy tales, although I would have loved to try my hand at it and I think my style of illustration would fit with it I don't think I would be able to pull it off well enough.

oh.my.god. Here is one of those things where I instantly go 'why didn't I think of that'. Pure genius

OUGD203

I've had a look at the live briefs and my initial reactions are that it's a bit of a challenge. I'm quite excited. Here are the ones that caught my eye and why:

'British Music Experience'

Firstly, this got my attention because I feel like there is something special about a bygone era of British music, which people should pay tribute to as well as encouraging new British music. Then I went to download the pack and well...the design on the PDF and their logo speaks for it's self. It's straight, serious and stuffy. Although the requirements state you're not allowed to mess with the shape or colour of the logo, it could be a good challenge to work with those rules and turn something that looks so boring into something contemporary and in keeping with it's audience's interests. 

'Feel Good Drinks'

this stood out although I can't decide whether I hate the idea or like it. The soft drinks industry has a smiley bright colourful face but I get the feeling it's pretty competitive. I don't think all the recycled packaging and bright colours isn't to do with giving off a healthy attitude anymore. I think this would be a really interesting project to work with, but what they are looking for "Create a campaign that communicates three simple things: our brand name, what our drinks look like and that our drinks are choc-full of natural, tasty, fruitiness. And do all this in a way that is unique, memorable and makes people laugh."- seems like a tall order to pull off when shelves are packed with drinks that all look the same and taste the same and claim to have all the same amazingly good potions jammed in the bottle. I do however like the attitude they have about their company. 


'Hovis'
I'm the most excited about this one! Obviously whether or not I get to be involved in this one is up to who I work with but I really really like that whole 'heritage' thing Hovis have going on, I love history and have such enthusiasm for social history and how a household would have run when Hovis was first put on the shelves. I love the idea of using different packaging for their bread, going back to basics. I collect vintage kitchenware and have some nice bread tins that are at least 50 years old (decorative...I wouldn't bake in them, they're too nice!) so when the brief mentioned old style baking tins I thought this would be perfect. I also hate shopping for bread, packaging is dull. So incredibly dull for something almost everyone buys, along with milk bread must be one of the most brought groceries in the UK. So why are companies failing to entice the great British bread lovers? Another good reason for me to do this brief is I really like both their original 1973 advert and their more recent ad. I love them both just because they're sort of what bread is about, it's always going to be around as a staple of the great British diet. People are always going to eat bread and the more recent advert is all about celebrating that, I think it's clever marketing that touches people's hearts...which is quite something just from a little loaf of bread.










 

 

  

  

  

 

You've probably all seen this, but I hadn't till now. Stupid of me, but I hadn't really taken time to look at what youtube had to offer in terms of idents before now. It was one of those things you go "yeah, yeah I know what idents are!' Then it struck...erm, I think I've been a bit confused. Thankfully, with less than 24 hours before crits I am now a little less confused.

p.s. I lurrrrve the music

Some notes on typefaces used in thriller films, suprisingly there is a wide range of different typefaces so thats thrown me a bit. Like the posters, I noticed the more recent thriller typefaces were very standard sans serif typefaces. Older thriller typefaces (like The Birds) have a lovely hand-rendered retro quality to them.

COMMON THEMES: I have taken a selection of movie posters from contemporary and classic thrillers and have been comparing how they are visually presented to try and get some ideas about how to present my indents. I have separated them into sections based on the colour pallet used, top left; white based movie posters with a limited and minimal colour pallet, top right; some of the more colourful posters I could find. I was actually quite surprised how many colourful thriller posters there are. I thought it was interesting how before the 90's a lot of thriller posters used bright colours and a more varied range of colours, this has decreased rapidly in the past 20 years. I imagine it's mainly due to the advances in graphic design? 

Anyway... Yes, the bottom section are the posters based around darker colours. I'm going to print them all out now, have a look at some more and artists who illustrate horror/thriller books and do some typeface comparisons then hopefully I'll be able to decide on a design direction!

A classic thriller for my movie season- The Birds. I was trying to find a trailer for it on youtube but found this instead!





And Duel. My favourite classic thriller ever. My gran told me to watch it ages ago, she described it as just a man in a car being followed by a truck. I reluctantly watched it having convinced myself it would be the most boring cinematic experience of my life. And I was wrong, the whole film is filled with suspense from start to end.

Another quick thing, I know it's not awfully relevant but I love the poster for funny games. It was the cover for sight and sound magazine in 2007. I love love love it.

Oh! and How could I forget the moon poster? Probably my favourite movie poster ever.

MOVIE SEASON: Thriller.

I was finding it hard to choose which genre I wanted to focus on for this brief, finally I settled upon thriller.
I'll put my presentation up later, but for now two of my favourite new-wave thrillers to be released in the past few years:


Funny Games, Michael Haneke.





And Moon, A sci-fi thriller directed by Duncan Jones. Probably one of the best films of 2009.

Design for Print, Part 2. 


----------------------------------------------------------------------




For some reason I've got it into my head that my packaging design needs to be all white and minimal and beautiful and clean looking. I don't know why though. It's not realllllly what I'm about. So I've spent a week stressing out about how I have to make this beautiful piece of design thats completely the opposite to what I'm good at. So I need to stop thinking about nice clean white design and start think about how to apply what I'm good at to this brief. 




I'm a bit short on the development sheet thing for my 'product' which we don't have to make but I want to knock out some prototypes just to get a feel of what it would look like. I'm going to make a life clock, with a similar principal to Bertrand Plane's life clock (see below). However the clock will be in a wooden block format. Displaying how many years, months and days the user has lived. My aim is to make the user more aware of how they spend their time, hopefully motivating them to do something useful or productive everyday. My packaging will package and instruct.

Clock format, similar to how I would like my graphic product to look, although to display: YY-MM-DD I would need six blocks. 


In terms of package design I've looked at a lot of packaging which has embossing on it. I really like this, but need to decide on where it would fit in between all the other factors I want to incorporate into my packaging design.


After deciding I could never happily produce something I'm not comfortable designing ( the minimal white vision I had earlier on in the project) I chose to design with the skills I use best, Illustration. 
I like the idea of my packaging being three colour. It's a nice uneven number and allows the design to be colourful without looking either minimal or cluttered.


Package designs that have given me some ideas:

“The idea of this project is to promote a more healthy food consumption and, concurrently, to also promote sustainable local agriculture, which involves methods that do not harm the environment, respect workers and animals, provide fair wages to farmers and support farming communities."

Designer: Isabela Serta, Brazil

Words & image: lovelypackage.com

"Frantz & Ivy is a new family bakery, with identity and packaging designed by Fay K. Pal. 

his duality is manifested in the brand identity — straight-laced typography partnered with whimsical illustrations. Frantz and & Ivy are depicted a quirky cartoon couple, transforming the owners into brand mascots. The clean black-and-white feel uses CMYK (and occasionally, brown) to identify certain products, and to bring in a bit of color, of course."

words and image: thedieline.com

"Seth Ciferri has been making custom tattoo machines since 1994 creating a range of unique liners and shaders. One of his latest is the "Light Roast" liner and in keeping with the roast theme, Seth partnered with fellow Portland business Courier Coffee Roasters to create a special packaging that combines the liner with ½ pound of coffee. Bringing together the two entities was Keegan Wenkman, who created some lovely lettering and illustration compositions for each, and printing those on a kraft paper bag. The result is something we will call Rustic Independent Chic. Or not. Point being, it's very nice. And, also, very hard as Keegan shares:

"It's terribly hard to print letterpress coffee bags, but possible. I had to build a jig of masking tape to fill the gap in the bag from its side folds in order to get a reasonable print… lots of fun though… its was low run, hand-fed and duo-tone, which made everything better." 

words and image: thedieline.com