colour postcards

images made for the postcards for the Photoshop colour theory brief. Manipulating images taken in Visual Language sessions with regards to the colour red. Definitely did not spend as much time working on these as I should of, but that's a lesson learnt for next time.

 All of them are placed on 410x148mm canvases in Photoshop, before the background layer is duplicated. One layer I made black and white, whilst the other I coloured red and altered Saturation, Contrast and Exposure levels to achieve interesting effects. Following this I combined the two layers through use of a circle.

I'm enjoying this one quite a lot, could be combined with some type to make a quirky, slightly retro poster design. Some nice Helvetica maybe..........something to try in future I reckon. 

more improvements

getting towards the final product......

i rekon this has solved most of the issues raised in the crits and assessments and whatever. 

typeface has been changed to something a little more unique, and in some ways feels quite appropriate for this poster. Irrelevant elements have been removed, such as the overlapping 100ml thing that I 'ruined' the first one with. The information has been amalgamated and the elements present are given room to breathe, complimentary colours used and all sorts. not that happy with it, but it least it's a more refined resolution, which would work. The original A3-2:1 scale I was going to use (420mmx210mm) is now a bit small to view all the information clearly, so I will scale this up to be printed on A2 I think. A screen print would be nice, but time's running out, so it'll have to be a digital job. 

and so on

further development. aye aye captain

potential typefaces

Another issue raised was the typeface of my original prototype......'have you explored any other typefaces other than Helvetica....' or something like that. Obviously such an effective, functional and attractive font is just too lazy in these days. Yes maybe I was just too lazy to explore other fonts so I settled for a fall-back font. So I explored a few others...which may or may not work equally well....:

the font I will use will be the seventh one, called U.S. 101, which despite maybe being not quite as nice and well-functioning as Helvetica, is indeed different. It is still a very nice typeface. Solid.

collection 100 improvements

I want to amalgamate all of the information onto one poster, as this seems far more logical than having 3 to demonstrate an interpretation of '100'. I came up with a few ideas for how the posters might shape up, without actually laying any information onto it.

hmmmmmm.

the bottom left one makes the most sense for what I am doing....the theme is caffeine, which gives you energy. Yellow is an energetic sort of colour, so teamed up with the upward stance of the shapes, it definately conveys that sort of feeling....in a way....it will look a lot better with the information I imagine. the two bottom left ones are my favourites.

I

hope you are enjoying my blog

100 project improvements

The issues raised will allow me to respond and improve the final designs for this 100 collection project. The main issues highlighted were as follows:

- colour palette used
- over crowding of elements
- use of irrelevant material
- lack of amalgamating data

there were some aspects raised in the crit that I did not particularly agree with, namely the over-crowding of elements and the use of 'irrelevant' material (overlapping 100ml in background), which would dull the posters significantly if removed.

However, I will attempt to respond on this feedback as appropriately as possible, by amalgamating all the data onto one singular poster design, and allow for more room for the graphic elements to breathe and be viewed efficiently.

Another issue raised was the typeface used...it was mentioned whether I had studied any other typefaces...which to an extent yes I did, it always seems like Helvetica is a winner in most situations, but obviously this is my own point of view. However...I will examine a few more typefaces to see if any will work more effectively...

improved type...

a hand-rendered version with an improved 't' for better legibility....although it now no longer matches the first 't'......though that isn't so much of a problem I imagine. maybe the extended part of the 'e' isn't such a good idea either. so many issues. 

book title type

running on the idea of triplets and whatever I spent some time messing around with this typeface I found....called Park Lane I think......it caught my eye straight away due to its similarity with musical scores, so it was an obvious contender. I initially drew this out by hand and then switched it up to digital, which looks somewhat less desirable than the original, which I'll upload at some point. 

Problems I noticed straight away were that the second 't' is too cramped and therefore becomes slightly less legible....looks more like 'triples' at the moment. I don't even know if 'triplets' is a good title word at the moment. The 's' has been slightly distorted as well, and this is why I often hate computers for how impossible it seems to just do something really simple. long. I wouldn't mind throwing in a couple of compound time signatures in the middle of the p where the e begins, on the score. Just for some subtle musical references.

books for book fair.

..................number 3 is the theme that I have been given.
Therefore after a short while of brainstorming and messing about I've decided that I will base my small edition of ten hot-dog fold books on the idea of triplet and swing-based rhythms in drumming, both which can be considered compound rhythms, meaning they are based around the idea of having a multiple of 3 beats in a bar instead of simple beats which would be multiples of two. Of course there are hundreds and thousands of variations, and of course these swung beats can be incorporated into 4/4 signatures and whatnot. and vice versa. but basically I'm planning to make some sort of simple booklet aimed at those who are interesting in learning some alternative rhythms, or even those who have never played drums but would like to get involved........

Final crit. 4/2/11

Issues raised...

:Colour palette used. Wasn't really sure why this issue was raised...perhaps it was not obvious as to why I chose these particular colours. Generally I felt that they had some sort of connection to the type of drinks shown on the graphs... i.e. yellow for energy, an energetic colour. hot drinks obviously link to red, and soft drinks being cold, would be blue. How this was not obvious I wasn't sure.

:Over crowding. really?

:Irrelevant elements. i.e. the overlapping 100ml in the background. I added this just for a small amount of aesthetic appeal, but perhaps it indeed is slightly too distracting, maybe I could fix this problem by further reducing its opacity or making it smaller or something. Can't be getting rid of it though, for I imagine it would just be too bland as a piece of design if this was the case.

:Amalgamate information. essentially, why did I make it on three, why did I not just make one big piece of design displaying all the data in the same place. To be honest, I don't know why I didn't do this. Maybe I will do this today and see what happens.

for final crit

poster designs for my final crit. i rekon the softer colours allow the graph to be read nice and clearly, and make them sit well as a series of designs.

refined ideas

the radar graph was useless. maybe this is just because i'm not that experienced at using illustrator. It was an achievement though, but sometimes it's just better to KISS......which i learnt is an acronym for Keep It Short and Simple...............or keep it simple stupid. So I'm going along with a new plan to create a simple bar chart but make it look unbelievable aesthetically pleasing. Of course I'm not one to judge. But here's some ideas anyway.....

click to enlarge.

a few info graphical ideas.

I started learning how to make graphs and stuff on illustrator.......doesn't seem to be that much you can do in the way of actually creating a graph, but of course editing it after it's been made is just standard.

They're not very good but I'm just getting to grips with it really.

From just entering the data I created a radar graph of all 100 values of caffeine content. Removing every other detail of the graph just leaves this nice shape, but apparently as it contains no other information it is practically worthless. 

standard click to enlarge............

got quite a way to go yet. However I don't really want the entire of the final chart to be crafted entirely digitally......because I don't. I'll deal with that later though.