Reflective Writing - James Iredale - Level 6 - Graphic Design by jai0155

The Ramblings of a Mad Man The Reflective Writings of a final year Graphic Design student

by James Iredale

Covering Modules: DN6001, DN6031, DN6032

CONTENTS

PROJECT 1 • Brief Introduction • Brand Sprint • Research • Screen Printing • Cinema 4D • Humans Behaving Badly • Feedback • Critical Evaluation

18 D&AD

• Brief and Ideation • Visual Identity • Previous Winners • Defining the Product • Identity, Script & Video • Feedback & Development • Final Refinements • Critical Evaluation

ANTHOLOGY • Typesetting • Cover Design • How to Create a Book • Feedback • Mokcups & Illustrations • Final Product • Critical Evaluation

PLACEMENT

FMP

• CV • Portfolio PDF • Website • Placement Research • Stack Magazines • Pandemic Professional? • Critical Evaluation

• Building a Brand • Naming Process • Customer Personas • Logo Design • Typoegraphy / Wordmark • The Character • Critical Evaluation

Module no: DN5003, DN6031

The Stories We Tell A showcase of the lesser known decade defining narratives over the last 100 years James Iredale â&#x20AC;&#x201C; London Metropolitan Unveristy

1928 The Death of Harry Houdini

1931 Amelia Earhart Takes Flight

1947 Jackie Robinsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Debut

1950 A Vaccine for Polio

1961 The WWF is Created

1978 The First IVF Baby is Born

1982 Time Magazines MOTY

1990 Dinosaur Sue is Uncovered

2007 Darcey Bussell Retires

James Iredale

Module: DN6001

IDENTITY Statement of Intent

What excites you about the brief? The idea of developing a project around identity is what most excites me about this brief. Through this process, I will be exploring the idea of how I conceive identity and whether I want to take a more literal way of thinking (i.e. through branding) or a more conceptual way (abstract animations or a series of photos).

What Prior learning can draw upon to work on this project? I think throughout my final weeks of this project I have relied heavily on practices like 2D animation with After Effects as well as the principles of creating a visual identity. This was largely because at the beginning of this project I wanted to explore different mediums of design and try to get out of my comfort zone. Ultimately though it did lead me back to my specific areas of interest incorporating moving images into visual identity in order to tell compelling narratives.

What themes, materials, processes and research sources will you explore in the project? This project has allowed me to explore many different processes of design. In particular, platforms like Cinema4D, going back to basic crafts utilizing clay, broadening my knowledge around grid systems used for identity and experimenting with abstract techniques like acrylic pouring. Overall itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been great to have the opportunity to play around with different processes rather than sticking with what Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m comfortable with.

What skills and techniques would you like to develop and use for the project? At first I was very excited to research the process of 3D animation and platforms like Cinema4D - utilizing and integrating them with practices I know quite well like identity design. However, as the year progressed I found myself more exploring the structure behind identity marks and how powerful they can be when creating a consistent theme throughout a piece of work. Complex grid development has been a key aspect of this project for me.

Module: DN6001

Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY

Ideally I wanted this project to be something new and utilize technology that hadn’t really been seen in university teachings. I really wanted to incorporate the use of Augmented Reality into this project, using products like Adobe Aero. Alas, I couldn’t make it work - but by using QR codes I still believe that I have achieved this in a way that’s a bit different to a traditional outcome.

Examples of specific practitioners you will have to research the project. When looking at designers in terms of illustration, I looked at designers that were synonymous with the 80s like Neville Brody, April Greiman - as well as a modern take on them such as James White. However when going back to my foundations of branding and animation in a Swiss style, I heavily relied on the teachings of graphic designers like Jens Muller and Julius Wiedemann - particularly their works in the book ‘Logo Modernism’.

Define your audience. How will you reach them/interact with them? I really wanted to create this piece as something a bit different for the summer show (if that was still going ahead of course). I wanted people to engage with the piece rather than just have it be another part of the show that viewers can just walk past. This is why I added the QR codes to the poster. Although they may stand out and look blocky - it does capture people’s attention and offers a chance for them to engage with the poster. Also I think adding a voice over of a Morgan Freeman impersonator will add a level of humour to the piece that I hope viewers will appreciate.

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What is the scope of your ambition for the project?

IDENTITY Brief Introduction

In today’s session we were introduced to the Studio 3 project 1 brief and its overarching topic around the word ‘Identity’. We discussed as a group the different meanings that identity could have, both in a personal, philosophical and commercial sense. For our first exercise, we were asked to draw what we all thought represented identity. Everybody had something different, some personal to them like a new chapter in their life that they were embarking on, some breaking the boundaries of what an identity could mean to someone. I decided however to draw the Nike swoosh depicting a well known brand identity (not the most artistic thing but still somewhat relevant to the task at hand). These were then posted up on the wall next to each other to compare the differences in what we all would associate with the word ‘Identity’.

We then all participated in a second exercise to see what other words could be associated with identity using the Thesaurus website. Starting with the word Identity, we compiled an almost rabbit hole list seeing where we could go from that word and seeing what other words would splinter off from it. At the end we all put our lists onto the wall (next to the first drawings) to have a look at where we all ended up.

Module: DN6001

1. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY

Reflections I felt that this task was a really good introduction to the studio and a good look into viewing tasks and brief not in one linear direction, but to look further into what is asked of us. Today, RIcardo introduced us to some keywords that we should focus on this year, such as ‘Lateral Thinking’, which is defined as “the solving of problems through an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light”. This term in conjunction with our studio brief of creating ‘Identity’ really goes well together and challenges us as students to think about factors like who our audience is, how do we best provoke interest and the idea of constantly testing our ideas and results

Module: DN6001

Finally, from that everyone’s list, we picked a word that we liked in particular and wrote it onto ping pong balls placed in the center of the room.

IDENTITY Brand Sprint & FMP Tutorial

The second Studio 3 session was focussed around the idea of branding or more specifically, the practice of Sprint Branding. We were split into groups of 4 or 5 and tasked with giving our studio a complete visual identity. The visual identity would include: Studio name; creating studio values; what, how, why golden circle; drafting a studio logo; discovering our ‘audience’; and developing the studios visual guidelines (i.e. Stylescaping, Colour Palette, Typography/Typeface design). Our initial timeframe to have all of these completed by the end of the day (although this was later changed to a later date by the end of the class). Our first task after being split up into the groups was deciding two roles within the team, first who was the “decision-maker” and the other was the “note-taker”. I was chosen to be the decision maker, solely off the basis that I had done some branding and identity work over the summer (also being the only level 6 in the group) whilst a level 5, whom clearly had the best handwriting was chosen to be the note-taker. These roles however were very quickly pushed to the sideline as all 4 of us would be very engaged with this project, drafting and collaborating ideas, constantly taking each others opinions into account before coming with an agreed outcome for each of the aforementioned tasks.

After the FMP tutorial session, we headed back to the studio where the rest of my group had designed the mood board compiled of some of their favourite artists and imagery. With this, and all the other tasks completed, we got to work on the studio name and logo. After narrowing down a group of words (using the synonym exercise that we were introduced in the previous session) we compiled a list of 4 in total. The words we all felt spoke with our studio message of ‘Challenging Conceptions’ and using past teachings to progress forwards. The 4 names we had it narrowed down to were: ‘Flow’, ‘Duality’, ‘Aim’ and ‘Mash’. As we couldn’t really decide on which of these we were entirely happy with, we decided to anonymously vote on one name. ‘Studio Aim’ was chosen and so we progressed on with the logo. Using one of the larger sheets of paper, we all began

Module: DN6001

2. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY

Overall I really enjoyed this process of sprint branding and would like to practice this again (although without the FMP session in the middle of it). It showed me how even under time pressure, you’re able to come up with a lot of creative ideas particularly as a group. We haven’t done a whole lot of small group based projects, but I felt that because of the fast paced nature of this exercise, a compromise had to be made which really helped the flow of our group. If we were to do this exercise again though, I would like to see more time spent on digital outcomes, perhaps even splitting off into mini groups to focus on the outcomes for different tasks.

Reflections After completing the first few studio tasks, the level 6’s participated in an introductory FMP session with two former viscom graduates of The Cass: Carl and Rose. Although both of the graduates were illustrators, it was interesting to see the direction that they took their projects in whilst at university. Carl was a graphic artist who specializes in doing recommissioned movie and band posters. His work was in such high detail that a lot of his work looked entirely painted, however all of his projects are done using photoshop. He discussed his process creating these images as well as the freedom of doing more of the work that he wanted to do (such as his own ideas and narrative) during his FMP rather than what he is usually commissioned to do. Carl, for his FMP collaborated with a friend of his who specializes in script writing in order to help come up with a narrative for his graphic novel. I found their joint process really interesting in that they would both come up with seperate pieces, sometimes not even discussing what the other would be doing, and they would then come up with creative ideas to include these in their novel centered around a dystopian reality of the Sussex countryside (around the Eastbourne area).

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drafting some ideas of what we associated with Aim and what could be good ideas for the logo. After about 10 minutes of “doodling”, we had one low fidelity option that we wanted to explore further that would include our tagline as well.

IDENTITY Module: DN6001

Rose was the second former student to speak having graduated last year with her FMP focussed around the idea of fake social media posting. It was a really interesting take on a project, in particular considering that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s predominantly an illustrator. However her project involved very little (if any) traditional illustration, rather conducting the process more as an Art and Set director. Rose subtly added a lot of powerful pieces within her art as well, really emphasising the detail that she went into during her project.

IDENTITY Research

1980s Graphic Design and Vaporwave Graphic design in the 1980s is known for its brash and attention grabbing style that hooked the decade. It has been making somewhat of a comeback in today’s design, in particular with the Vaporwave style that has been paying homage to the design of the 80s. The styles can be identified by different sections such as Neon Noir, 80’s Deco, Memphis-Milano, Tropical, 80’s cute, Fantasy and of course Digital. Each of these separate styles, although vastly different are easily recognised with being apart of 80s culture, carrying over the brashness of the 70s and referred to as the ‘Me Decade’. Its heavy use of bold / neon colours, jagged typography and often questionable hair / fashion styles. Vaporwave is more of a music genre, a proclaimed dead one at that when speaking about it today. Its rise came as a reaction to huge economic and social forces like globalization, consumerism and manufactured nostalgia. In terms of design, the music videos were often aesthetically pleasing visuals, could be referred to as ‘trippy’ based of the 80’s and early 90s subculture. Its visuals predominantly consisted of glitched out photographs, old graphic designs like Microsoft Word Art, ancient statues, tropical elements (e.g. Palm trees) and japanese cityscapes. This style was picked up by mainstream media with some large artists using them for their album covers like Drake and Flume. It could be said that the style takes a refreshing look on retro artworks. It’s still seen today with examples from the recent Japan 2019 Rugby World cup, where this Vaporwave style is often used in their advertisements / cut aways.

Module: DN6001

3. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY

Memphis helped refine the design industry in the 1980s. Memphis was all about being bright, bold and solid colours with random geometric patterns and shapes layered on top of each other. The style was brought to mass attention by the Memphis Group in 1981 which was led by Italian Architect Ettor Sottsass. The style derived from design patterns popular during the 1960s in Italy, focussing on breaking the rules of modernism in architecture.

Brutalism isn’t actually derived from the word brutal but rather the french word for “raw concrete”. This style was huge in architecture, creating smooth bold geometric concrete buildings. Brutalism is relevant, particularly as part of the Vaporwave web design aesthetic approach in early 2016. They keywords for a Brutalist design is “Bright Colours” and “Chaotic Clashing”. Although the result can look messy and filled with mistakes, everything is in fact executed correctly and doesn’t hinder the usability of the design. It provides a twist to the status quo of how web design can be portrayed.

Module: DN6001

Memphis and Brutalism

IDENTITY Screen Printing

This refresher screen printing session was a bit different from the other two that I have done in the past. Rather than coming up with a set amount of prints that we had to have by the end of the class, we were told to get very playful with how we were printing. This included collage with the what we were printing on, using different types of paper to print on, ripping up the paper into various different shapes and sizes and also playing with the paint and the way we would use the squeegee. It was good to have the freedom to do whatever we wanted with our images and play around with the different colours that were on offer. During the session, I really tried to experiment with the colour and trying to create different gradients in my image. Below are pictures of some of the other students work.

Upon reflection, I don’t feel that I really experimented with collage as much as I could, nor with the variations in my image. I would like to go back and do another session during an independent study and try to use a more versatile image, blocking certain parts of it to try and present a certain degree of contrast in it. I’d also like to see how much contrast I could create by utilizing different techniques within collage. I also liked Joe’s idea of directly screen printing into our sketchbooks, so I do intend to go back and do this once I’ve experimented a bit more with screen printing in general.

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4. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY Cinema 4D

We had our first session with Hashmuk Kerai, a former student and a professional motion graphics design and 3d illustrator. Although we have been introduced at Cinema 4D at a base level last year, this session seemed to get into a bit more of the functionalities and shapes that C4D has to offer. The aim of this session was to try and recreate the scene shown below, customizing and positioning the different shapes as well as adding textures and colours to them.

I want to do further research into this topic and look at some of the online tutorials that are available. For my studio 1 project, it is so far all digital illustration. I would like to explore how this would look with more complex 3D shapes and textures. It will also give me the opportunity to explore animating the posters giving it another layer of dynamism. Although it would have been nice to touch on the animation side of things, it was good to look at the general layout and shape distribution/creation. I wouldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve liked to explore the camera tool a bit more, learning practices on creating the best angles for different scenes and lighting. However a lot of what I wanted to do will probably be introduced next week, until then I plan on getting a head start and viewing some more online tutorials from YouTube. It would also be beneficial to play around with C4D to create interesting abstract posters.

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5. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY Humans Behaving Badly

During the session we were asked to create a fashion piece made only out of accessible materials / recycled materials. To do this we were split into groups of 3. Originally the idea was to relate it to some form of fast food working, such as making apparel out of burger king wrappers. We began by drafting out some ideas like the uniform could be made solely out of the wrappers from burgers. After realising this would take far too long, an idea around creating a concept for a character. From the previous workshop around makeup, we thought it would be a good idea to create this character, still using the makeup as well as acrylic paints for body colour to form a hand puppet character. After much discussion, we decided to make a piece of fashionwear (an opera mask to be exact) out of recycled coffee sticks from the coffee shop next door as well as some fabric material that was brought, being held together by staples and super glue. After creating the mask we wanted to setup a proper photoshoot for it. The intended idea behind this project was to show how pointless the large fashion brands can be in charging extortionate prices for the same piece of clothing. However this was contested by the rest of the class group and tutor. The piece that we created didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t firmly represent the idea, nor was the concept around the idea necessarily true as the pricing comes down to what the customer is willing to pay. In short the concept wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t strong enough. The final product itself though was well put together.

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6. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY Feedback

Today’s session was a chance to get some feedback at the later stages of project 1 from the tutor and other students. It was useful to see what the other students have done with their projects and along with the advice from Joe has allowed me to focus on my final outcome for this project. Following from the discussion I had with Joe and upon reflection, I have certainly played this outcome safely - not wanting really giving it any meaning behind the work and not wanting to cause any possible chance of disagreement. After our conversation though, I do agree that especially as this is my final year this is the sort of project that I should be daring with and creating something eye catching rather than to blend in and get a safe mark. The majority of my development for this project has been around exploring the different processes that I could go with, from 3D animation to Clay and Acrylic pouring. However, now I want to focus more on topics that I am interested in. As I said during the lesson, I’m conducting more research around living sustainably and actively trying to help with the climate change disaster (in my own day-today life). In order to come up with a more focussed idea that includes all of my current research, I’ve started with a mind map to get the mind rolling for ideas around climate change. My key findings from the research assessing the impacts of climate change include: carbon footprint; brands needing to do more; plastic in the ocean; and natural disasters. Given my previous research around the 80s and Vaporwave, I want to try and make this piece dark in meaning but brash and colourful in its outcome. I immediately think of the work by Francis Bacon, in particular his piece The Study After Velazquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X. When discussing the painting, Bacon states that his motives “He says he has nothing against popes, and that it was an excuse to use those colors” (Ingram, 2014). My initial idea is to create a short moving image utilizing the colours like pinks, blues, purples and yellows (similar to those of vaporwave). The moving image I want to depict a tree slowly being built by human hands. These hands could then decay into skeletal bones and the colours could change into something more sinister as random shapes ‘float’ around in the background (meant to represent the plastic polluting the oceans).

Module: DN6001

7. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY Critical Evaluation

We were tasked with researching, conceiving and developing various outcomes around the explorations of identity - what it is and what does it mean to us? We were encouraged to discover and present our own concept of how we interpret identity through various workshops, masterclasses and group tutorials with peer feedback. When asking what identity means to us, the question can be rather complex and taken in a variety of ways. I noticed that some took a more theoretical approach, relating identity to how they see themselves within the world. Others took it in a more practical approach, viewing identity as what we see based physically on how they look. At first, I wanted to explore the many different approaches of identity, exploring the different processes of design that would lead me to finding an appropriate fit. My goal though was to try and avoid processes that I was comfortable with such as creating and portraying a visual identity through the principles of branding. This goal led me through a very extensive process of trial and error, from 3D modelling in software such as Cinema 4D, going back to basic crafts utilizing simple modelling tools and producing an outcome with clay, and even approaching the task through abstract experimentation by using the acrylic pouring technique - leaving me unable to predict the outcome. Though my research was extensive, I was unable to avoid going back to the area of design that I am familiar with. Branding, or more specifically logo design may have been something that I was experienced with but, I still intended to challenge my thinking and utilize this opportunity to learn. Drawing upon one of the studio workshops at the beginning of the year, performing a brand sprint, I wondered if this could be done as a series of brands. I came up with the idea of creating a visual mark for various events of each Decade over the last Century. Originally these were to be designed utilizing the Golden Ratio or Fibonacci Sequence that is commonly seen in logo design. After consulting with Ricardo though, it was agreed that I should use a complex grid system similar to what I had done in my FMP.

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8. Studio Project 1:

IDENTITY

Overall this task was very challenging for me. In an effort to try and pursue an outcome that was far away from my comfort zone, it only led me back closer to it. I would deem the project successful - but it couldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been more had I spent less time exploring different processes and ideas. It could possibly have allowed me to fully explore an area that really interested me like Augmented Reality rather than revisiting old techniques like clay sculpting.

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Differentiation is the key though, and I still hoped that I could find a way to produce a project that had that something extra within it. Animation was a clear route to take, but what if I could take that further? I had been looking into the different programs such as Adobe Aero that allowed its users to create an augmented reality scene - truly bringing designs to life. However this wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feasible for me to complete as I did not have the capabilities of producing 10 unique, AR ready animations. I decided then that I would include a voice for my narrative - Morgan Freeman, along with the user of QR codes that offers viewers an opportunity to engage with the design.

James Iredale

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BBC Tips Statement of Intent

What excites you about the brief? I’ve really been looking forward to completing a D&AD brief for two reasons. One is that the company whose brief I’ve taken on (the BBC) is one of the companies I’m hoping to apply for post university. The other is the brief itself focussed around product and UX design, the area of interest that I want to pursue at the BBC.

What Prior learning can draw upon to work on this project? I haven’t got a lot of UX experience so researching that and learning more about the process is something that I’m really looking forward to. However, my knowledge in animation is going to be the driving factor in this project. I want to try and enhance this as much as I can and learn more about the process of designing animation for promotional products. I’ll also draw on my learnings from my FMP project around visual identity.

What themes, materials, processes and research sources will you explore in the project? As the brief revolves predominantly around product design, the theme I’ll try to focus on mainly is designing a working product - UI design for both mobile applications and browsers will be key here. However I also want to create a visual identity for my product idea. This means going through the same process that I have done for my FMP but on a smaller scale (predominantly going off my FMP research).

What skills and techniques would you like to develop and use for the project? Certainly I’d like to develop my skills using Adobe After Effects for 2D (and potentially 3D animation). I’d also like to obviously develop knowledge around visual hierarchy (particularly in UI design) and how the two (UI and Animation) co-exist to create a visually complete looking product and product video. I’d also like to develop the principles that go alongside this such as scriptwriting, storyboarding and defining a sub brand.

Module: DN6031

D&AD 2020

BBC TIPS

There’s no doubt that I want to get a good grade for this project so completing it to the best of my ability is essential. However I’m also motivated by the idea of winning a pencil (gotta aim high!). I want to try and make this as complete a product as I can - showcasing mockups of the product as well as potentially a working prototype be that in high fidelity or low.

Examples of specific practitioners you will have to research the project. For the product design aspect I’ll mostly be following the examples set out by Will Grant in his book ‘101 Principles of UX Design’. However I also want to research the work by the BBC already so that I can keep a consistent grid and product identity through the design. For animation, I’ll be drawing on the teachings on YouTube such as ECAbrams as well as the School of Motion. Both channels offer a range of different approaches to tackle animation workflow challenges.

Define your audience. How will you reach them/interact with them? For the BBC brief, the audience that they are targeting is Gen Z (so 16 - 24 year olds). This means that as an identity, it needs to appeal to them. I want the identity to be playful but not over the top (the principles of animation such as stretch and squeeze, over exaggeration and gravity will apply). However for the presentation for the judges, I need it to read easy and be well presented and thought out.

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What is the scope of your ambition for the project?

BBC TIPS Briefs and Idea Generation

Although there were some really cool briefs on the D&AD site that I considered, the BBC stood out most to me largely due to two reasons. The first being the actual brief and outcomes being focused around product design and UX - a field of interest that I’m looking at developing throughout this year and pursuing it as a speciality / career option post university. The other is because the BBC is a company that I have been interesting in applying for since the middle of last year. They have a UX Design Traineeship, taking up to 5 candidates every summer and this would put me in a great position should I be successful in this competition. After downloading the brief, I began by highlighting the key deliverables: The outcome would have to focus on bridging the gap between physical and digital, targeted towards 16-24 year olds, connected devices (perhaps using augmented reality?). I then started brainstorming ideas trying to explain each concept as simply as possible. Here were my initial product ideas:

BBC Speak App / BBC Trending • A platform where people can discuss what they think is the most relevant (e.g. Climate change / activism / well being / equality / sexism / etc) and give their thoughts on the issue. • This could then be discussed by a panel of experts at a set time who are talking about some of the issues at hand. • Similar to a live stream, users that have the app downloaded will be able to submit questions in real time (moderator permitted)

BBC Show Rater • People can give live feedback on their favourite TV Shows • Presenters can then respond to them if they want to - giving the BBC further contact with their audience. • How would this be moderated?

BBC Meme • Users can get screengrabs for the TV shows they watch from iPlayer and use the BBC Meme platform to create their own memes. • These can be shared via social media and featured on the BBC homepage

Module: DN6031

1. D&AD 2020 :

BBC TIPS

• This mobile app creates a new interactive VR experience unlike any other. • Using their current location, users are able to create multi-sensory events that can be interacted with other members of the public on their devices. • In memory of WWII and VE Day 2020, the BBC could put on a VR event for everyone to show the remarkable day. • Examples could include the simulation of parades in London, the landing of D-Day in the beaches of Normandy, the wartime broadcast played when the camera is pointed at a radio.

BBC Showspace • Create the workshops and online classes. • Have polls based on the workshops that people want 9members can vote) • Categories or ideas with most votes are held and depending on membership status is ticket priority • Special workshop where an athlete comes in and teaches the workshop / livestream that people vote for • Community: Instagram // Local Clubs // Events // Class Feedback // Voting System // Special Guest Workshop I had narrowed it down to two preferred options to pursue: BBC Tips and BBC Showspace. After thinking about it for a week, I decided that the best option would be BBC Tips. This is because the creation of the app and platform is more realistic and achievable than Showspace. Given my interest around branding, I thought that the next best step would be researching and forming a visual identity for my new product. I think being able to create the Showspace product would have been a lot of fun, and perhaps more of an idea that D&AD looked for when selecting their winners. However, as I’ve stated my thinking is around the idea that Tips is far more realistic in terms of developing as a product in the real world.

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BBC Showspace

BBC TIPS Visual Identity Research

When designing a visual identity as a sub brand, it’s important that it can still be recognised as part of the parent brand. With this in mind, I have started my research by looking at the different off brands that the BBC has, in particular the platforms that are most relatable to the BBC Tips product that I am proposing: BBC Bitesize and BBC Taster. From first glance, the majority of the sub logos are very simple type / wordmark logos. Perhaps the only exception is BBC iPlayer which is minimal in its design but clearly depicts the letter ‘i’ with the play icon factored in. The Bitesize logo is very simply the word Bitesize in the BBC typeface ‘Reith’ that is based on Gill Sans (the BBC’s previous typeface until January 2017 where it was premiered as the new font for BBC Sport) (BBC, 2017).

Beginning with some of the ideas and works from a Branding Identity master Aaron Draplin, I start by looking at some of his more minimalist logo designs. From previous research that I have conducted around the idea of visual identity, I am going into this project with the following teachings: A logo should be able to work in colour, black and white; A logo is there to identify and not explain; A logo should be timeless; It should be designed to be remembered (simplicity); and a logo should communicate its intended message (BBC Tips being the evolution of online education).

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2. D&AD 2020 :

BBC TIPS

When it comes to creating a UI, I began by creating wireframes of the existing BBC products such as its Homepage, BBC iPlayer, BBC Bitesize and BBC Taste. This will help in creating a user journey that is familiar with current BBC customers and provide a similarity in the Tips platform. I have then created wireframes of some of the competitors existing online education videos such as Skillshare, Udemy, YouTube and Lynda. These are websites that have been created with proven results in their UX and will therefore provide a good starting point in creating a successful journey for the Tips prototype.

Examples of the logo work by Aaron Draplin.

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I feel that for an entirely new platform, the use of colour and patterns will help differentiate it from the existing BBC products. I want to use patterns as it can relate to Johan Huizaga’s theory around play, more specifically the coin he termed as ‘The Magic Circle’ in which a person is in when they are playing. This is a more theoretical rationale for being in a state of immersion, something that should be prominent when an individual is studying and pursuing a new skill. In an article posted on Wired Magazine, Frank Rose writes “Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature: a face, a figure, a flower and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and those patterns we find meaning” (Rose, 2011) Taking this into account, I feel that it justifies my concept of incorporating patterns to promote a healthy and effective workflow to a user utilizing online video tutorials. These patterns will be created as background features and could be used alongside the presentation of the Tips logo (where necessary).

BBC TIPS Previous New Blood Winners

After conducting the initial identity research and seeing the framework BBC used to create their platforms, I thought delving more into the actual D&AD video submission would be a good idea. I started by going through some of the previous years D&AD winners to look for any running similarities. The videos I watched included the RuGirls campaign, Bacardi Event and all of the previous BBC submissions. One of the first aspects I noticed about all of them was that they all had some sort of visual identity consistent throughout their promotions. Particularly for the BBC this will be very important. Throughout all of the BBC’s sub brands, although they all have distinguishing wordmarks their creative identity can easily be seen. This prompted me to look at the BBC identity guidelines to find out the consistent elements that I can use. From this I found the BBC font family ‘Reith’. This will be really useful given that all of BBC logos are indeed wordmarks based on this typeface.

Poster image for: RU-girls D&AD New Blood Submission 2019

When viewing the RuGirls video, I really enjoyed their use of simplistic cartoon illustrations. It’s clear that utilizing animation is vital to create an award winning submission, however it’s certainly not one of the prioritising design features that I’ve seen from the majority of winners (with exception to the ‘Become Something With Us’ Monotype submission!). This is something I’d like to try and spend a bit more time on though, applying some of the fundamentals that I’ve learnt during my projects. Adding in some of these principals like stretch and squash will help to give my idea a more playful theme, which is the route I think I’d like to go down.

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3. D&AD 2020 :

BBC TIPS

Show off the proposed product: give them high definition mockups with a clear user journey to follow. Perhaps you could create a mockup using Adobe XD?

Give them real world statistics to say why this project is important. All of the previous winners relate back to some sort of data.

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t oversaturate the slides with text. A clean and structured layout thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to read will work best. Keep the images that you use relevant to the text.

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Points to highlight from viewing the previous D&AD winners:

BBC TIPS Defining the Product

After compiling research on both visual identity and d&ad previous winners, it was time that I looked into defining what the BBC Tips product is - formulating its layout and its unique selling point. I thought that a good way of starting this was to split the product into different sections: Online Learning Platform and the BBC Tips Community.

BBC Tips: Online Learning Platform The Tips online video guides that could utilize the BBCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s access to celebrities and talent. These personalities could be the teachers, offering a unique style of online education. Video Guides would predominantly be seen on desktops and laptops, so I decided early on to create a user interface built for browsers. This trail of thought prompted me to start researching the layouts of BBC Home Pages, in order to see if there was a certain grid system and preferred layout they have for their different sub brands. Given the similarities of products, I decided to look at the BBC Bitesize page in particular.

As part of my research, I looked at the different home pages for a few of the BBC product sub brands like BBC Bitesize, BBC iPlayer and BBC Taster.

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4. D&AD 2020 :

BBC TIPS

Tips:

Bitesize:

• Offers huge variety of discipline in its • More traditional education online training content. • Familiar with a younger demographic • Real time geolocation platform (GCSE’s and below) serving as an interface between physical and digital. • 16+ content is more focussed on academic skills • BBC Talent (Celebrity) led online course content • Social media feedback • Encourages social community Next, I needed to define the type of content that could be used for the online video guides. I narrowed an initial brainstorm to 4 key categories: Sports, Arts, Business and Lifestyle. These 4 areas are in my mind, key to sustaining a healthy and happy life and are thus vital for the target audience: Gen Z. Sports: Users can gain coaching tips from recognised athletes of all disciplines. Sports included range from Football and Tennis to the obscure like Rock Climbing and Skateboarding Arts: The ability to be more creative, particularly in the workplace is being valued more and more as time goes on. Recognised practitioners and artists will give breakdowns on the software they use and how they use them. Business: Young people today are looking more towards working for themselves and on a remote freelance basis. BBC Tips can offer small introductory lectures to the necessities of running a business. Classes include how to run your own accounts for independent businesses, to project managing individual ventures. Lifestyle: There seems to be a new health kick trend happening every week these days. The internet is flooded with information. BBC Tips filters the noise and gives its users the relevant content from various specialists in: Diet, Routine, Fitness and Mindfulness.

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After mapping out the Bitesize page, I thought it was pertinent to include a slide about how BBC Tips would differentiate from Bitesize:

BBC TIPS

Given that online video educational platforms are not new, I needed BBC Tips to have a statement that would grab the attention in its opening paragraph. I decided that the best way to do this was to have an elevator pitch: Tips is BBC’s answer to the global trend of online education. The platform goes beyond any other existing service, offering an abundance of introductory courses in every field of interest. With guest lectures from celebrities, athletes and recognised professionals, the BBC Tips platform offers one of the most powerful services to encourage personal growth

BBC Tips Community: It’s within the BBC Tips community that I feel is the product’s secret weapon. The community aspect tackles a specific part of the D&AD brief: utilize BIG DATA to engage with Gen Z. My idea for the community app works through the users location and the content they have watched on the video guides. Users would be able to set up events relevant to their new practices (be they a sport, discussing business ideas, or even hosting an impromptu dinner party) that will notify similar users in the nearby area. The community platform would be integrated with social media, allowing further communication between the BBC and its viewers.

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The Elevator Pitch

BBC TIPS Identity, Script, Storyboarding and Mock Video

The Logo

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5. D&AD 2020 :

I had started putting together a solid visual identity through Google Slides, as well as starting to create a logo mark for the BBC Tips product. The logo is based on the BBC Reith typeface, similar to all of the other BBC Wordmarks. However I wanted to go a little bit different with this identity mark. Using the typerface I have been able to create more of a symbol mark - an abstract take on the shape of a pencil. It’s definitely not entirely right at the moment. I’ve struggled quite a bit with trying to make the mark symmetrical and balance the harshness of the letterforms. The ‘S’ makes it quite tricky, if the product was called BBC Tip then perfect! Alas, this is not the case.

Color Palette I decided on a playful colour palette to accompany the type utilizing purple, maroon, blue and yellow as its 4 primary colours. I also want to further explore how I can use patterns and moving shapes to further display an essence of play throughout the project. The idea of play is important as it’s not something you would generally associate with adults - but it is a concept that is vital to human life and an important process we must all go through. It shouldn’t be forgotten so swiftly when moving into working life, so I want the BBC Tips platform to really emulate this.

Script Writing What comes first, the chicken or the egg? The same kind of thing could be asked when creating a short 2 minute video. However for me I found it easier to get some form of dialogue in before I started sequencing images and video. There were a few visual elements that I know that I want to use though, such as the kinetic type animations that are used in Apple’s Big Release video. However, I recalled some of my previous practices of scriptwriting from my work placement over the summer holidays. At the end of the day, this video needs to tell some sort of story.

BBC TIPS

Storyboarding After I had the script together, I started the process of storyboarding. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to have this version illustrated though (I know where my strengths and weaknesses are in design). I decided it would be a good idea to use relevant high quality images and add some kews where needed. I sourced all of the images from Unsplashed.com.

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I thought in this case as its more of a product video, it perhaps wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be a bad idea to get a bit cheesy with it. A lot of my inspiration for this initial script came from the videos you see from tech giants like Google and Facebook.

BBC TIPS

Given that online video educational platforms are not new, I needed BBC Tips to have a statement that would grab the attention in its opening paragraph. I decided that the best way to do this was to have an elevator pitch: This initial mock video was only intended to give me an overall feel for the product and for the video. I got all of the footage from royalty free sites like pixelby or the Adobe Creative store (hence the watermarks). This opening part of the process was really fun and allowed me to get pretty creative and recall some previous teachings that I learned as far back as first year. I haven’t done video editing like this for a very long time, so relearning all the techniques again was really enjoyable. In reflection, my overall feeling for this initial video is pretty happy. Some of the feedback that I got from some of the other (not as interested) students was that they would be pleased to submit something like that for their final piece. However I really want to do well at this project, so I noted down some initial aspects to fix: • There are too many scenes (cut this down) • Bespoke animations need to be added • Doesn’t show any consistency in the identity • Needs to fit with the music • Cramming a lot of information into a 2 minute video: Need to rely more on visuals doing the talking rather than the voice over. Follow the link to view my first draft of the BBC Tips D&AD Submission Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXBcOf VYym0&feature=emb_logo

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Draft Video Version 1

BBC TIPS Feedback and Development

It was great getting feedback from 3 tutors: Ricardo, Angharad and Alistair - each offering their own take on my slides and research. The feedback included: • Make sure the facts are referenced and checked - use credible sources to back up your statements. • Cascade who’s giving the advice (someone who has 20 years experience to someone who has a had an internship) e.g. gaining information on what it’s like to be an intern (broaden out whos giving out the information) : EXPANDING ON THE SPECTRUM (think about how to format it). • Peloton Advert: Think about the type of images that are used. Include diversity and inclusivity. • Celebrity / Workshop Formats. Is there room for mentoring / shared experience (give and take link between prior students and new) Socio economic. • The logo is nearly there but the S is making it tricky. Tighten up the logomark: A Smile in the mind: Get this onto some papers. Sit and look at a pencil if you have to and draw it in as many ways as possible. • Start bringing in more of a visual identity into the whole presentation - colours, iconography, mockups, etc. • Send the script through to one of the creative writing tutors

Logomark and Visual Identity In terms of the logomark, I really had to scale things back and stop overthinking my process. By doing this, I was able to create an identity that was more fitting with the other sub brands of the bbc and their wordmarks. The new logo is still based on BBC Reith (Bold this time). However the key difference is that rather than using the whole word to create the pencil, I have included it in place of the letterform of the I. The new letterform logo has been created using the golden ratio system - made entirely asymmetrical, in proportion, and precise angles.

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6. D&AD 2020 :

BBC TIPS

Overall Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m really happy with both the new logomark and the introduction video to go along with it. Perhaps my only gripe with it is that it still looks a bit chunky. However it has to be this way again because of the S!

User Interface: Browser Next I started the process of actually building the website. Using my research on the BBC websites, I created a pretty simple 3 column grid and designed my template using Photoshop. From here, I was able to implement the visual identity and mock content of the website. I was able to build 4 pages in total: Home page, Featured page, Video Library and Video Tuition page. Again I was really happy with the turnout for all of these pages. Thanks to using a grid system, I was able to create pages that are consistent with the other BBC sub brand pages.

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I then created an animation to go along with it for the opening sequence of the video. I thought this adds a really nice touch and further gets my message of playfulness across to the viewer. The logo animation includes the stretch and squish principal as well as showing onomatopoeic style movements (bumps and bounces) whilst exploding shapes like circles, squares and triangles to the BBC Tips colour palette. My workflow for creating these animations is this: Create the logo mark in illustrator; import to after effects; utilize keyframes for scale/ size/rotation as well as masks to fulfil my desired effect.

BBC TIPS

One of the main differences for this version is that now there is considered footage and animations for each scene. There’s beginning to be a sense of identity running throughout the video. One of the ways that I was able to help portray this was by creating my own mockups of laptops and screens in illustrator. It’s a very cartoony vector sort of style, so this too helps with the running theme of play! However, I still feel that the overall message that this product solves still could be shown better. Another issue of mine is that I don’t feel that it best mentions Gen Z. Most of the celebrities I have used don’t fall into this category and I think this issue needs to be resolved. There also needs to be a certain level of consistency with my animations. You can view this second draft of the video here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AUrt420jD1U

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Draft Video Version 2

BBC TIPS Feedback, Final Refinements and Project Reflection

Feedback • Tips Logo - too big on the screen. The BBC logo was the size it should be. Change the tips logo • Create an Icon set for the sports/lifestyle/etc. - sell the icon in the digital product too • Use a grid!! Build consistency - weave into your narrative. • Could the logo mark act as a symbol? Could the pencil be broken up for each of the icons (sports/lifestyle/etc) Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D&AD kindly extended their submission deadline for the New Blood competition. This allowed me to add a whole other layer to my project as well as tighten up some of the higgledy bits that were bothering me.

The Logo Part of the feedback that I got from Ricardo was to have the logo be more inclusive with the colour palette and the 4 sectors of the product. He suggested breaking apart the logo into 4 distinct pieces that could be used throughout the submission and video.

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7. D&AD 2020 :

BBC TIPS

This of course meant that I would have to redo the introduction logo animation as well now. However, it actually gave me a chance to redo all of the animations to keep the identity consistent throughout the video (website mockups, platform mockups and general tips animations). I created a dancing Tips animation to have constantly playing in the top left hand corner (further emphasising this idea of play) on any of the new Tips animations.

Animation The logo adjustments weren’t the only elements to be uplifted by new animations. I also created further platform ones such as mobile phone mockups for social media, big data visualisation. All of the type animations also got a bit of jazz up by either adding transitions or further playful movements.

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I took what Ricardo said on board but didn’t want to go down that route entirely. I wanted to try and create a bit more motion with the logo and I don’t think that direction necessarily would have done that. I ran with the concept of splitting the logo up however, as well as thinning the entire line weight of the type down. I had to do the thinning myself as the BBC Reith font isn’t quite like Goldilocks - either it’s too thin or too chunky.

BBC TIPS

I hadn’t really thought much about the slides over the whole process, thinking that I could just amend my process presentation. However, I decided that this really wasn’t fitting if I really wanted to try and win an award with my submission. The slides gave me an opportunity to showcase some of the products that I didn’t get to touch on during the video such as the UI for the BBC Tips Community App. It also gave me an opportunity to highlight what the problem is, and how BBC Tips can solve it.

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The Result You can check out my final submission video here: The Slides for submission can be found here:

Decline

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D&AD Submission Slides

BBC TIPS

Overall I really enjoyed doing this process. It was very similar to the job I was doing over the summer but allowed me to take a driving seat rather than that of an assistant. The D&AD really appealed to me as I’m starting to find which direction I want to pursue after university. It will be somewhere in between Branding and Advertisement - both of which I was able to do during this project. I’m very happy that I was able to use animation a lot more during this project with it becoming one of the main elements of my submission. It wasn’t my intention to have such heavy reliance on motion graphics at the start, but adding in the element of play just goes so nicely with it. I think perhaps I played it too safe with my overall concept idea though. Looking back, I would’ve liked to have pursued the idea of BBC Showspace and explore a bit more of virtual / augmented reality. I do sadly think that my safe idea may be the deciding factor into whether or not I could win a prize - in summary: I’m very happy with the work that I’ve produced, but should’ve been more risky with my overall idea and concept.

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Reflection: Statement

BBC TIPS Critical Evaluation

During this D&AD project I was responding to the task of developing a digital product or service that serves as an interface between the physical and digital. They key point in my mind was creating a link for the user that can be applied both online and offline. It was this thinking process that led me to the idea of online video guides interlinking with geo-location real time interaction platform. I thought of this brief as if it were for an actual client, and began thinking around some of the workflow principles during my time at Extreme Sports. In order to keep track of everything I created two docuemnts: A Trello project management spreadsheet to keep track and organise tasks, and a presentation document that I could fill in as the project progresses - making timeline of progression clear to btoh myself and the tutors. Next I decided what practices I could put into place, particularly those that are vital to product design. I narrowed them down to 3 key elements: Visual Identity / Product Mockups / Motion. Through these 3 areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s of design, I set out to create a product that would be realistically achieveable should the BBC of actually wanted to do this brief. The process was one of consistent feedback and refinement in order to create a consistant playful theme that was recognisable not only with the sub-brand of BBC Tips, but with the BBC brand as a whole. I think perhaps if I were to do of done the brief again I would have been a bit more daring in which direction I chose - rather of gone for an entirely different product that would have carried with it an entirely different visual presence.

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8. D&AD 2020 :

James Iredale

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Anthology Statement of Intent

What excites you about the brief? The experience of creating a book especially for print is a really useful skill to include on a design portfolio. I’m looking forward to developing my knowledge around adobe indesign and the best practices that are used when creating a book. I’m interested in researching the principles that come with typesetting, and how designers use them to ensure consistent and quality design throughout their pieces.

What Prior learning can draw upon to work on this project? I remember doing a type oriented session with Sara during the beginning of second year - creating a poster within InDesign based off one of our previous blog posts. For sure the principles that come with forming a consistent grid system through the publication, utilizing principles potentially such as the golden ratio within book design will be something to think about for this year’s anthology.

What themes, materials, processes and research sources will you explore in the project? As a group, we really liked the idea of growth as a journey for our theme, so I’m excited to see how we could potentially include this within the creation of the anthology project. In terms of cover design, it’s considered as seperate process and a certain art form. I’m interested in exploring cover designers and illustrators like Joan Wong and David Pelham.

What skills and techniques would you like to develop and use for the project? I’d definitely like to develop my skills around typesetting during this project as I think it’ll be vital for many different purposes in the commercial world of design. I’d also like to gain a further understanding of the different grid systems and how they can be best implemented in design processes like book and magazine design.

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Book Design

Anthology

Ideally I wouldn’t mind being the winning group for this year’s anthology, however reflecting on last years I think I’d rather spend the time focussing on studio projects (in particular my FMP). As a group we certainly want to be able to produce a high quality of work that represents not only our abilities as designers but would also represent the student body work of the university (in every creative field) in the right way that would do them justice as well as ourselves.

Examples of specific practitioners you will have to research the project. I have already touched on cover designers like Joan Wong (cover designer of the novel series ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and David Pelham (legendary penguin cover designer for the cult classic Clockwork Orange). Other cover designers I’m interested in researching more about in particular are the likes of Rodrigo Corral with his designs for Turtles All The Way Down. His abstract style is renowned for cutting through the noise of the busy world of cover design.

Define your audience. How will you reach them/interact with them? At the end of the day, the audience for the anthology is predominantly the students of London Met university. As has been said by the tutors, this is an opportunity particularly for the creative writing students to showcase their work and should be treated as if it were a performance. As this is a university run project - the audience members will include all stakeholders of the university, potential students wanting to join, alumni students and teachers, etc.

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What is the scope of your ambition for the project?

Anthology

Structure

The first research that I conducted was around the very process of designing a book: What aspects do we need to consider when designing one? Who are some prominent designers? What is the common layout for book design? As well as looking at some examples of appealing cover design.

Typesetting Typesetting is the process of setting text onto a page. Typesetting is vital when designing a book and key element of visual communication. The process determines the makeup of a book - determining the size of the margins, stylizing the chapters, a consistent typeface and font size. “While the very basics of these things can be tackled in a book formatting software, a professional typesetter will go above and beyond, catching and fixing technical issues such as whitespace rivers and ladder”.

Typography From my research I can see that typesetting and typography aren’t the same thing. However well thought out typography is still vital to a book designing project. It is the art of text creation - choice of font and use of space.

Structure Font matter: typically includes author, publisher information, and copyright information. It might also include a: dedication, epigraph, epilogue, preface, foreword, or table of contents. Body: is the bulk of the book, and its where the main content goes: the story or the non-fiction test Back matter: fills in any lingering information the reader might want, such as an epilogue, afterword, appendix, glossary of terms, etc. Trim Size: the standard sizes for fiction are 4.25” x 6.87”, 5” x 8”, 5.25” x 8”, 5.5” x 8.5”, 6” x 9. While in non-fiction, it’s 5.5” x 8.5”, 6” x 9”, 7” x 10”.

Designing a Cover The dimensions of a cover will obviously be determined by the proposed dimensions of the entire book. However it’s still important to factor in some ground rules that can be implemented before deciding on the book size. The rules to consider include: Trim Width x2 / Spine Width / Bleed of about 3mm..

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1. Book Design : Research Typesetting and

Anthology

Back Cover: Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to forget about the back cover, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important to the process of designing a book. The back cover usually provides essential information, a synopsis or a summary of what text the book contains. Therefore, it should get a similar amount of thought to the process of what design to put onto it. This blog post predominantly covers the aspects that are needed to be considered when designing the covers of a book. A follow up blog post will discuss my research around some prominent cover designers.

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Front Cover: Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t judge a book by its cover. Except in this case, please do. Creating book covers is a seperate skill in design. Some of the aspects that need to be considered before designing a book include what sort of feel are you going for with the book, finding inspiration for the book cover, whos going to be reading it (the audience), choosing the right images for the book, choosing the right typography for the cover, and of course exporting (pdf for print).

Anthology

Joan Wong Joan Wong has a vast and impressive portfolio of works to her name including creating the book cover series for â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Crazy Rich Asiansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Her style ranges from simplistic illustrations, to incorporating structured grid systems and bold typography. She is the owner and founder of the studio JoHoWo with a focus of creating thoughtful visual narratives as a response. Wong has worked for some of the largest names in publiushing including Penguin Random House where she designed the covers for H.G. Wells, Samantha Irby, and Jonathan Lethem.

Jaya Miceli Jaya Miceli is a book cover designer, illustrator, and the art director for Scribner. Her strong use of typography can be seen in many of her designs. However her practice and degree related field of interest is in illustration

Kimberly Glyder Glyder is a book cover specialist with multiple awards to her name. She has a recognisable style of illustration and can be seen in the majority of the book covers that she has designed. Her use of colour is a prominent feature, with consistent pantones used throughout her covers. Her client list includes the likes of Graywolf Press, Random House, Ecco, and National Geographic.

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2. Book Design : Researching Cover Designers

Anthology

David Pelham has not only illustrated but also written a plethora of children’s books. He is best known for the much loved Sam’s Sandwich series of books. He was Art Director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979 and created some of the publisher s most celebrated cover art. However his most notable piece has to be his illustration of the cult classic ‘Clockwork Orange’ in 1972. “Pity the poor designer who has to create a new cover for Anthony Burgess’s novel when David Pelham’s Penguin cover” (Coulthart, 2012).

Rodrigo Corral Corral is a celebrated designer, partnering with talent such as Junot Diaz, Jay-Z, Deepak and Sanjiv Chopra, Chuck Palahniuk, Tory Burch, Gianna Angelopoulos, Gary Shteyngart, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, and organizations such as the Criterion Collection, New York Magazine and The New York Times. While Rodrigo’s style is diverse, each project carries enough permanence to cut through today’s noise and rise above the current trends.

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David Pelham

Anthology

Book.

During a taught session we split into groups and started reading different processes relating to creating a book. From reading this, we were able to see the process and the different methods that can be used (such as creating a typeface with scanning and illustrating) to create books to different budgets and how your own experiences can be used to further create a book identity.

As a group we started exploring the 5 topics that we were given: Voices // Transformation // Creation // Contrast // The Unexpected. We wrote down the words that we associated with these and then highlighted the focus topics to the ones that we want to pursue further. We then played around with the different ways we could layout the book. We liked the idea of using simple illustrations throughout with a playful text (InDesign picture taken by Bich Dang).

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3. Book Design : Studio Session - How to Create a

Anthology

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As the tutors said, students could use this work almost as performance. To represent this, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve discussed the idea of using simple rotoscope illustrations to represent the topics generated by a QR code. The main books we looked at during the session were: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and Book Typography by Mitchell and Wightman.

Anthology

Today’s session was group feedback with Angharad. I feel as though we had quite a lot to talk about and to run through our ideas with the tutor was useful. We haven’t had a lot of time to work on the anthology with other projects both studio and work ready being quite hectic. However we were able to clear a few things up. We discussed the possibility of getting creative with the way that we could bind the anthology for this year. Angharad emphasised the importance of wanting to make this year’s publication different to the previous years - so traditional formatting and presenting wasn’t necessarily what she wanted. We discussed the possibility of separating the chapters through different binding or folding techniques. One idea in particular that I liked was the idea of having secret / further information located within the folds of the chapters if we included French Folding. This idea went against what Big, Gemma and me wanted to do, as initially our thoughts were to create a tidy and traditionally presented publication. However, it is definitely something that we can research further. I particularly liked what the tutors said about how this anthology is a way of students to present their work, taking real pride in the stories that they were telling. As if it were a performance. My practice this year and last has focussed heavily on the process of animation and that statement got me thinking that including animation as part of the anthology could be a really nice touch - and it would be something different to previous anthology submissions. The idea could be carried out using QR codes that could prompt people to hover over with their phones in order to make the page come alive with rotoscope style animations. Angharad thought the idea was cool but would definitely need working out how this could be made to look appealing - QR blocks at the end of the day don’t look visually pleasing. We spent a lot of our meeting speaking about the idea of incorporating illustrations in the book in general. Gemma’s line based illustrations were the way that we wanted to go, progressing forwards and agreed that she would create some mockups based on the 5 chapters for the anthology.

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4. Book Design : Feedback Session

Anthology

Presenting

We as a group agreed very early on that we wanted to have a style of illustration that was quite minimal - relying heavily on the line work and a monotonal colour palette (perhaps just black and white or at a push incorporating a bold pantone of red). This style would work nicely with the idea of creating rotoscope animations if we wanted to go down that route as well. After the group had decided the overall theme and style of the anthology, I created a Gantt chart for us to work on so that we could keep on top of all of our individual responsibilities, as well as being on top of deadlines.

Binding I was asked to research some of the different methods that we could use for binding. One of my favourites that I found was the Doâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a Dos style of binding. Another idea that we considered was to have the different styles of bindings as a way of separating each of the 5 chapters. For example, we could do a fold out style of binding for one chapter and the french fold for another. However, in the end we decided that we wanted to keep a polished look throughout the book and decided it would be best to continue with a perfect bound book.

Cover Design We wanted the illustrations to feature heavily throughout the book. One of Gemmas initial ideas of a seed transforming into life could fit really well into the whole idea of the anthology. We wanted to show the book as some sort of journey, giving the students an opportunity to tell their story.

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5. Book Design : Mockups, Illustrations and

Anthology

I was asked to have a look at some of the typographic options. For book design, its common belief that serif fonts are the way forward if you are creating a book designed for print. However, when viewing online, sans serif are usually betteer and work nicely for a contemporary style. I looked at a few of both including Helvetica Neue, Baskerville, Sabon, Garamond and Caslon. However, in the end we decided it would be better to go for one font that could be used for headings and body copy in different weights.

Layout Bic was mainly responsible for the layout of the book. During class, we decided we wanted really large margins so we could include little illustrations around the book - further adding some visual narrative to the anthology. This idea was similar to the sort of designs you would find in medieval books. However, those illustrations were in quite a lot of detail; we still wanted to keep them minimal line based drawings. We explored the idea of having 2 columns for one page as body text similar to how you see in essay writings - however in the end we decided to go for one main column of text with large margins.

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Typography

Anthology

Elevator Pitch An identity that presents the stories shows the creative growth and new stories of students at The Cass & London Met University

Front Cover Illustrations meant to represent the growth of a student at London Met schools (Little nod to them with the recognition on the front cover) Title is Handwritten to fit in with the thin line illustration style of the anthology

Front and Back Cover Perfect Bound book as an A5 format - Good for short runs (printing on demand) / Offers a clean visual appeal that works with the illustrations / Easy binding for recycled material (maybe?) Back Cover is minimalistic (place to nicely put a price / information sticker?) Soft cover - Casewrap 115gsm gloss laminated on white Inner pages - Uncoated Recycled paper 100 gsm on white

Typography Typography - Lucida typeface is used. Lucida Sans Regular: Body Copy Lucida Sans Bold: Subtitle & Page no. Lucida Serif Reg: Author recognitions and further publishing information

Chapter Divisions and Body Copy Chapter Divisions done by a double page illustration spread with title (could be good to have the titles in the same sort of handwritten font as the anthology title?) 6x5 grid system for the page layouts for the body Body copy can be single column or double column depending on the length of the stories. In Margins with a lot of space there will be added â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;doodlesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; similar to the plants of the front cover.

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6. Book Design : The Final Product

Anthology

Working as a group was a lot of fun. From previous experiences group work hasn’t always worked out as well as I had hoped (cough cough). However the dynamics and attitude that the three of us (Bic, Gemma and me) all had towards each other, the ideas we presented and how we communicated was great. Throughout the project, we were in constant communication over Whatsapp - giving us the flexibility to run ideas through with each other. I think that it was a good thing that we were offered the choice of who we wanted to partner with. The fact that we all had our different areas of expertise and interest in design served to really benefit our group. Gemma’s illustration was key in our visual identity, whereas Bic was able to provide our anthology submission with the groundworks it needed by constructing the structure (font matter, body and back matter) of the novel. My contribution was mainly around creating the presentations for the tutors, researching the binding and choosing the most suitable typography for the submission. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the presentation to the tutors for feedback due to ongoing health issues. These health issues unfortunately got in the way of a lot of the work that I wanted to do with this project. In particular, I wanted to get more involved with creating the illustrations for the body copy and margins, As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I wanted to try and implement a way of integrating rotoscope animations as part of the anthology. I had the idea of using QR codes and wanted to try and utilize them in more of a visually pleasing way than the traditional blocks that you see them in. Ultimately this would’ve been something that I would have spent a lot of time on and would have enjoyed presenting the different concepts for. However, it would have been a challenge to implement this idea throughout the anthology. Although we weren’t the chosen group that went on to design the anthology this year, I am pretty happy with what we were able to present. Perhaps we should’ve been bolder in how we approached the project though, forcing ourselves to get creative with ideas around binding in particular. The project was a good group working experience though, with a real hurdle of communicating and staying motivated collectively during the coronavirus pandemic. Overall though the anthology project wasn’t something that I particularly enjoyed. Although the idea of creating a book cover is exciting and can offer a lot of freedom - over the course of the year I have begun to find myself drawn to certain aspects of design and creative practice that aren’t really related to traditional book design. Although there were elements that I did enjoy, I think my general view on the project was hindered due to my health issues disrupting the progress we had initially made as a group. It should be mentioned that Gemma and Bic were very helpful and understanding throughout the group work as were the tutors.

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7. Book Design : Critical Evaluation

James Iredale

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Work Placement Statement of Intent

What excites you about the brief? The brief allows us to go out and participate in the creative industry doing the jobs that we’d like to do post university. This is a project that allows us to build ourselves as industry professionals - applying what we have learned over the past 2 years. What excites me most is the idea of experiencing the workplace as a creative where opinions and designs are valued.

What Prior learning can draw upon to work on this project? Given that I have been able to secure a summer internship for the past 2 years, I’ll be able to draw upon the experiences from them to help me succeed in my role at Stack Magazines. The professional etiquette that I learned whilst there and at previous employment will set me up well for life in the workplace. I’ll be relying heavily on the presentation principles that I learned during my time at Extreme Sports throughout my placement to show a certain level of practical communication of ideas and responses between myself and Steve from Stack.

What themes, materials, processes and research sources will you explore in the project? I think that the processes I’ll really be exploring during this project would be the process around creating a visual identity for a sub brand as well as interesting assets to compliment the new identity. The process I’ll mainly be using to best compliment the identity will be around using 2D animation. Creating the identity for the sub brand will need to have a lot of influence from the parent brand, so ensuring the identity is consistent with that is vital to the project’s success.

What skills and techniques would you like to develop and use for the project? I’d definitely like to develop my logo work for this project. I’m excited to try out the processes that I’ve started with my FMP and put them to test with a live brief for an established company like Stack. I’d also love to try out the process of logo animation - I’ve begun seeing a lot of these trending through Instagram and am excited to try and do one myself.

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Work Placement

My ambition for this project is to try and do a good enough job during these 2 weeks that the company would think about offering me work outside of this. It’s going to be a great opportunity to create some designs that will go onto my portfolio as live briefs rather than as strictly university / passion designs. It also helps me reach a point further with my ambitions for wanting to go into the branding / advertising route.

Examples of specific practitioners you will have to research the project. The majority of practitioners I have looked at are similar to those that I have researched for my FMP given that this job revolves around branding and visual identity. These include the works of Alina Wheeler, Marty Neumaier as well as Chris Do and the video guides he gives on his platform The Futur. However, for the logo design and videos, I’ve been looking at the works of ‘Made.By.James’ on Instagram. He’s a great logo designer and has recently been specializing in creating logos for the purposes of showcasing them through animation. His finished results are so well thought out and revolve heavily around the use of grids. I’d like to try and implement some of his principles and strategies during my time at Stack Magazines.

Define your audience. How will you reach them/interact with them? I suppose my audience could be targeted towards 3 sets of people. The first is the company Stack Magazines. They have to like the work I submit as they are the client - so they are the most important priority of the audience for this project. The second set of audience will be potential future employers, I want them to be able to look at my work and think that this is done professionally and of a standard that they would have. The last audience would be the other students at London Met.

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What is the scope of your ambition for the project?

Work Placement

For a long time I’ve felt that my CV has needed some Jazzing up. This was confirmed when I showed it to Alistair who said it’s vital that I have a professionally designed CV if I’m going for any form of job with ‘Designer’ or ‘Creative’ in the title. Whilst I do have CV’s that are designed - they’re old and definitely don’t reflect the kind of direction that I’d like to go for.

Research I started by having a look at some of the graphic designers that I follow, in particular the ones that are in similar areas of speciality as I want to get into. As luck would have it, I found one that is almost identical to the fields of interest as mine (perhaps minus the animation). Kate Margolis. Her portfolio and CV gave me the idea to utilize presenting its landscape rather than traditional portrait. This will allow me to get a bit more information onto the page, as well as providing clear sections to distinguish.

The Information I think it’s worth putting as much of the professional information on there as possible - showing how much real workplace experience I have in an office environment. Thankfully I’ve been lucky enough to secure work placements every year since starting university, so I hope that this will play into my favour when applying for jobs post graduation. Some of the information I want to put on there include: Extreme Sports, Adler and Associates (in particular working Cannes Film Festival) and SmartFocus. I want to highlight what skills I have that are related to graphic design specifically also: things like proficiency with the Adobe CC and UX related platforms like Sketch.

The Logo There’s no way that I can go down the branding route without creating an identity for myself! So I started sketching down some ideas and values that I believe that I have. These included elements like ‘Innovation’, ‘Investigation’ and ‘Out of the Box Thinking’. I also got to think about me as a creative - what sort of style have I started to develop throughout my journey so far. At the moment, I’m loving the blocky modular style of design that can be seen by the likes of identity strategist Mark Bloom but also the use of geometric shapes. Funnily enough, it was down to me playing around on Illustrator that I stumbled upon the idea that I really liked. I came up with the concept of a shape breaking away and moving forwards.

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1. Professional Practice: CV Creation

Work Placement

My portfolio was in a relatively good position prior to this year. However, given the changes to my CV I thought it would be a great opportunity to completely rejazz the entire design of it. I began by deciding on a colour palette that would benefit my new identity logo mark that I discussed in the previous blog post. Going with a more neutral colour palette, I wanted the work to really be the eye catching part of the portfolio - not have the portfolio be a distraction. The typeface needed to emulate a similar sort of style, for it not to be distracting but easily readable and unobtrusive to the showcased piece. For the colours I decided to go with a simple off black (#020202), red (##F2490C) and grey (#F2F2F2). For my headline font I’ve decided to go with Concord - a simplistic geometric style typeface. For the body copy, I’ve decided to go with Calluna - a serif font that’s easy to read both print and online. When choosing what to put into my portfolio, I wanted to make a really strong statement right from the start as well as at the very end. Perhaps some of my strongest work comes with the process of identity design. Similar to some of the portfolios I’ve researched like Kate Margolis, I wanted to dedicate an entire spread showcasing the logos that I have designed right at the start of my portfolio before jumping into further detail with my FMP - WANDER. This project has given me the opportunity to explore the identity process in all its glory - from creating stylescapes and personas to developing characters to be used as logos and animations. Other projects I want to include in my portfolio include: The Cass Summer Show, Touring Tails, Extreme Sports Iconography and Athlete Mockups, Stack Magazines branding work, Delayed Gratification events animations, and the animation work that I did for the D&AD brief.

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2. Professional Practice: Portfolio

Work Placement

Perhaps one of the most important elements, particularly today is making sure that I have a professional looking website portfolio. It’s on this medium that I should be able to go further into detail about the projects I have worked on both at university and outside of education. There’s many different platforms that I could use to create my website - probably the most popular being Wordpress. Using a CMS like Wordpress would allow me to create a website with real structure. It’s also the platform that most companies and agencies use to host their websites, so gaining more experience with the platform is likely to be valued quite highly for work (although traditionally that’s more of an assistants role - i should know as that’s what I used to do!). Then of course there’s hosting sites like Wix and Squarespace - offering a simpler alternative to wordpress requiring less developing knowledge, but at the same time giving you less creative freedom when wanting to design the website. This wouldn’t be a bad option for my current situation given there’s still a lot of work to be done with my other projects. Options like WordPress and even Webflow would require me to spend a fair amount of time researching and learning the platforms further. Wix and Squarespace offer a good solution given my other university commitments. The hosting platform that I’m likely going to go for however is the Adobe Portfolio one. True it does probably give me the least amount of flexibility - but it has some key aspects. It’ll do everything that I need it to, I have the option of presenting my clearly using a grid, it’s a very friendly user interface. Also, as I have the Creative Cloud subscription - it’s already included in the price and requires minimal setup!

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3. Professional Practice: Website

Work Placement

Deciding which content I want to present on my website is key. For sure I definitely don’t want to show any early works where I don’t feel entirely happy with the outcome. I also want to try and set myself up a niche or area of speciality. My focus throughout this year has always been centered around two main areas: Branding and Animation. However, I would love to try and focus more on the Advertising and UX route of design particularly post university when I’m looking for jobs etc. The projects I feel happiest with at the moment are the following: Stack Magazines - Identity Work and Animation WANDER (My FMP) - Identity / Branding / Animation / Project Management / UX BBC Tips - Identity / Branding / Animation / Advertisement / UX Extreme Sports - Identity / Branding / Advertisement The Cass Summer Show 2019 - Identity / Animation Touring Tails - Identity / Branding / UX I’d also like to try and include some of the logos that I have designed (be they for made up companies or existing ones).

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Content

Work Placement

As part of our practice for the upcoming Work Placement, we’ve been tasked with conducting research into some of the companies that we would like to work for. This is something that I’ve been meaning to do personally anyway as we get closer to finishing the year. Although I had some work experience with Extreme Sports over the summer - which was a really great experience, I’d like to try and focus on gaining a placement with more of a design based agency. Specifically, I want to try and find an agency that focuses on either branding, UX/UI design or even in animation.

My List of Companies Somo: These guys are one of the fastest-growing digital product and experience agencies, working with some of the world’s biggest brands as well as startups. They focus on designing digital products as well as solving technical and creative challenges that companies have. Their clients include Audi, HSBC, EasyJet, Siemens and The Economist. Fjord: As part of a university trip we went to visit Fjord’s offices. However, thanks to Southern Rail, I missed out on this which would have been a great opportunity. Fjord specialise in product design - one of the areas of interest that I’d like to get involved with post university. Their clients include: Natwest, Sonos and Unilever. ManvsMachine: I found these guys when I was looking for summer internships during my first year. I decided not to go for them because I didn’t think my animation knowledge was anywhere near the level it should be for them. MVM specialise in creating motion campaigns for large brands such as Nike. Mash Creative: Mash is a one person studio - so the likelihood of getting a response might be high but getting a placement could be quite low. Mash (otherwise known as Mark Bloom) are an identity and type creative agency based in Essex. Some of his most recent clients include doing some identity poster design for HP. Big Fish: Big fish specialise in creating brand identities, packaging and marketing. Some of their recent clients include Tyrrells, Yeo Valley and GU.

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4. Professional Practice: Placement Research

Work Placement

Although I wasn’t chosen by one of my preferred companies, I was chosen by a cool little publishing / independent supplier company located in Somerset House. Stack Magazines are a well known independent publisher for a range of magazines. Stack prides itself on publishing the works that push the boundaries of contemporary magazines. Their content includes topics that cover global issues such as climate, modern artistry, feminism, tackling ethical and racial issues and even unexpected (sometimes humorous topics) like Skateboarding, an entire book of what the author doesn’t like and even a magazine that gives the reader useful tips to take over the world. Stack works off a subscription basis with customers that are located all over the world. My primary focus during my placement at Stack was focussed around creating an identity for their podcast as well as developing a promotional video for their up and coming commercial service Stack Bundle. I also did some work for a company that Stack shares an office with, Delayed Gratification, an independent journalism publication. During my time with them, I created animations to be showcased at their event featuring Iain Hislop. I was even invited to attend the event. However, during this time I had a few health issues that really impacted my working capabilities. Due to this, I decided not to attend which was a real disappointment as I would have loved to have been there as well as gotten to know the guys at Stack and DG a bit better. I may have been chosen for the placement with Stack due to my background and interest in identity design and branding material. However during the placement I was able to further explore the process of 2D branded animation as well introduce myself to 2D character animation. Progressing forward I do intend to try to implement After Effects animations within my university work, and conducting further research in Brand Identity animators such as Nikita Melnikov and Phong Luong. This experience has been great practice for my FMP around creating a brand and product (app prototype). One thing I would have liked to improve on was unfortunately unavoidable given my health issues. I did try to remain professional and was communicative with both Delayed Gratification and Stack, updating them on how I was feeling and what I was working on whilst at home. “James Iredale worked with Stack from Monday 13 January to Wednesday 22 January 2020. He worked diligently at all times, and was able to pick up briefs quickly and produce a high standard of creative work. One of his pieces of animation was used at a live event featuring Ian Hislop, and a separate piece of logo design and animation are currently being used to promote the Stack podcast. His time with Stack was unfortunately cut short because of ill health, but we’d love to have the opportunity to work with him again in the future.” - Steve, CEO and Founder of Stack

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5. Professional Practice: Stack Magazines

Work Placement

I thought it would be useful to reflect and research on what it could be like to go out and try and find work during these uncertain times. The world right now is in uncharted waters that could have a lasting effect on how we work. The pandemic has hit everybody hard but perhaps, in terms of job opportunities and employment has hit the creative industry one of the hardest. Unfortunately in the world of big business, it’s often creative which is the first to get cut. Now more than ever it’s important as a creative / designer to apply yourself and work in trying to build a portfolio that stands out. There are several areas that I want to look at a bit further given the current job climate. Certainly I’ll still be applying for jobs that interest me particularly around branding, visual identity, advertising, UX and advertisement. However I want to start paying attention to advertising myself for freelance work. From first year, this has always been spoken about not only by tutors but by the guest speakers that have presented at London Met. In particular, everyone mentions the importance of having a well thought out Instagram page. This is an area of my portfolio that I have completely neglected throughout my education. However this is a good thing, as now I can tailor it to the direction that I want to focus on. During this time it’s also a good opportunity to start doing challenges that would benefit my field of interest. Daily logo designs and animations are a good way to pick up new techniques and get into better habits. One thing that I’ve been wondering for the entirety of this year though is whether I pursue education further and apply to do a Masters. Due to my health issues, I put this thought to the sideline, but given the situation, it is perhaps a good time to start relooking at some of these options. In particular, I would need to make a decision as to which pathway I want to take be that a more theoretical and behind the scenes psychological style of design like in UX, continue the graphics route and pursue more of an education in Animation, or go down the more commercial and business route in Advertising and Project Management. The last option I have in my mind is that this time could be a great opportunity to start thinking about creating my own product. My FMP has put me in a fantastic position to pursue the creation of a brand and developing an application. It should go without saying that during hard times, creativity should be able to thrive and succeed.

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6. Professional Practice: Pandemic Professional?

Work Placement

Overall I would say that this module has prepared me quite well for the workplace environment. It has given me the opportunity to work in a design / creative role in a small business where my responsibilities actually had an impact on the company. Through the placement, It has also given me the opportunity to work as a team, teaching us essential skills such as communication, delegation, efficiency, idea generation as well as offering support for each other. It has helped me develop and a certain level of respect that should be shown for other creatives. I really enjoyed my time at Stack, and in particular I enjoyed the experience of working as a creative professional. Being able to set up meetings to discuss ideas around the different campaigns I was working on, allowing me to take the lead on creative concepts and idea generation. I feel as though my results show this. Thanks to my time at Stack, my portfolio is heading in the direction that I want it to go in - further highlighting my interest in 2D animation and branding/ identity design. I don’t feel as though I got everything out of this section of the module though due to my health issues. One of the studio sessions that I found particularly useful was having the introduction to project management at the beginning of the year. Learning principles and best practices such as SWOT and PEST analysis are key for any working environment. The strategies such as using a gantt chart proved useful in university projects (in particular the anthology module). It also helped me to reaffirm the benefit of using platforms like Trello for my design projects, even for the day-to-day design activities it has helped keep on top of all of my projects (well for the most part at least). Although the degree is in design, I would’ve liked to have had more from this workshop. I felt as though we only just scratched the surface and I was interested in finding out more about project management as a whole. It’s definitely something I’ll look further into post university. The portfolio workshops were great for formatting our pdfs and giving us advice on which projects we should present with them. The one thing I wish we did have a bit more guidance on though is building a website and best practices for advertising it. However with that said, the portfolio and CV workshops have been essential in preparing us for the job hunt post university (even if it will be a bit different given the ongoing pandemic). However, I think that there could’ve been sessions to teach us how to present ourselves in conditions such as interviews or how to best to network and collaborate with other creatives. In particular, if we were to pursue a self-employed style career it would’ve been great to have a workshop that focused on preparing presentations for pitches, agreeing and pricings of our services and ways to get work other than through social media and traditional PPC search options.

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7. Professional Practice: Critical Evaluation

James Iredale

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WANDER Statement of Intent

What excites you about the brief? The FMP brief allows for total freedom for us as level 6’s to explore the areas of design that we are interested in. The most exciting part about this brief is that it isn’t really one - we have complete control. This gives me in particular the opportunity to explore all the elements that I want to pursue post university: UX, Advertisement, Branding and Identity and Animation.

What Prior learning can draw upon to work on this project? I think I’ll be able to draw upon many of the learnings from university and expand upon the teachings in my FMP. Animation will be key to appropriately representing the brand, but also the principles of designing for identity are vital to this project - although we haven’t covered much of this at university, my learnings from work experience (particularly last summer) will be essential.

What themes, materials, processes and research sources will you explore in the project? I obviously want to explore the process of visual identity within branding. For this, my key resource of information will come from Alina Wheelers book ‘Designing Brand Identity fifth edition’. Her teachings offer the foundations of creating a visual identity whilst also presenting the length process in its entirety. Other resources I’ll be relying on for my FMP include Marty Neumaier, A Smile in the Mind, Aaron Draplin and the Principles of UX Design.

What skills and techniques would you like to develop and use for the project? I’d like to explore the process of developing a visual identity in its entirety primarily. However, I want to develop skills and techniques like animation in after effects, the creative process of building a promotional video (script writing / storyboarding / working with additional actors). This will also be a great chance to explore product design and the workings of User Experience design and how it is then implemented across a brand and platform.

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Final Major Project:

WANDER

I’m letting my mind run wild with this project! I don’t want to think that this can’t go on to be a project that I pursue and turn into an actual business so I want to get as far I can. Certainly I want to get the fundamentals of a brands identity complete: Visual Hierarchy, Logo, Color Palette, Typography and Imagery compounded into a guidelines booklet. I’d also like to get some promotional material such as a working animation as well as at least a low fidelity prototype (high if possible). The idea of creating an investment pitch document would also be great, but I don’t think this is necessarily something I’d do as part of the submission.

Examples of specific practitioners you will have to research the project. There’s no doubt that the teachings of Alina Wheeler will be key to this project. However, branding expert Chris Do with his educational platform ‘The Futur’ have released bundles of videos around the subject of branding and creating a brand identity. They have also released a video showing the process in its entirety with a small brewery and their rebranding process. Other practitioners include Aaron Draplin and Sagi Haviv for Logo design, Marty Neumaier for the Principles of branding and the resources supplied by the university and Studio Output.

Define your audience. How will you reach them/interact with them? My audience for this project will be potential customers, branding agencies and potential employment positions as well as the chance to reach investors should I want to go further with this. My best way of reaching them will be getting the product out there through various different platforms (for investors AngelInvestors is a good one), and getting it out on my social media page.

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What is the scope of your ambition for the project?

WANDER Building a Brand

Starting a business is something that almost everybody dreams of at one point or another. Throughout my time at university, I have explored many different sectors that are within the design industry from photography and printing, to creating abstract animation pieces. From experimenting with these different practices, perhaps the overarching theme that I would come back to is ‘how could I implement these skills into creating a brand / brand identity’. A close friend of mine and I have been in discussion for some years now about starting up our own mobile application. Given that the final major project at university gives us the opportunity to explore what we want in our final year, I thought this would be the perfect time to take that leap and start a business. I’m looking at this in a number of different ways. Importantly however, what I will be focussing on as my final major project is creating this brand’s visual identity. There’s no doubt that with proper branding behind a company, it will help drive success. I began my research by searching for different articles that could relate to my vision, a page that could encompass all the elements needed to create a successful brand. Luckily I was able to find pretty quickly that there is an abundance of people writing about this very process. One of the first articles I found was from ‘Fresh Sparks’ - a web design company that has masterminded the rebranding of companies like Tissot and New York City Parks. The article in question is: https:// freshsparks.com/successful-brand-building-process/. The writings provide the reader with a simple breakdown of the key elements that are required when creating a brand’s visual identity. To summarise it down further, Fresh Sparks have come up with 11 key elements to think about when creating a successful brand: Brand Audience, Brand Mission Statement, Competitor Research, Key Qualities, Brand Logo (and tagline), Brand Voice, Elevator Pitch, Brand Personality, Cross Product Integration, Consistency, Being an Advocate. Throughout this final major project, I intend to cover all of these 11 aspects. However the blog posts and submitted work will focus more on the design aspects of the project rather than the business and digital marketing side of things. My proposed final outcome will be the following: A complete visual identity based on research and trial and error that includes the use of motion graphics. A brand guidelines book to showcase the design elements that will/should be used moving forward. A working prototype of the application Research begun in order to get seed investment

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1. Final Major Project:

WANDER

Luckily creating brand guidelines isn’t exactly a new concept to me. I have so far created two different sets of documents, one for a start up and the other for an already very well established company. Previous ‘Brand Guidelines’ Created: Extreme Sports International / UNREEL Media - A social media orientated media network Touring Tails - Dog Walking service Although I will be using these two as templates, I feel it would be good to go a step further with this project. I think it would be better to use templates from other companies that are already established. Looking first at Nandos, we can see that they speak a lot about keeping their design consistent visually not only with their typography but how they present their signage and food photography. They do this by using a style of pattern designs as the background that are presented throughout their company material. Overtime, their logo style has developed from a ‘hand drawn’ look to more of a simplified modern look. However they have kept the hand drawn type (designed by South African sign writer Marks Salimu)

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Brand Guidelines - Research

WANDER

I’ve started my research by looking at the post on Piktochart that has the 30 investment pitch decks that were made by some of the most recognised companies in the world. The post can be found using this link: https://piktochart.com/blog/ startup-pitch-decks-what-you-can-learn/. All of them include one key thing: There’s a problem, and they can offer the solution. None of the pitches that were part of my initial research are very visually appealing though, not that this is a huge problem but I would like to make an effort to make this pitch visually appealing. Using templates I made during my internship at Extreme Sports, I’ll be laying out the pitch presentations in a similar sort of way. The main areas that I want to cover within the pitch are the following: Company Introduction; Elevator Pitch; Problem / Solution; Industry Figures; Company Values; The Product; Current Progress; Expansion Plans; Forecast Projections; The Team.

Creating a Prototype - Research From previous sessions in first year, we were introduced to MarvelApp as a way of doing quick high fidelity prototyping of apps and websites. This is a really good platform that allows designers to communicate and showcase a product without having any coding language knowledge. The platforms compatible with programs like Photoshop - so importing high fidelity wiresframes and mockups will be very easy. However, I’ve also just begun using the Adobe platform XD. XD allows for very quick wireframing with existing templates and downloadable iconography readily available. The platform also has built in features suitable for designing applications - in particular the guides incorporated to help measure spacing between elements on the page. XD also provides a prototyping platform that enables screen recording set to the app pages dimensions. My only worry with using XD is creating high fidelity mockups on the platform - will the quality be as good as Photoshop?

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Investment Pitch - Research

WANDER Naming the Brand

There’s a certain art to naming a brand, business or product. It’s gotta be part science and part gut instinct. When it’s done correctly, the brand’s name can lead a conversation! It should create an interest in the product or service and welcome further questions. When generating some ideas for naming a brand, it can be broken up into a six step process. What’s the purpose of your brand: To create a mobile application targeted to those moving to new cities and backpackers alike. The app will provide a safe place for people who have the same goals and interests to meet and socialise. Determine the brands criteria: Basic functionality is free Users can create events tagged to their location with the activities and events that they’re taking part in. Backed by emergency tourism info and advice, with real time communication to help guide and support the user in different situations. A space for both large and small companies to promote events to potential customers nearby. Determining a naming strategy Evergreen Connotation Names: pre-imbued with meaning and association. E.g. TrueGreen, BrightHouse, HelloFresh, Everready Coined / Invented Names: Often having no or little meaning attached to them. E.g. Xerox, Kodak, Skype, Voga Metaphorical Names: you are aligning the qualities and attributes of a person, place, or thing to communicate the brand message. E.g. Amazon, Kayak, Jaguar, Monster, Red Bull Descriptive Benefit: these types of names combine a more literal industry word with an evocative or aspirational word. E.g. JetBlue, FootJoy, PayPal, Carvana Linguistic “King” for the Brand These add an extra layer of “stickiness” to a name. They can make them more interesting, memorable and engaging for the users. E.g. Rhyming, Play on Words, Jazzy and Alliterative. Pair the brand name with Descriptor Phrases and Taglines Think of brand names as the leading actor. The tagline is the supporting actor. Many times, a name that works somewhat well excels when couples with the right supportive phrase.

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2. Final Major Project:

WANDER

Choose the final winner! After narrowing down the list to about 10, 1 will gain further feedback using Google Forms and some questions. After a lot of brainstorming and note jotting, I came up with a total of 34 names, highlighting the 10 that I wanted to use for my Google Forms questionnaire. Packed, Parley, TravelLocal, TRAVELN, Advite, Travelics, Buddle, DMUNITY, Gatherly, TellMate, Helplic, PGroup, Crowdture, Findive, Travvy, Happer, Meetora, Amunity, BeTraveler, Dister, Waitrek, Tourney, UTRAVEL, Bfriend, Eventup, WANDER, Visity, Scoute, Junity, Peer, Ultravel, WeTravel, XploreMate Google Form Questions Which of these names seem most suited for a mobile app? Which of these names do you feel most represents backpackers and backpacking? Which of these names do you feel best represents a platform for group events? Which of these names do you trust the most? Which of these names do you think best represents a community? Which of these names are the most memorable to you?

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Narrow down your list to the best candidates: Compare the leading names against your original brand criteria Check for domain availability Check for Social Media availability Screen the names for trademark Linguistic screening

WANDER Customer Personas

I came across the video on The Futur, a really good YouTube designer channel who specialise in branding and identity. Throughout their video series ‘Building a Brand’ as well as plenty of other video guides, they teach viewers their process of creating a visual identity. Here are my notes from what they call the discovery process - as well as how I used this information to create the personas for my brand WANDER and the Stylescapes they have influenced. Building a Brand What is a brand? According to Marty Neumeier (Author of ZAG and The Brand Gap) a brand is a person’s gut feeling about an organisation, product or company. What makes a good logo? According to Sagi Haviv it must be: 1. Appropriate for the context 2. Memorable 3. Simple and works at any scale 1st step in the Creative Process. DISCOVERY DEFINE GOALS PINPOINT CHALLENGES IDENTIFY CUSTOMERS DEFINE THE BRAND (Challenge the assumptions) Defining Goals: Creating an environment where those few drinks turn into one of the best nights can exist. A safe and comfortable space where people of the same mindset and of similar interests can meet instantly. This is not a dating app, nor a meetup app. This is a social media app that encourages being social in the real world rather than online. A further real time platform where both large and small companies can advertise promotions and talk with their existing and new customers. Identifying Customers: Profile the customer - where to find them and how to best communicate with them Customer Profiling: Create multiple of these. (Male / Female) (Professional / Student) (Rich / Poor) (Married / Single)

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WANDER

Male or Female What are their interests? / What do they enjoy doing? How old are they? What is their Marital Status? Is this person a professional? Stay-at-home parent? Both? What’s their education / What kind of job do they do? What’s their income? What are they looking for? Remember, the brand isn’t being designed for you/me, its being designed for the customer. DEFINING A BRAND - What brands do you feel capture a similar look and feel that you’re going for? How would you describe it? Modern but not boring A design that can be used as an icon Something that can reflect the brand ideals and visions Trendy (or ahead of the trend) Something that can communicate a sense of welcoming (i.e. Adventurous Writing a Creative Brief: What is it? High level overview of the entire project including aspects from the discovery session like: The Client Goals; Design Challenges; User Profiles; Brand Attributes; Creative Parameters. These are then used to work on the deliverables. Reliable: This is a professionally run app based experience, whether that be from a user posted event, rep posted event or company posted event. The back team of the company are there to ensure that it is a safe environment with on hand advice should they need it. Welcoming: Customer service; Free Adventurous: Those spontaneous nights out that always turn out to be the best Gender neutral, corporate, modern / trendy

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Primary Customer Profile / Secondary Ideal Customer Profile

WANDER

What is a stylescape? Collections of images, textures and typography curated to create a look and feel. Similar to a mood board but taken a step forward, arranged in a way that makes sense and completely edited (every item). It creates a single visual idea and sets the direction for the design to continue.

Using the teachings from this video, I thought it would be a good practice for me to create my own personas. I knew that the platform was going to be split up into 2 main sectors of commercial activity. One would be the platform targeting B2C (Business to Consumer) through a subscription model. The other would be focused on B2B (Business to Business) through hosting the hosting platform, enabling them to sell tickets and various advertisements and promotions based on a users activity. In total, I created 5 customer personas. Jakob, a recently graduated student who’s just about to embark on his travels around the world (B2C). Kylee, an experienced backpacker and travel blogger who’s looking to keep her travels going for as long as she can (B2C). Aiden, a city worker who’s always looking to party! (B2C). Mikaela, a bar and restaurant owner looking to acquire new customers to help her small business thrive (B2B). And finally Elliott, a marketing manager for a sporting events company who’s looking to further push his athletes and talents media presence through various live events (B2B).

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Researching Competitors: See what designs they have gone for. Use for reference. See What trends are going on in design at the moment

WANDER Logo Design

The entire process of designing a logo has been a real journey! The entire process is lengthy and certainly not what you would imagine when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re first introduced to the concept of designing a logo. I think it says a lot more when you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think of it as designing a logo, but rather creating an identity mark! The below picture really summarises the journey that the WANDER logo has been through.

GET LOST

Before starting any form of designs, and evaluating the personas and stylescapes that I was going for. After getting feedback from everyone that I had sent the form out to, I decided to go for a combination of about 60% of Stylescape 3 (a bright and more traditional focus of the term Wanderlust) and 40% of Stylescape 2 (a playful abstract style focussed on socialites and hipsters). From these two directions, I created a moodboard that would best represent the brands identity including color palette, ideas for logo design, app mockups, contemporary style images and travel images.

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WANDER

Whilst playing around with concepts I chose a few that I wanted to develop further. Initially, I wasn’t thinking very seriously about a mascot style logo design but rather a pictorial or abstract mark instead. I took the drafts from my sketchbook into illustrator and began to play around with them, before exporting them into my FMP presentation. After taking a break from the logo mark to focus more on some of the ideas for typography, taglines and wordmarks - it suddenly hit me. Going through the works of Alina Wheeler, I came across the page: Characters - “a character trademark embodies a brand’s attributes and values. It quickly becomes the star of a campaign”. It’s been no secret throughout my time at university I have been drawn to the process of animation. The idea of incorporating animation was obvious, but character design? This was an absolute game changer. I speak more about the whole research and development of the WANDER character in a later blog post - but this was my epiphany moment! When looking through my old logo designs, I see that one of the concepts I developed was this crazy half and quarter looking parrot thing. I remember going with the parrot idea for a while because I liked how they have the ability to speak. This could be a playful element to have for a character in a brand, especially if it’s around a social travel app. I started to flesh out this concept a bit further, making him a bit more dynamic and based off the idea of a location icon. What I came up with was more of a chicken looking thing. When getting my feedback from Ricardo, he said that it definitely needs more work from this stage - his favorite image of the logo was one of the animated mockups that I created rather than the main image. He also suggested that the use of a wordmark would be pretty essential and could GET LOST work nicely for this concept moving forwards.

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One of the most important and useful processes that I found whilst coming up for the concept of a logo was simply just getting it on to some paper with a pencil. I watched a fair few guides on YouTube, in particular the guides from Will Patterson helped with my initial stages of the logo design.

WANDER

The final logo and character design was something completely different to what I first expected it to be at the beginning of this project. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out though - it’s truly a good representation of everything I want to progress forwards in in terms of design (animation, identity, branding, advertisement and UX). The witty tagline of ‘Get Lost’ was added as well in Montserrat font. This tagline will be the slogan throughout the company material. I also added an additional App logo that was created using the same complex grid system that I used for designing the icons. Overall doing this process was really interesting and provided me with a whole host of challenges along the way. I really think that I have benefited from doing part of the project as now I can see the journey and process a designer has to go on when creating a great and memorable logo.

GET LOST

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What I came up with was a character that was starting to show a bit more personality - sassy as it may be. The WANDER was now more of a chicken, a bit more compressed with arms, facial features and more depth as whole being more 3 dimensional rather than 2D. The wordmark that I had incorporated was getting there as well but was definitely missing some character to it - it didn’t come across very playful nor like a professionally designed wordmark - just some mix match frankenstein wordmark. My feedback this time around was focussed specifically around the beak of the character - it was very static and was the key thing missing when thinking about WANDER as a brand. Characters should be alive and thus be able to make sound, talk and move!

WANDER Typography and Wordmark

There’s no doubt that every brand needs to have a consistent typeface that best represents their brand. I started thinking about which fonts I should use during the Stylescape process. As part of the more corporate direction, I thought about Gotham Bold - a relatively safe font particularly for techy platform brands. For the second direction aimed at hipsters and socialites I looked at the font Gesta this seemed like a good middle ground between something more corporate but could be used in conjunction with some simple illustrations. Finally I looked at the font Montserrat for my third direction - focussed more towards the idea of backpackers, travelers and this idea of Wanderlust! After getting my initial research and feedback from google forms in order, and choosing to go with a mixture of direction 2 and 3, I decided to go with Montserrat for the brands body copy typeface. When it came to creating a wordmark though, I wanted to make this different. I liked the idea of using a font that would best represent all 3 values that the brand was going for: Wanderlust, Engagement and Community. Wanderlust: Wandering is a journey - constantly exploring and knowing that you’ll never know anything. Being present in the moment. When I think about this I pictured a combination of the imagery of Los Angeles during the 1960’s and 70’s as well as the possibility of stumbling into a tiki bar in Fiji. Engagement Engaging and engagement means its constantly present - flowing naturally and just pretty cool without trying to be. As a typeface I picture it being bold in its process but slick in its presentation. Community My initial thinking of community and typefaces was a picture of social gathering - think of a hippie commune opening up a pub in Ireland… or something to that effect. The emphasis is on social gathering, a place where people can communicate freely and interact with each other. After analyzing my chosen typefaces I started sketching some wordmarks out. I wanted it to be playful and purposely disjointed - but not so much so that it just looked bad! I again used the video guides of Will Petterson who has plenty of different tips and techniques when creating grids and principles of wordmark design. After digitising the typeface that I thought would fit with the brand the most, I began researching some of the other wordmarks that I was going for. My primary research point was the Looney Tunes wordmark - absolutely essential viewing for me when I was a child and the wordmark has always stood out for me along with the tagline ‘that’s all folks!’.

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5. Final Major Project:

WANDER

GET LOST

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I still wanted to keep the playful nature of the typeface - displaying flexibility and this bouncing sort of formation. The line weights are purposefully inconsistent to highlight this idea of a brand being alive and in a way - imperfect. Extra outline was used to give a 3D sense but also to take the harshness of the inconsistencies away from the users eye. The comical tagline ‘Get Lost’ was also added - fitting for the sassy character but also telling the user to go out and explore! My finished result really worked nicely with both the character and the montserrat tagline. Reflecting back on this process, I actually really enjoyed the process of creating my own type and it’s definitely something I want to try and do post university. I think I have a certain knack for designing fantasy / cartoony style letterforms and the idea of animating them is very exciting. Had I had more time I would’ve liked to have done this for the WANDER brand, although this could over cartoonish the brand and take away from the fact at the end of the day, it is still primarily a technology platform.

WANDER Creating a Character

As soon as I began thinking about doing a character as part of my brand I got incredibly inspired. For a long time now I’ve wanted to do something with character animation and I had managed to implement it as part of my FMP. As part of my brand research from the beginning I had given it the archetype of Explorer - seemed fitting for a travel app. However, with a character as the mascot of the company, this allowed me to add another layer to the brand. I thought that a Jester style character would work well particularly with a social media app. A character is the perfect embodiment of a brand and its values. They can quickly become the stars of advertising campaigns and can become cultural icons. The character incorporates a broad spectrum of design including recognizable jingles, voices, characteristics and more to help them leap into the space of the audience’s lives. I played around with ideas of different poses as well as character redesigns. I wanted to try and incorporate the characters beek from a more front/side on profile to see how i could be displayed 3d with possible logo change ideas. Overall though I think the character works better more of a presence within the brand rather than the actual logo.

Audio The sound of brands could easily be forgotten about - however when you think about some of the most popular and well known brands, there’s a certain track or jingle that goes with them. Some good examples are brands like 20th Century Fox, Compare the Meerkat, even the Windows startup sound or the Facebook messenger notification. Sound effects are vital for animation - they help add to the characters personality and mannerisms. This video showed me some of the essential sound effects that are needed for animation. It wasn’t just character sounds I would need to think about, but rather all things in the crazy world of WANDER. I first analysed which sound effects I needed for the character and broke them into different categories: Eyebrows, Blinking, Walking, Spinning, Turning and Whistling.

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I wanted the character to look soft and cute with a hint of sarcasm and mischiefness. However, I wanted the real value to be in the voice.Similar to the characters Bunny and Chick from Toy Story 4, the Wander character may look soft and cute but is juxtaposed by having a strong and powerful voiceover. I wanted to do this professionally, and knew that I definitely do not have the voice talent, nor the audio equipment to do this project justice. I started looking at fiverr for different voice artists that fit with my powerful voice. I chose Dom based off his audio demo track - which I thought would fit the character perfectly! I created a brief for him and sent it over. It was great being in a position where I was able to practice giving feedback for Doms work. It definitely felt weird to be the one giving the feedback, but I think this was a really good opportunity to experience how it will be like working with other people from different departments, and shows a bit more of a leadership role.

Animation I used Adobe’s product ‘Character Animator’ to do the bulk of animations for the WANDER chicken. It was a cool experience to use the software and made life a lot easier! During my first attempt, I synced the mouth pieces using after effects which proved to be quite difficult in terms of timing. After animating the character the rest of the animation was completed in Adobe After Effects. Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4_r0Odk3Z0&feature=youtu.be

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The Characters Voice

WANDER Critical Evaluation

Really engaging in this FMP has been a very exciting and in my mind successful project. It has allowed me to really see the process of creating a visual identity for a startup brand in entirety. I think it’s a common misconception to think that creating a brand identity or a logo would be a simple process. In order to do it correctly I’ve had to really get out of my comfort zone and explore teachings that I never thought I’d have to do, such as the basic psychology of a customer, creating personas, finding out where the brand fits within the market and giving a brand human qualities and emotions through the archetypes, values and tone of voice. What made this project really different from others is that I was able to crossover multiple areas of design - all of which I want to try and build my career around. These topics include Branding & Identity, Advertising, Animation, Character Design and User Experience / User Interface. To be able to explore all of these areas in depth was such a unique experience that has helped to put my portfolio in a great place. An example would be creating the tornado for my WANDER animation. There aren’t any videos that I could find that teach you how to create a cartoon tornado similar to how you would see in Taz the Tasmanian Devil. This exercise really put my mind to the test and I had to draw on my previous experiences to come up with a solution. In the end, by combining the process of rotoscope, looping and the different effects I;ve picked up from using After Effects in 2D animation, I was able to come up with an outcome that blew my mind! It really exceeded my expectations and in my opinion turned out far better than I could have predicted. After completing that task, it actually gave me solutions to a lot of the workflow problems that I’ve been finding particularly with animation. Usually if I couldn’t find a tutorial on the desired outcome that I wanted, I would give up. However, this exercise has really given me a new perspective when it comes to working out how to do seemingly complex outcomes (when actually, it really wasn’t too complex when I come to think about it). It allowed me to realise that if I break things up particularly in animation, amazing scenes can be created by small and simple compositions. It was a real benefit to have my studio doing a similar project to my FMP. This allowed me to have access to some really useful information when it comes to visual identity. In particular, the document supplied by Joana from Studio Output showing their process when it comes to branding. It included some really good slides such as brand positioning and implementing identity through mediums like Iconography. In reflection, I think my WANDER project has been a really complete and successful one. If I had more time, I would’ve liked to have created a larger set of iconography as well as created a fully functioning website (although that might be a project in of itself). This would have given me the opportunity to explore the workflow of some of the web design platforms like Wordpress of Webflow. Webflow would’ve been an ideal one given its capability of implementing animations via After Effects. Overall though, I am extremely satisfied with how my project turned out.

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7. Final Major Project: