Category: Student work

Multiple shades of green

For Sophia’s logo trends project I was instantly drawn to the ‘Multiple shades of green’ theme. I chose this theme as it best resembles me as a person, being quite reserved, relaxed and very chilled. I wanted to show a sense of purity/naturalness in my logo and going off of the images that I had collated for my mood board it felt right to choose nature. I felt that choosing a more natural themed logo would be fitting as it fits with the green scheme and there is also a surge of a more ‘green’ approach to the way we live as people. It started off with a simple idea, by using photoshop tools I was able to duplicate a pattern of leaves which parts of it were then blurred. I then added a font that I found on DaFont, which I used my initials and name in design.

 

Green, nature inspired

Green, Nature inspired logo

The theme that I chose for this project was “green” because I liked the simplicity of it and the freedom to take it any direction.
I started off grabbing pictures from online of anything green and just throwing them together to see common themes amongst the colour, obviously nature and leaves cropped up quite often so i decided to use that.

 

I then created a second mood board of nature inspired logos or logos to do with nature to see common themes used or styles chosen for these logos. It was from these logos that i decided on the style of font that I’d like to use, because i saw it was quite a similar font used between all of the logos i’d picked out, so i decided to go with a bold blocky font.

 

I then started on ideas for the logo and settled on the use of a leaf in the design, once i’d created the leaf i decided i wanted it to sort of grow out of the R to tie into the theme of nature, i moved the leaf across created some cutouts on the R to make it seem the leaf was coming out of the R and then pushed the Z and R together to have the leaf sprawling over the Z aswell. my final decision was to change the R colour to green to tie back into the original theme of the logo.

The Great Gatsby

Completing the first task for ‘making a penguin’ was straight forward due to video tutorial. I enjoyed setting the typefaces and manipulating the tracking, leading and the horizontal and vertical scales. I will be able to use this new approach on how to set up words on a page to make using InDesign a much easier process. The part that caused the most difficulty was when making the ‘cartouche’. At times, when trying to manipulate the pen tool I would need to go back and re-adjust slightly. After a while I became accustom to this and the whole process was easier. I would then go on to use these same techniques that I had learnt on my next book cover that I designed.

   

Penguin Book Cover

Trainspotting Penguin Book Cover Design

Having replicated the Great Gatsby book cover, I was then tasked with creating another Penguin book cover for another book, which I quickly decided would be Trainspotting.

Not knowing how much to change the original concept, I decided to create two designs – One following the rigid Penguin formula and another more experimental use of the elements.

First, I created the more formulaic design. This was comprised of me adding a train track image along the top edge of the coloured block, using the alignment tools to ensure the shapes were correctly arranged. I adjusted the lower quote, made easier by the paragraph styles used on the previous file. When placing this in context with a Photoshop Mock-up, this works well but, as expected, is pretty unoriginal and not recognizably different to the previous design for The Great Gatsby. While the colour was changed to mirror the colour palette of the films marketing, the similar orange shade made this adjustment barely noticeable.

For my more adventurous design, I decided to focus on the imagery of a train, an important symbol as the story ends with the lead protagonist betraying his friends and taking a train to a new life in Amsterdam. Looking at reference images of train tickets, I began to replicate the structure, with the ticket obviously forcing the books cover to be landscape instead of portrait, which would likely allow the book to stand out from other Penguin novels when sold in high street shops. I then added text over the design, mirroring to some degree existing train tickets, while trying to balance the design and create visual hierarchy. The title and author name still needed to be the focus, so I used size and placement in order to direct a viewer’s eye in that direction.

Although this design is more adventurous, it’s deviation from the original means that, for me, I believe this to be the better design. The more creative concept, use of appropriate imagery and subversion of conventions allows this to be more enticing as a viewer of the cover. The design works well as a Photoshop Mock-up, while still featuring the relevant information from the original.

The Shining

For my second design, I decided to base my approach around ‘The Shining’ and because of this I have added many nods to the Stephen King novel. I started by recreating the famous carpet that is seen in the hotel, this process was a lot easier than I initially thought it would be. I made the first initial shape and once that was made it was simply a process of copying the pattern. The font used for the title, author and the brief description is a very similar to the one that was used throughout the posters and book covers for the original. Room 237 has also been included. Although there are many nods to The Shining, I have also kept many of the Penguin book cover conventions. The ‘cartouche’ still remains and the original page layout has also been kept the same. I decided to change the penguin logo, on this cover the logo is white making it slightly more legible to the reader but I still feel like this could be improved upon.

 

Blue Letterforms

For this brief we had to look at different letterforms around campus with a running theme. For my theme I chose colour, my chosen colour was blue.

Each of the letterforms had a different function, ranging from instructing such as the ‘paper only’ bin and the blue roundabout sign. I also looked at  different perspectives, thinking about how each sign is viewed. For example, for the pedestrian and cycle pass sign I angled the camera down and head on along with the Oreos in the vending machine. Whereas, for the big E and T on the wall in the typography department, I changed the perspective as this is how these letterforms are seen as people walk past.

Peter Pan book cover

For my second book cover I used all the similar styles to the original penguin book cover and related to Peter Pan. The first thing I did was change the colour to a green colour that most Peter Pan books are keeping it a solid shade as this is what all penguin book covers are. I then went on to remove the penguin and add a Tinker bell outline to replace it. I was able to do this by inserting a picture from good images then cropping all the back ground out using the snip tool. I then went on to add some more images around the top that frames the penguin book logo. Overall I went for a more simplistic approach as when doing some research all of the penguin book covers where very simplistic and I tried to follow this with an approach of a Peter Pan book.

Fox Design

When beginning this project I had some difficulty curating ideas for my logo. I had tried various methods to gain some inspiration such as creating mood boards, quick sketches and filtering through others’ logo ideas on Behance.

After this research, I decided on a colour theme and what aesthetic it would fit into. the choice I made was an abstract mix of deep forest green and a high contrast orange. In the first few hours, I could only muster up one idea for a logo design. the idea was that the letter F from my initials starts before the letter D and crosses through the middle of it. It took me quite some time to create as I was a little rusty in using adobe Indesign as it had been a while since I hadn’t done any projects like this. In the process of making this first draft of my logo, I realised how much of a challenge it was to mix my colour theme into my design. I considered changing my colour theme but I saw some great examples of the use of my colours and was determined to get a product using these colours. (see the use of colour in mood board)

so I know now that the colour theme is not going to be my problem, now I can focus on what I can do to fix my design. After experimenting with the pen tool and getting myself familiar with Indesign again I decided I would attempt to draw a fox to use as part of my branding. And on my first attempt, it came out perfectly and exactly how I wanted it to be.

After I had my fox it was very straightforward from there. I started experimenting with how my name looks and how I can make the fox look back over behind him at my name. I even decided to add in some defining features that would make my brand recognisable if it was commonly seen on high streets etc…

After I was happy with how my logo would look I decided to implement it onto some business card designs and an app interface to get a feel for how my logo would represent itself to the user.

I even asked some fellow students what their thoughts were on the design. from their feedback, I tweaked sizes of fonts to better match the premium feel of my brand.

Nasrin designer

My logo is based of the 90’s style clothing. My mood board shows the 90’s popular clothing, the colour schemes and fonts for most logos/brands, and some famous branding. I chose to create my logo as being bright and vibrant just like most posters,logos and or brands in the 90’s. I named it The 90’s style in the beginning then changed it to Nasrin designer. The font chosen is based of the fonts used mostly in the 90’s and the name in caps makes it stand out way more. I chose similar colours to what I have gathered in my mood board too.