type session - magazine layouts

Some stuff from last week's type session; where we are beginning to arrange large amounts of text onto a magazine page; along with an image.

We had to arrange the same text to suit 3 different styles of publication:

- academic journal
- sunday supplement
- magazine aimed at 16-21 year-olds.

The Issuu docs shown below display progress from simply dumping the information on the page to attempting to give them some kind of order using typographic rules and conventions.

Open publication - Free publishing - More layout

words.

From the brief; we selected 5 words/phrases that could fall into the 4 categories shown. This should hopefully enable us to re-write the brief quite effectively...essentially it is picking out the most important parts and removing less useful information. By looking at the words it is a little easier to get an idea of what the brief is asking for; rather than reading paragraphs of text off the brief.

5...

5 things the brief is asking us to do:

- help them engage with a younger audience
- communicate the qualities of the newspaper
- make 'i' the most read paper amongst students
- encourage a younger audience to sample the paper
- help them build a student community and have an in-depth interaction with this market


5 problems we are being asked to solve:

- There is a lack of interaction with students/young people; i.e. the newspaper reading audience is older than that it seems. I rarely see someone my age reading a paper
- They don't have a huge budget for this problem
- Not many students are reading their paper
- There are other, FREE daily newspapers in circulation
- Many students now catch up with the news via the internet, social media etc.

Chosen YCN brief

After careful consideration, we decided to opt for the 'i' brief, which involves creating a campaign in an attempt to make the 20p daily paper the most read paper amongst students. Here it is:

For a while we were undecided between this and the 'Fredrigoni' brief. The Fredrigoni brief had a lot of creative potential and would have worked well as a sort of continuation of previous explorations made in the print module at the beginning of the year. There was also the potential to get quite heavily involved with colour management, which appealed to me quite a bit. 

However; we felt that the 'i' brief presented us with quite quite an interesting task; particularly as it is geared towards attracting a student following. This puts us in quite an ideal location to begin tackling the problems presented; we are in a part of the city that is constantly swamped with student types, and obviously a lot of establishments have adapted themselves to cater for the needs of students (a good example being banks, who seem to switch up their adverts to shout out to students as opposed to professionals/families etc). Hence we are in a good position to immediately begin researching and developing ideas.

I think another reason the brief appeals to myself personally is the idea of potentially being able to directly have an impact on the people/places around me. If, by some miracle, we were to succeed and be chosen as the winners of this brief, it would potentially affect many of the people I see every day, as they are the target audience of this brief. 

On top of all this, we felt that this kind of brief suited our skill sets pretty well; it seems like there will be some good opportunities to get involved using type/layout skills, as well as some deep thinking. 

YCN brief questions

Some information regarding the details of the collaborative brief; i.e. who my partner is and why we have chose to work with each other; why we think it will work well etc.

The second sheet is a contract which is intended to detail the various roles we will undertake during this brief. It was quite difficult to fill this one out as a lot of our skills overlap as such, we both share pretty similar interests in terms of design work, and so realistically we will have to both undertake the same roles which will in theory double the workload; hopefully resulting in some very effective work.

Next up we will have to take a look at the potential YCN briefs that we could choose; and narrow it down to find one that would suit our skill sets effectively.

OUGD203 Module Brief

Stocks

Testing out a few stocks. The photograph of course does not really show how each one looks on an individual basis; but it's clear to tell that certain colours work better than others. The top left one, although it doesn't look amazing here, provides quite a nice texture and weight for the ink, and would not interfere too much with any colour. Unfortunately at this point in time I could not test them with colour as I have been using my desktop printer thats under my desk.

Colour testing

Thought it would be best to test some of the colour schemes out on one of the posters in order to get a better idea of what works and what doesn't. The results were quite surprising, actually; some of the colour schemes that I imagined would not work in fact look quite effective, particularly the 5th, 6th and 7th version which make use of quite different colours to what I had originally intended. In fact, the yellow I had used originally (5-1C) almost looks a little bit lemony compared to the rest. I will have to test them out alongside the booklet to see how these colour schemes might work over a variety of media.

Poster development (Layout)

Put a few ideas together (in terms of layout) for a poster which could either promote or be part of a package received upon purchase of the typeface. At this point in time I have only used one image and a colourway (Number 8. of the colourways investigated earlier, one with a slightly dimmer yellow and a deep purple) just so I can focus on layout. I quite like the idea of reducing the opacity of the image and overlaying the type, as though one was acting as a drop shadow. The image however is landscape so might be more suited to a landscape poster, though I will have to test this out

I also slightly re-thought the logo to tie in with the geometric nature of the typeface, although I am not sure whether I like it as much as the circular logo.

Colourways

The first noticeable problem with my original work was the lack of investigation into the use of colour, something which is of course of great importance in any design process. I initially chose a deep blue (DS 202-1C) and a bright yellow (DS 5-1C) to convey the idea of 'midnight', which developed out of my own personal familiarity of coming up with some of my best ideas very late at night...which of course in turn helped name the typeface.

Anyway, I messed around with a few other colourways - bearing in mind that this project is intended to be printed in duotone format, partially due to its aesthetic appeal as a print process, but also due to the potentially reduced costs resulting from this.

Here they are:




For some reason the colours in this issuu document are not appearing as vivid as they did in the psd files; for example number 1; which is the original colour scheme used; the blue appeared a lot deeper and more night-like. I am still quite enjoying the original colour scheme, though then again I'm quite enjoying the slightly hazy qualities of number 2 and number 8; something that ties in well with the imagery used, which is a reference towards dusty city transport systems where you would perhaps find a typeface like this. I will continue with these three colour schemes and apply them to other media to see which is most effective.

Resubmission - concept

Resubmission work for OUGD201 - Design for Print. 

It was identified that the reason that I did not pass this module was due to my lack of investigation into print processes, which of course meant that there was no evidence for my understanding of these. 

For this module I spent a lot of (too much) time creating a typeface, which should have been the material I could use to investigate print processes. I named the typeface 'Midnight Maths', and would perhaps best be suited to infographics/signage/transport systems and the like. 

So essentially what I was doing, or should have been doing, was designing some sort of promotional material + packaging, which could then be sent to or bought by those potentially interested in that sort of thing. 

Therefore, it seems necessary to investigate print processes that would be suitable for this, on a variety of media such as posters, sample cards, and of course the booklet that I have already created, which displays the typeface, shown below:

silent movie snapshots

Title Sequence + Idents

Title Sequence - Final from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

IDENT 1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

IDENT 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

IDENT 3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

IDENT 4 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Silent Movie - Final Videos

Final videos for the 'Silent Movie' Brief. Basically getting to grips with basic AfterEffects skills.

Bouncing C - Final from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Sliding C Final from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Toppling C Final from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Spinning Letters Final from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Rotating C Final from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

60 seconds

60 seconds + audio from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Completed a semi-first draft type thing for my title sequence. At the beginning of this brief, I was quite worried about how I would manage to fill 60 seconds worth of video, but after getting started it was not too bad. 60 seconds still feels a bit long for a title sequence..particularly on TV where most adverts/sequences only seem to last half that time.

Without proper feedback I am unable to tell how close to completion this is, although I have already identified a number of issues that could do with addressing:

- In the initial 10/15 seconds the colours of the CMI screen compared to the logo do not match; although this will be fairly easy to sort by fixing up the original AI files.

- The audio does not match at certain points - despite my best efforts to arrange everything to fit in time with the chosen track, the track is in fact ever so slightly slower than what it needs to be. This is a result of me creating the title sequence in the wrong order; realistically I should have laid the track down first before animation, so I could have animated it directly in time, but this will be a lesson learnt for next time. To be fair I can easily solve this situation by opening up the track in Ableton and speeding it up ever so slightly.

- Wrong section of audio track used - Although the section of track used is approximately 60 seconds in length; it sounds a bit flat as there are only trebles and mids at that point in the track....so once again if I open it up in Ableton and cut and paste a few parts of the track together I should be able to get a nice range and deep sound.

Other than that, it seems pretty sweet. I've been thinking about quickly getting some circuit board imagery and allowing that to drift through the background, almost as a texture, just for a bit of extra interest as the background currently looks fairly flat and boring. Should hopefully only be a half hour job, if I've got the time.

50 seconds

title sequence - 50 seconds from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

50 seconds of my title sequence so far. A fair amount of it is still pretty rough at times, and I have not yet laid the audio over properly, as I need to warp it a little bit to make it fit properly.

Title sequence progress

I've started to reach around about 30 seconds of my title sequence. The first ten seconds were fairly heavy in terms of the number of layers used, and at my skill level became quite a lengthy task to achieve. Luckily the following sections of the sequence are a little bit more basic, which will allow me more time to refine them and get them spot on. Here is a semi-rough draft of the first 30 seconds:

1st 30 seconds ish from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

Unfortunately the logo, being a psd file, is affected quite badly when scaled up, so I got hold of an eps file which sorted that problem out nice:

title sequence improvement from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.