ITAP - Jonny Griffiths - Design Heroes: Matt Pyke.

http://www.arch2o.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Hyundai-Vision-Hall5.jpeg (edited by me)

In the creative world you often hear about people who 'push the boundaries  and 'think outside the box', these people are the ones who 'break all the rules' and 'try not to be bound by one discipline'. Matt Pyke is no exception to this character profile. He is one of those people who let's nothing get in his way of success and he utilises anything and everything to help him progress. He spoke to Apple about the use of the Macintosh and how it helps him work from his attic in the northern town of Sheffield yet still uphold a robust and professional appearance to the outside world. He is a person to look up to and learn from certainly and I am glad Jonny chose Matt Pyke as his design hero.

With a list of clients like MTV, Apple, Hyundai, Coldplay, Chanel, Audi, Nissan, the V&A, Nike all projects of which were full of diversity yet had the unique stamp of Matt Pyke, I couldn't help but spend a good half an hour lost in his website. Universal Everything is the name of his company and he has recently launched Matt Pyke.com as a seperate entity, he said in an interview with 'It's Nice That'. 

"There’s more people now involved with Universal Everything. Other people are working on things, leading projects, but ultimately it’s still my baby. A lot of the work still stems from initial seed ideas I have, and I then tend to oversee the creative direction, help to push people further."

Some of my favourite pieces of his work are the work he did for Hyundai filmed here:

The beauty of the movement is captured beautifully and then represented by the digital work with such excellence, it's art. The idea behind this particular video, is 'Made By Humans' there are other works in the set that capture different elements of the creation of these Hyundai cars.

"What we tried to do is really emphasise the importance of the human and their role in the creation of things. Although a lot of what you see industrial and automated the important part is that the human spirit is in everything."

Matt Talks about the design process and how working on the computer is an essential part of that process. They transfer the video captured by dancers or tai chi masters and animate around the subjects so that only when the movement is applied, the play button is pressed, you can see what is actually going on. And in Matt's words "that's the thing that breathes the soul into the work".

ITAP - Jane Anderson - Design Hereos: Stefan Sagmeister & Kate Moross

Janes talk on Stefan Sagmeister & Kate Moross was one of those talks that you hear and it makes you want to do stuff. I couldn't help but get passionate in my note taking, i was inspired to get out there and make stuff with stuff just for the sake of it! I believe in those kind of talks/lectures because they have movement and action in them.

I think the reason for such a motivational talk was the two subjects  you cannot look at Sagmeister or Moross' work and not be inspired to 'do'. Their simple philosophies...

Personal work makes client work better.

- Sagmeister

"Make your own shit, just make shit."

- Moross 

...inspire you to get out there, forget about clients brief and projects and just do stuff for the fun of it, the reason you enjoy it in the first place.

Sagmeister's work is heaviy influenced by what he does in his private life. I watched his talk at one of the TED conferences and he talks solely about his personal work, his travels, his own self initiated projects and it's clear that he deems these things highly important. 

http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/images/made/images/u_work/Aizone-13_1800_1114_75.jpg

http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/images/made/images/u_work/Aizone10_1_1800_1114_75.jpg

These two images are from the "Art Direction & Design for Aizone, a luxury department store in the Middle East. Taking the vibrant nature of the brand and presenting it in campaigns that are printed in newspapers, magazines, and billboards throughout Lebanon."

http://kingydesignhistory2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/trying-comp1.jpg

These images are from his personal work entitled, "Things I Have Learnt In My Life So Far", you can clearly see the influence. Experimental and environmental typography is very striking and when doing the Aizone project they decided to do as much as they could in physical and not on computers for a 'next level' quality of image. Which brings me nicely onto Kate Moross who believes in 'making shit'.

Kate Moross' work has a very hands on feel to it also, she seems to have developed her style simply by making stuff, having a go and not discounting anything right from the beginning of here career.

http://a4.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/7/561c23d7ff3628fb7161e810a85af9ad/l.jpg

http://payload85.cargocollective.com/1/7/237494/4015761/RIDEJOURNAL_800.jpg

These two pieces the first one from 2006 and the second from 2013 you can see how her style has progressed and improved but you can see where it has come from and how she has been on a journey. Much like Sagmeister, the work she has done in the begging (which I would imagine was in the early, fun stage of her career) has influenced her more professional work.

Both these designers are inspirational and I hold them very high up in my hero's list.

ITAP - Mark Murphy - Design Heroes: Saul Bass & David Carson.

Mark Murphy from Surely Creative Design and a visiting lecturer to our course gave us a very diverse and informative talk about two of his design heroes, Saul Bass, the American graphic designer and film maker and David Carson the American, graphic designer, art director and surfer.

SAUL BASS - This man had a very distinctive style. Using Limited colour palates  and hand made type in most of his film title work, but he was also a very prolific graphi designer, designing some amazing logos along with loads of other work.

Here you can see some of the iconic, simplistic logos, all of which were deigned in the 60s and early 70s. His use of white space and drawing with space is exceptional and what every logo designer wishes to achieve. Many of these logos are still in use today, not many of them have needed to be adapted and they are such timeless design pieces.

http://www.graphic-design.com/design-bookshelf/2012/saul_bass/Saul_Bass_Logos_t.jpg

In the talk Mark showed us many different examples of Bass' work I particularly liked the Lawry food packaging for it's timeless design, great use of colour and illustration and typography. These designs would fit right into the supermarket shelves of today and would out rank some of the competition still. That is the mark of great design in my opinion, weather it's still going to look good in 30/40/50 years!

(source: Mark Murphy's presentation slides)

DAVID CARSON - A rule breaker and experimenter, a mad scientist of design. Mark described this guy as 'a marmite designer' you love him or you hate him and at the time I disagreed. My stance was exactly the same as my stance on marmite,  I actually didn't mind his work. I din't love or hate it, it was just ok. I have to be in the mood for it to like and appreciate it. BUT as time has gone on, I have seen more of his work and had time to think about it and i have decided that I am not the biggest fan. In some cases i think his work is good, but i would never choose to design in the way he does. Unless i was requested to.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/images/uploads/2010/12/lwl_black_swan_0.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgug7HQZlwHq9clK0NSO5LKoHBC_n4wK4gJzzjD285pCS99HzTyKEolCAAY4zjngH0EK16tBKxhDstzcSYw65ask0MdHvMwZmeyZVf3rFeTONW18OLcpLMYau7uchEuHQl49ON_CrK-ib8h/s400/mastercard_david_carson.jpg

I do like this cover image he produced for Little White Lies and I do appreciate his style somewhat. I think in this context it works really well, I also like his use of hand written type in his master card work but a feel that both of these images I like are not typically 'David Carson', they have elements of his style but they're far from signature pieces.

These magazine covers and ads are more what you would think of immediately when someone says David Carson.

http://mabsoota.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/4590744095_a8c360d082_o.jpeg?w=900

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnbVw5zsIyjI0H9ce3QEYTeaX2hm-uGWpYibmzd8p4YA5qDZsHks7rQf8LCvhY1cUR92VOfmsquRUvNQC-iNtQQbFOAIfFw9n_1deBV6ncygmHMBZ4XUQonxp7SVXDtDlRV0LDOQJ7Ca3g/s400/casron%2527s+work+3.png

One thing I cannot bypass is the amazing ability to break the rules of design and come out with innovative and exciting work that forces you to engage with it, 1 - because it's genious and 2 - cause it's slightly different and difficult to read. I have to hand it to him.

ITAP - David Osbaldestin's Introduction

To kick us off and launch us into our new Graphic Communication module David Osbaldestin gave us a talk about the main roles of graphic communication.

• Design for invitation 
• Design for information
• Design for expression

These three roles within the graphic communication world are key to understanding any piece of design in it’s purpose and intention.

Take this Advert from Nikon for example, 

http://markertising.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/i_am_brave.jpg

Nikon launched their 'I AM' campaign back in 2010 but it is still going strong, I can isolate each of the three design roles within this one image.

Design for Invitation - This image persuades/invites you to engage with it in many ways,

 - the quality of the image.

 - the bright, bold, striking graphic in the centre.

 - choice of language, 'BRAVE'.

 - capital letters.

 - subject in in the photograph.

 - warm, inviting colours within the photograph.

 - the size of the tagline being small, requires you to read deeper, focus in more and that itself is a technique to get to you engage with it.

All these things are examples of design for invitation but what are they inviting you to? 

I think the invitation is one of the IDEA, the concept of 'I AM'. Nikon have gone personal, using real life images captured by Nikon cameras and real people, Jamie Oliver and Robbie Williams to name two, they have made it about the customer. Birgitta Olson says, 

“We hope this campaign will help to extend the legacy of the Nikon brand to a wider European audience. By reminding our customers that they too are at the heart of the image, we hope to ignite a new understanding of photography – one where anyone can express themselves, regardless of their photography experience.”

 I AM *insert line here*, you can make it whatever you want. They've invited you to be a part of Nikon, not just a consumer.

Design for Information - This campaign is one with little conventional 'information', or information as you would expect to see it. This is the beauty of the campaign. The main information in the image is the Nikon logo, but along with this goes the colours and typefaces used in the graphic in the centre of the image, they are all within Nikon's brand guidelines informing you of the brand, the product. 

In the case of the TV ads there is more design for information at the end of the video when the viewer needs to know the product comercial is advertising and also the tagline and the website are arranged on screen in the perfect way so that you get all the information needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwEZUiE97Uk

 

Design for expression - The print ads are the best example of design for expression, using inspirational lines matched with excellent images. The designer is allowed to express the concept freely. 

http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/print/2010/3/i_am_neil_armstrong.jpg

I particularly like this 3rd prize Nikon competition winner. The composition, symmetry and humour expressed through the image is great and it's a very cleaver entry. Good enough for 3rd place and a D3100 kit package prize!

http://blog.iamnikon.com/en_GB/wp-content/uploads/I-am-a-lady.jpg 

3 Principles that influenced my work

Over the course of this ITAP lecture series i have learnt so much that is important to the development of my thinking as a designer as well as important to the development of my work in the module.

Here I will write about 3 of the principles i have written about in my ITAP blog series and show how they apply to my work.

Legibility
This is a very important principle for my work particularly as we as a group chose to use a typewriter as the main provider of the body copy of our magazine. This was a deliberate choice because we decided on maintaining the principle that not everything that is old, is bad. we wanted to show that old techniques are still useable. So here are a few things i did to ensure that legibilty was always the best it could be.

So as you can see from this original scan this document is very hard to read. Well we scanned in the documents at an extremely hight resolution, 1600dpi so that when I got the images into photoshop I had the best quality possible. that meant I sort out blemishes to detracted form the words themselves and also correct spelling mistakes (a manual spell check!!!).

I concluded this in my study of legibility "The context of the image (web/print/screen) is important in analysing weather something is legible." So i considered this when making the final product and i think the final outcome is one that is legible, it's not the easiest of things to read but I'm not designing a magazine for children nor am i designing a magazine for people who have trouble reading. Our taget audience is one that is intelligent, educated, doesn't mind reading and has an interest in the things of old.

Visual Hierarchy
Using my magazine cover as the example here we can asses the visual hierarchy of this image.

- The thing that stands out the most is the large letters 'see?' partly because they're black on white on a brown coloured background so they colours help is to stand out. Also the text size is large as titles normally are this draws the eye to text, 1 - because our eyes a drawn to titles, 2 - because it's the biggest text on the page. The position also helps, it is central this draws your eyes to it also.
- The second thing the eye is drawn to is the text below, 'the birmingham issue - for the creative mind'. This is because the eye follows downward when reading naturally so after reading the title 'see?' you then move on to whatever it beneath it. This was an intentional design feature based on what i learnt in my study of visual hierarchy.
- your eye then having nowhere 'natural' to go looks around the rest of the image and picks up the title at the top of the page and any other details that may be ont he document.

Text and Image
This one again is very apt to my project mainly because we used the typewriter we had to treat our text as images, they were photographed or scanned in and therefore were .jpeg images. We did use computer text too in our magazine, everything except the body copy of out articles was Times Italic. We chose this as we felt it offered a nice contrast to the gritty hand typed typewriter text, it was nice and clean yet still 'old enough' to be in keeping with the design of the whole magazine. This was important because we didn't want a magazine that looked like it had conflicting styles, we wanted something that worked well as a whole and party due to the correct us of text and image i believe we achieved this.

ITAP - Text and Image

This week we have the chance to write about any principle we think relates to the subjet matter that our lecture was about. Text and Image is obviously a very huge subject so I will be writing about the use of text and image in moving image for example motion typography.

This video uses text in a very cleaver way, employing simple techniques that work well with the chosen audio track. The most effective thing about this use of Text and Image is that timing of the animation along with the audio track, another example of when the audio track is very important is this video by Sebastian Baptista.

Make it better from Sebastianbap on Vimeo.

An example of motion or kinetic typograhy that is not relient on sound for it's effect is this:

FUTURA LE SPECIMEN ANIME from Thibault de Fournas on Vimeo.

There is a soundtrack to this video but there is not sound effects for the movement of the words or letters, the others all rely heavily on the sound to give it that 'UMPH!' but this one does not. This video is an informative video about the specific typeface Futura, it is very clean, crisp and clear in it's delivery of the information it is providing. Without the innovative use of text in this video it would not be successful. Nobody wants to watch a video with text scrolling down the page as if it was some 'Galaxy Far Far Away' nonsense. They keep it quick and fast paces without it being too jittery and they showcase the font for the beauty that it is.

This is an example of very bad kinetic typography.

It is not very imaginative, and it's not well synced.

I can concluse the text is very important to image in a vast number of scenarios, weather it is selling a product or entertaining an audience or conveying an emotive message, text is vitally important for all. Not only the presence of text but the use of that text is important too, they way in which the text is animated in these examples is key to the success of the video.

ITAP - The Design Workflow & The Experts

I have chosen to write about the design workflow and the section titled The Experts.

1. The Design Workflow

This is my design workflow. At frist glance it looks like not a lot and yes it is simple BUT there is a lot of thought in this workflow system. It took me a while to pin point exactly what process i go though when i work, but i narrowed it down to these 6 simple steps that reach the ultimate goal of final product. I know too that i can be lazy and miss a few of these out and this often tends to be the work i am not proud of. I think at any stage of review or analysis there is the potential for you to start all over again or at least go back to the work stage of my chart and start from square one. Also after a final review you may find that you need to go back to the development stage to develop your original idea in a different way. I find this works for me and i think i could use this model to teach others with potentially too.

2. The Experts
My favourite expert is Stefan Sagmeister wo said:

“most current graphic design  done by professional 

design companies is used to promote or sell, which is fine, but 

design can do so much more”

I agree a lot with the quote, i am sometimes disheartened when i find people using their skills purely for commercial means. I feel as though those people are withholding something from the rest of us, it's great to use your skills to try and sell something but i think there are other things just as important as making money which require design.

Sagemeister's typographic work proves this for me;

His collection of 'life quotes' done in this very interesting form show how he is willing to put so much effort into something that yes may have been put into a book or a gallery and he may have made some money off it but in his TED talk he explained how this series was born out of a list of truths he had learnt over the course of his life. It was stuff that made him happy not purely driven to make money. And that is why i like Stefan Sagmeister the best, because he brings real life into his work and he isn't always driven by money rather a pure love for the subject.