Graphic Design - Level 6

Todays session on how we should price freelance design projects that we undertake was really useful. I have done a few paid projects before and have always come out of it feeling like I’ve under-charged because I have felt like charging more is too pushy and asking too much. I had always considered that for any given project e.g. a logo, a poster, a rebrand, there would be a fairly consistent price, however it was interesting to hear about pricing and how much it varies, dependent on the client, but also depending on you personally; how much money you need to make and how much you can justify charging.   For the paid projects I have done before, I have set a fixed price at the beginning; while this is a viable way to do it, and appropriate for smaller projects with a singular outcome, we also learnt about setting a day rate, considering how much we will be working on it and how much we would ideally like to end up with you can figure out a day rate. We also leant abou...

The whole idea for the visual identity of New Music Market is that it is contemporary and represents music whilst in contrast takes on a more rational mundane supermarket aesthetic as a sort of parody. Thinking about the target audience of the service, whilst everyone does listen to music and the target audience can’t be incredibly specific, I think in general I can assume the demographic will be younger people (18-35) - this is because it is an online service, and also the music on it will be quite current and contemporary.   I created a range of quick ideas for the logotype. Designs 1-10 demonstrate a fusion of rational sans serif type with more stylised and decorative letterforms, clearly demonstrating the main idea of the brand. I liked designs 1-3 because of the range of different letterforms within the logomark, I feel like that communicated the idea of different genres and styles of music really well. I also liked design 6 - I think the way the central ...

During the summer I visited the Design Museum in London to see the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, whilst there I had a look at the ‘Cornflakes to Cola’ exhibition; exploring the early work of Sainsbury’s in house design studio who created the labels for all the own brand products. In the 50’s in London, Sainsbury’s set up its first self service store - customers could pick their own products from the shelves, which was very exciting given the had not long ago been rationing during the war. In 1963, Sainsbury’s in house graphic design studio was created, led by Peter Dixon. The team created hundreds of designs a year for own brand product packaging design and general branding for the store. The aim was to create a fun and exciting brand identity and line of products, making shopping a fun experience.   I found this exhibition very interesting, it was intriguing to read about the general day to day of the studio and their design process, consulting often with CEO John Sains...

My feedback from my tutorial with my supervisor was very good. My essay structure that I had listed out was ordered well and had no issues, all I need to do now is start to fill it up and pick out quotes and references that I will apply to each point. One bit of feedback was that perhaps I have too much content and I will struggle to keep within the word count, however once I’ve filled in my structure a bit more, I will have a better idea of how much I will be writing about and what will be most important to focus on. We talked about getting some primary research for my project. My intention is to email Ben Arfur, a designer I contacted last year for my creative report. He has designed a lot of album covers and his input would really benefit my project I think, getting some insights into designing for music in a contemporary environment. I don’t won’t to send him absolutely loads of questions because he will be less inclined to respond so I really need to consider what th...

Given the feedback I’ve received on my idea for the design project, and also having been more informed by some of the research I’ve done, I have come up with 2 ideas for a direction to take for my practical design project: We no longer consume music in the sense that we don’t rely on purchasing cd’s or any other physical format in order to listen to music, we stream and download it because its free and instantly accessible. For the future of the album cover, this perhaps means it will become less relied upon and for musicians and artists, this means that they receive less money because they don’t get compensated from music downloads, how can these problems be solved, and how can this project prove that design is still important in the consumption of music? Music Products/Artefacts - If we no longer rely quite as heavily on the album cover as a visual signifier of the album, maybe we can replace it altogether. What if instead of an album cover, there was an object or p...

Introduction - Graphic design is undoubtedly important in the consumption of music - this essay will explore a number of ways that design can aid the consumption of music Album Covers Introduction- Album Covers are the most fundamental association between design and music - briefly discuss the origin of the album cover   Album Covers Theory - Triangulate 3 sources - Why is an album cover so important? - aesthetic theory? - How can one singular image convince you to buy an album? Case Study - XTC - Go 2 - anti design - consumer process of buying a record is recognised Case Study - The White Album - compared to XTC’s Go 2 - is this anti design? - why was it still so successful? - The Beatles reputation and status - would this happen in the modern day? Controversy - Case Study - Scorpions - Love Drive Production - Creating Intrigue - Case Study - David Bowie Blackstar Musical Acts as Brands - Triangulate 3 sources   Charismatic Brands - Famous band logos - e.g. Rol...

For my research I read ‘Cover Art By:’ - a collection of interviews from designers who create album covers and record sleeves. The questions asked in this book are incredibly applicable to my essay, touching upon topics such as how relevant album covers are in the era of streaming music. Here are all the quotes that I found which I thought will be useful for my essay ‘An album cover is the initial moment of the record. It’s the doorway into the music’ - Peter Blake Adrian Shaughnessy Quotes ‘music became a commodity … they were actually encouraging the audience not to place any value in the package they were buying’ ‘The major labels still commission cover art, but its rare to find examples with any resonance or originality. When we do encounter meaningful cover art, it’s usually because of strong-minded musicians demanding a visual corollary to their music’ ‘we live in an era where the demand for music - in both its recorded and live forms - has never been gre...

Todays session on methods to plan our time and get more organised had some interesting points and ideas. I liked the ‘rule of 3’ idea - each week you set 3 priorities for the week, 3 priorities for the day and 3 wins for the week. The idea of being able to set an achievable amount of tasks to do for each day/week sounds like it would be do-able and not too daunting. There were also methods of how to work more efficiently, which included ‘Pomodoro’ - working for 25 minutes and then having a 5 minute break, with a 15 minute break every cycle of 4, and ‘Eat The Frog’ - doing the most daunting task at the beginning of the day. I think these could be good to implement from time top time when I need to be slightly more productive, I like the ‘Eat The Frog’ method because the idea of getting the majority of the work out of the way is appealing.  Annual Goals Get a placement Complete Extended Practise Complete PPP Term Goals Complete COP Get a good start on extended prac...

Who was involved in the study? This essay examines the effectiveness of ‘co-design’ - involving the end user in the design process in order to get contextual insights in to the design process that perhaps the designer would not have thought of. The essay involves both the designer and the end user.  What arguments does the article make? The article argues that by involving the end user in the design process, the designer will gain first hand insight and make a more effective design. In this specific example with asthma leaflets, It’s the end user/target audience who know about asthma and know what information they would want in the leaflet. Though the designer can research and gain a lot of insight into asthma, they can never truly understand what is required in the leaflet without that first hand primary input.  What suggestions is the author making in relation to how we practise design? The author suggests that co-design is an effective method of practicing g...

Graphic Designer/Artist Patrick Thomas came in to give a talk about his practise and some of his projects. Originating from Liverpool, Thomas studied Design at Central Saint Martins before heading over to work in Barcelona. He’s now a lecturer at a university in southern Germany. I found a lot of his projects really interesting, one thing I really noticed was the strong sense of function and meaning that each project had, everything he’s done has been for a reason. A great example of this was his ‘Protest Stencil Toolkit’ project. Stencils are inherently highly functional, and by using them as the content of the publication, Thomas gave people the means to communicate in however manner they wished, it’s almost collaborative. And while Thomas is an advocate for a lot of current social and environmental causes, he’s not passing them on to whoever buys the toolkit, he’s giving them the means to communicate these ideas if they so wish to.  I also really liked the simpli...

As an afternoon workshop, we printed abstract compositions built up of sections of letterforms. The three typefaces were Baskerville, Cooper Black and Neue Haus Grotesk, 3 distinctively different typefaces. We drew small sections of these typefaces and then cut stencils to print with.  The exercise was very interesting to undertake, the first instinct is to draw out fairly recognisable shapes and sections and to print these very precisely and rationally, however as the process continued it was intriguing to experiment more, playing with more abstract shapes, chaotic layouts and varying levels of print thickness.  My first composition takes curved shapes from Cooper Black and lays them out in a swirling composition, I was aware of the relationship each shape had with each other on the page. For the second composition made from Baskerville, I concentrated on circular shapes, a lot of them made from the negative spaces. With a selection of more rational self contained sh...

As an internal collaborative project, I decided to partner up with Jamie to do a branding based project. Branding is one of the areas of design we’re both interested in and I also really like the style of his work and some of thy projects he has done. We started thinking about what to do for the project, we considered a few ideas; something music based as that’s something we’re both interested in or a product like beer or coffee which we could really push the packaging design for. Ultimately we came to the conclusion that while its all well and good to pick some company or musician and rebrand it, actually it would be good to do something more locally based, that way we can experience it, gain more knowledge on it, and also get feedback back from the actual business/establishment.  With this in mind we have got to the point where we want to research bars, cafes, restaurants, coffee shops in the nearby area. With a location like this, we can produce touchpoints like a logo, pro...

For my first extended practice project I want to do an individual publication project. Whilst leaning towards branding and visual identity as the areas of design I favour and potentially would like to go into, I still really enjoy editorial and publication design and would like the opportunity to take everything I have learn about it throughout university and create a very developed publication.  I personally think some of the most engaging publications and zines that I have seen are those that focus on one specific idea/object/thing and go into great detail about it. As a reader, its interesting to look through publications like this and learn about something that perhaps you have never considered or thought about in great depth. Thinking about the nature of the content, it could be informative, purely visual, it could catalogue a variety of things, it could document a specific process/journey or maybe it could be more collaborative. Whilst it will still be an independent pro...

Following on from the feedback from my presentation, I started to think about how I can develop the idea for my COP design project. The fundamental issue with my existing idea was that people don’t consume  music anymore, they don’t buy records, they stream and download music. People don’t consume music anymore I I Problem: Artists don’t get as much money from streaming sites. Also perhaps the spontaneity of finding records in a shop and listening to them has vanished, people experiment with music less. I I Project Considerations: I want the outcome(s) to be more experimental, perhaps even making objects. I I Solution? The idea of creating objects is interesting I think, we did a similar thing at the end of first year when we created considered objects based upon the micro genre of music that we picked. Thinking about Caramel, by Connan Mockasin, the album I was originally going to redesign for my project, having done a fair amount of research on it, I ca...

What is the main argument of the article? The main argument of this body of work is that graphic design can be utilised for activism. More-so, it questions the capacity of how it can do so by comparing - “campaigns that aim to be activist but in their practice are closer to commercial design culture, to projects that are not executed by graphic designers or originally have no activist intention, but are visual interventions that can be interpreted as activist graphic design” What is the main theoretical framework of the article? The main theoretical framework of the article is based upon ideas put forward by Papanek in Design for the Real World. Papanek talks about design which is ‘on the social side of good’ - some of his requirements for this include that designers should be advocates for users, and that instead of voicing a clients voice in a commercial design, or their own, they can create design that is a service to the reader. A definition of what ‘design activism’ is cr...

In general, the feedback for my cop proposal was positive. My essay question makes sense and does not need to be altered and the research and reading I have done for my essay is on the right tracks. It was noted that the specific areas in which graphic design aids the consumption of music that I identified were good and that I need to push them individually and back them up with theories. In regards to research methods, it was suggested that an interview would be a lot more effective than a quiz/survey - a survey of 20 people or so really isn’t very effective data.  Most of the constructive feedback I received was in regards to my practical design project. While it was said that the work I had done for my Caramel album rebrand was good, and the physical typography experimentation was interesting, the basis and rationale of my project needs to change. While I do love designing record sleeves, the fact if the matter is that although vinyl has had a small resurgence, we simply d...

Intriguing Concept The album cover for XTC’s GO 2 is almost like anti-design, its self aware about the consumer process of buying a record and how bold and eye catching cover designs influence that and it literally tells the reader, however by doing so, creates a captivating cover that you want to keep reading.  Controversy This is the cover for Lovedrive by Scorpions, when it was released, people called the cover art crude and unnecessary, however by doing so, this controversy sparked conversation, and ultimately increased sales, purely because more people heard about it then they would have otherwise. Hidden Messages - Production Value The packaging for the vinyl release of David Bowies Blackstar contained various hidden messages and secrets. Shining a uv light, heating or putting some areas in water revealed these hidden messages. People become so excited about finding these messages that it boosted the sales of the vinyl record.  Bran...

One example of how graphic design can aid the consumption of music is in advertisement when it gives the music exposure, therefore increasing the amount of people who know about the album and subsequently the amount of people who listen to it. I read an article about how in 1967, Jac Holtzman, head of Elektra Records, was driving down the Sunset Strip and had the idea to advertise bands on the massive billboards; there was such a high volume of traffic that it would undoubtedly reach a vast amount of people. Soon this location become a hub for massive billboards adverting musicians, and the record companies and designers started creating more experimental and eye catching designs, stretching out of the standard dimensions of a billboard. Bruce Springsteen actually spray-painted on his his own billboard which led to a lot of publicity about it. 

As a practical experiment to create a logotype for Connan Mockasin, I bought some golden syrup and drew out letterforms with it. I think the thickness and viscosity of the syrup really materialised the idea of caramel. At first the letterforms didn’t come out that well, I literally tried drawing out his name however by the time I got to taking a photo, thew syrup had spread out and the letterforms were less refined. So I refined the process by quickly doing larger letterforms of the same letter 2 or 3 times. I then decided that by squeezing more on the ends of the stems and doing thinner connecting stems, the letterforms assumed quite a nice gloopy psychedelic shape. I edited the images of the letterforms on illustrator, refining the shapes by decreasing the amount of anchor points, creating more fluid refined shapes. I like the end result, I think it does convey the idea of caramel whilst also looking quite free and psychedelic. If I were to refine this logotype more, I would experim...