A - Z (Typography Project) - Project 6

This project involved creating our own fonts, naming them, coming up with new ways to show off type and construct it; it involved methods like potato painting stamping and deconstructing type by tearing it up etc.

This project was interesting for me, because I dont really enjoy typography, but it became more of a learning curve and experience for me than enjoyability, never the less a definite learning experience into the world of font making and the difficulty it involves in constructing them.

What is Design?

During our 1st year at Greenside Design Centre GDC-Link, they asked us to define design.

Our answers were rigid, general knowledge based, and undeveloped.

This year the same question was asked.

Design is something that is more tangible to me now, less distant and foreign. 

I am building a relationship with my skills and improving on those that need practise.   

1st year, was about stepping out of the box and being able to recognize design, design is everywhere. 

Design is everything. Living, Moving, Organic, Mechanic it doesn’t matter. Design is everything we do on a day to day basis, every object. A pen, a car, television are all products of the invention, imagination and potential, engineered to be a product of a functional design. 

You yourself are a product of design.

Every ligament and party in your body is perfectly designed for existence and function. 

We are all designers in our own way, each an individual inventor. As soon as pen hits paper the design process has begun. A process that, like adding the perfect ingredients to a homemade stew, you start with your main ingredients (ideas), slowly adding in other ingredients over time (research), stirring it (analysing), boiling it (conceptualizing), tasting it (refining). Till eventually you have brewed perfection. This is what we do in design, we taste, touch, feel, smell, we experiment until we are fully satisfied with our main course. 

The design process is essential to master and perfect, and essential to improve yourself as a designer.

From a personal experience design is not perfection. It’s finding something perfect in its imperfections. Design is not rigid. It’s constantly moving, improving looking for "the next best thing". To me it’s a life cycle that never ends. It’s being able to extract your surroundings and project them in your work in a more tangible way than reality. 

Design is a product as well as an art it must sell and in order to sell it must attract and relate to the everyday person. Design is less complicated than we think; only needing to step back from a situation and break down the subject into its simplest form, there is where you will find the best designs. 

Design is taking chances, going with your gut and experimenting. Like riding a rollercoaster for the first time, starting a design is scary but once you have put down the first idea, next ideas flow easier until ideas flow out like an addiction.

In short a great design can only be great after it has been conceptualized, analysed, validated and refined. That’s where creating unperfection to be seen as perfection is performed.

other great design blogs that have inpsired me - 50 top graphic design blogs

This year being my Second year at Greenside Design Centre, is all about putting knowledge gained from First Year into practise for second year projects. With that practise we have to be able to decifer the difference between working smart and not hard. Working smart means being able to time-manage, appropritaley choose media, reference and study and appropriatley apply this, as to not waste time or effort in the design process.

All ready this year I have had my taste of working hard and not smart.

So throughout this year I will be be blogging on projects, any constructive critisim is most welcome, follow me on my discovery into design.

Copy Cat Editorial - Project 5

Taken from an essay written on the French FIlm The 400 Blows in our crictical studies class, our task was to adapt that essay to an inspirational editorial we had chosen and change the layout to be more creative than the orginal. These are my final pages feel free to comment.

Photo Farm - Project 4

This was my favorite project because i love photography, I enjoyed the tutorials they furthered my understanding and enthusiasm for photography. These are my finals: Food Finals, Polarized Final, Rule of Thirds Final, Water Droplet Final, Smoke Final etc

Food Final 1

Food Final 2

Food Final 3

Food Final 4

Rule Of Thirds Final 1

Rule Of Thirds Final 2

Chosen Effect Final 1

Polarized Final 1

Light Final 1

Chosen Effect Final 2

Light Final 2

Smoke Final 1

Some Final 2

Water Final 1

Water Final 2

iDesign ER Packaging - Project 3

"Find a need, Fill a need" - In this project we had to discover what designers consider a Design Emergency and conceptualise a product to fill that design need.

My concept is a Design Charger for the everyday run down and lethargic designer; it involves a wrist band and chord which then directly pulgs into the wall, for instant recharge of body and mind.

We then took this conceptualized product and adapted it to the Apple Brand Inc branding scheme; My design charger followed in the same pattern of Apple and became the iBoot charger.

After conceptualizing all of this our final work was to design the package for this product.

We also had to construct a Kusudama, Miniture paper toy resembling our selves and Light box.

This project taught me alot about proffessional practise and final finish, I enjoyed the process of this project.

Character Identity and Symbolic Evolution - Project 2

"Every Successful product or ogranization has its own 'personality', and just as human personalites are complex so too are product and organizational personalities. The trademarks and logos of products and organizations are a means of condensing complex reality into a single simple statement, one that can be controlled, modified and matured over time"

This project brief instructed us to select a movie, in my case Pulp Fiction and represent that movie and three characters from the film through character identity or Logo Design. Once our Logos had been constructed we then had to design appropriate business cards for these Logos. This project posed new and exciting challenges for creating something BETTER, DIFFERENT and MORE CREATIVE.

Type Book - Project 1

The object of this project was to create our own book using type in a way as to represent or characterize people in our class through their typeface and quotations, it was a very interesting project even though i didnt quite finish this one it taught me alot about type and alot about the people in my environment in a very short space of time, was kind of an exciting jump start into 2nd Year Design.