Type Workshops.

I never really considered myself a type based designer, it's something that doesn't come naturally to me at all. That doesn't mean, however, that I do not appreciate it's worth, or admire when it is done well. The type workshops are already beginning to make my head hurt, and it hasn't helped that I have missed a few. So this is me trying to make sense of what I have been told, and filling in the gaps of that which I have missed.


The first session.
We looked at how different aspects of a piece of typography can change, however subtly, how it is interpreted. We started off by picking typefaces to reflect out voices, I chose Curlz, just for a giggle, but it proved to have some interesting results. We managed to pick out exactly what kind of voice someone who spoke in Curlz might have, and it certainly wasn't mine!
We also looked at how we can portray emotion using type. Using the word 'dog', we tried to change how the dog was feeling using different typefaces. The results were all relatively similar, but it was the minor changes in positioning, size, and weight that really made the word seem 'happy' or 'sad'.


For the 'sad' dog, I chose Baskerville - regular. This serif font is more formal than most of the sans serif fonts out there, and the lowercase letters are less attention grabbing than if I had chosen uppercase. However the real reason for me choosing this is because the 'ear' on the G, actually looks like a dogs ear, lowered like it has just been told off. The loop of the G also looks similar to a tail. 
The positioning of the word on a page also has a huge baring on how it is read. For instance, I've made this image bigger so that you can see it, but I would've made it very small, and positioned it somewhere towards the bottom of the page, possibly to the right hand corner, or central. Both of these create a feeling of loneliness or solitude, adding to the dog's unhappiness.. :( 

The second session.
This session I missed, though I have tried my own experiments based on what others have told me. They were looking at sentences, and how the problems faced in the previous session are duplicated by the presence of more words! 

The first problem being, how to break a sentence up without destroying it's readability? Sometimes what looks good, doesn't always read good, and therefore this should be one of the first things to consider when laying out a piece of type. After a while of playing around, these are the two variations I chose for my proverb. The first example reads almost like a line from a poem, there is a slight rhyme in the words 'cannot' and 'spots' which I quite like. But then the second example totally breaks that. It reads slightly disjointed, but seems to have more impact this way. 

Interesting stuff. These are the things that go totally unnoticed, 

unless you spend a bit of time trying to decode them

Finally, there was a mention of kerning. The way to do this properly, so I have been told, is to take the biggest area of negative space and  reflect that across the entire word. As you can see using my name, the biggest area of blank space is between the L and the A. Using that as a base, I spaced the rest of the letters to reflect that area. Simples. 

(the top example is the newly kerned version)

The third session.

(will be posted as soon as I recover the work from college!)

Summer Postcards.

This was the first project back after summer, and our introduction to the print module, which I'm currently enjoying very much. This year seems a lot more lecture based already, as opposed to last year where we spent most of our time finding things out ourselves. It's quite refreshing to sit and listen to someone tell you things. Anyway, I digress. We were asked to produce 4 postcard sized pieces. One full colour, one 2 colour logo, one 3 colour word, and one single colour pictogram. The idea behind this being an exploration into the possibilities when faced with a problem such as a limited colour palette. How can you used those two colours to create more colours? Using variation of tints and overlays, a lot more is possible that I first thought. Or not even that, I just didn't think to think about it until it was pointed out. Anyway, You may notice that my 'word' postcard is in fact two colour, not three, but that was sue to a misunderstanding.

Another thing I enjoyed about this brief was how easily I slipped back into the way of working, I thought I had forgotten how to get things done this summer. I know it was only a short brief, and not really worth much, as well as the fact that this is marked mainly on our knowledge of print techniques...

Despite this, I knocked out a fair few design sheets, I had an overall theme, a message, the whole lot.

What a great project to start back with.

Summer Project.

I won't post anything to do with what I did over summer, a lot of that is already on my first year blog, in all it's barely comprehensible glory. Instead I shall show you the out come of what I finally decided to look at.
As I spent a lot of my time working in the pub, and I've been looking for an excuse to do something with rubbish, and there is a lot of waste in that place, I put two and two together. I asked my co-workers to save what they swept up off the floor when I wasn't there, and when I was there I did it myself. I ended up with a full black bin liner of everything swept up from behind the bar at the end of each shift. There was all manner of surprising objects in there, and I began the mammoth task of separating, washing, and recording all I had collected.
The result was a set of books, a book for each material collected, i.e. glass, plastic, metal.. Each book was laid out differently, using a different method each time. In theory it would have been brilliant! Had I put the time in and got the whole set complete. I ended up with 3 books instead of the desired 5. However, I do feel I got a good deal of what there was to get out of this project. I put more thought than physical work into it, which I feel was necessary to mentally prepare myself after a good two months of vegetating. Overall, it could've been better, but a good effort and concept none the less.