My Wrongs, #2,598 - #2, 643

More photos from the SD card of dreams. This time it's from the 'Tennis' brief, just a few shots of my sketchbook work I took while it was ongoing and forgot to put up here:

Initial website layout ideas

Website design

What 'Topspin' is.

Alan Sugar Opens His Mouth To Speak

Forgot to upload a few photos of some of the screen printing we were doing the other week, allow me to rectify this mistake by doing that now.



Can't be long before me and Ed are snapped up to design for TopShop, can it?

A Dessert Spoon As Head Of Channel Four

Easy now, rude people. As you're probably aware, this week our class was split into pairs and asked to create your own brief in response to a choice of problems we were given, I'm working with Andy Makin, our joint creative force equivalent to the destructive power of Krakatoa. We decided to go with the 'Try Something New' brief, and after a bit of the ol' deliberation and awe-inspiring creative thinking, we've come up with the idea of creating a campaign based on alcohol abstinence, or rather, offering up alternatives to drinking in Leeds. For Students. Students like us. 

We plan on creating a 'Refferal Marketing' network, building a list of potential venues in Leeds where students can go and don't have to drink to have fun [You know the score, Cinemas, Swimming Pools, Brothels] and getting these venues to have printed media advertising their counterpart venues, so it should all work like a network, based on partner co-operation. 

We've also come up with the idea of designing packaging for an Isotonic sports drink [to tie in with the more sporty things we've come up with, like joining a football club or swimming...] that looks like a bottle of beer. The idea is that it will highlight, when you look at it, that you don't necessarily need alcohol to have fun. The packaging would include a fold-out on the reverse of the bottle with relevant information, etc. It's still in the early stages yet, so judge me not, ye non-faithful.

Anyway, we had to create three A2 boards to pitch to the rest of the class today, so here they are in all their Illustrator-based glory:

Aye, so there you have it. [This blog seems to have issues with expanding images when you click on them]

Also, thought I'd upload the posters I made earlier on this week, because I likes them I do. Fred explained that we'd be working in pairs, then he gave us 50 minutes to come up with two A4, two colour posters, one promoting ourselves as designers, the other requesting certain qualities in our contemporaries. This is what I came up with:

Jam

Behold, I have created a step-by-step guide to hitting a slice serve in Tennis for the latest brief, given that I know absolutely sod all about Tennis, I'm quite happy with what I've produced so far. Take an eyeful, a bit of feedback would be nice.

Also, earlier this week I created a quick website for the project in Dreamweaver, I hadn't used Dreamweaver for around 10 months before this, so getting back to grips with it proved difficult, imagine Stevie Wonder playing with a Rubiks cube, that kind of vibe. Anyway yeah, here's the result [This was my initial, I'm going to re-design it to fit in with the theme of the print campaign.]

Negative Orgons

Oh yeah, I was gonna upload the 'final' posters for the Don't Panic brief wasn't I? Well, here goes. 

That last one in grey was the one I went with in the end, after a couple of crit sessions I thought it answered the brief and expressed my message clearer. More people than I would've liked compared it to 'talk to frank' though. 

I Want Total Chaos, And A Holiday Home In The East

The latest brief to descend from above upon us like Napalm is Fred's [I think quite clever] idea of getting us to choose a topic from his book of 'How to do 1001 things'. Great concept, but sadly I picked 'How to hit a Slice Serve in Tennis'. I'll be honest, I know absolutely sod all about Tennis. But that's the point. Anyway, I've been conducting a bit of the ol' research, and I came across this slow motion video of some player or other doing it, direct your gaze below:

Handy that, as one of the ways of approaching this brief I've been thinking about is using my mediocre Dreamweaver skills to create a website as the 'hub' of my campaign. I want it to be both print and web based, web to give it an interactive edge, and print because it's not advisable to bring a laptop to a tennis court. 

The Leeds Side Streets That You Slip Down

Just did this, it's a 'final' of an idea I came up with at the start of the 'Pure' brief. Do not judge me.

I Think I May Be Developing Toothache.

Welcome to the sparkly new blog I've created specifically for the third module. That's right, I'm jumping on the 'whatever is suggested in class goes' bandwagon, I'm selling out, I'm becoming Lord Haw Haw.

That aside, how's about some of the work I've been cracking on with? Well, last week were were given the choice of doing either this months' 'Don't Panic' poster, or a postcard competition for Cog. I went with the Don't Panic brief in the end, this month's theme being 'Pure'. [As soon as I heard that word I thought 'how can I manipulate this..?']

I started off looking at what different takes I could go with, I thought of sex, things like virginity, paedophillia, sex exploitation and the like, I thought of water, it's purity and how we take it for granted, I thought of 'pure' figures in popular culture, the main one being Barack Obama, and how he's become an untouchable 'Jesus' of the 21st century. But in the end, and this may shock some of you, I went down that old dirty back alley route of drugs. Cocaine in particular, the cruel mistress that she is.

I feel I really went for it this time in terms of research and development, because after the last module I sort of thought 'well, this is it, either I sort my shit out or join Al Qaeda.' I began looking at figures, the purity of cocaine, what it's cut with, who uses it, why, what areas of the UK is it most prominent in, etc.

One of the most shocking things I discovered was that it was largely being cut with a chemical called Phenacetin, an old pain killer from the 1800s now banned in the UK because a dosage above 500mg begins to cause cancer. And nobody wants that, just ask Jade Goody.

Anyway I thought this was a serious issue that needs to be brought to the attention of the audience of Don't Panic, I wanted to warn them without preaching. I'm not going to tell you not to do drugs, but I want you to know the risks. I don't think demonising drugs and threats of 'You'll end up stealing your mothers' pacemaker to sell for smack' work on a younger audience, what with me being one of them. You need to treat them as they are, generally relatively intellectual with a prior knowledge of drugs.

I'm rambling, take a look at some of the worky work I came up with:

Design tip: Spreading your work out makes it look like you've done more.

Those were just some of my initial ideas. Thought chalk was a good tool when doing a brief on Cocaine, but yeah, my final designs came out fairly different to what's shown here but I'm gonna have to upload those later because I left the files at college.

In the mean time, why don't you watch a film or ring an old friend to go for a drink?