Category: Student work

Christ or the Antichrist?

For todays brief, we were given a word to respond to. Mine was ‘Religion’, and with this I had to create an image or composition that clearly represented the word. I started. by drawing a spider diagram, writing down any words or ideas that related to religion to see what I could use as a subject. I liked the idea of using a crucifix as my subject as its shape is quite graphically symbolic and well known. I wasn’t sure on the tone I wanted to convey so I started writing down different questions, theories and ideas that people commonly had with religion. I liked the idea that god might not be this perfect image that he’s portrayed to be, and could actually be something sinister. I had this result after questioning why such tragedies happen in the world and why an all powerful being such as god would let them happen. I started questioning if he truly is god or the devil. I wanted to take this idea and inject it into the second image, which is supposed to change the tone of the first by adding an element.

Firstly I started photographing a crucifix that I borrowed. I used this as it was a large enough ornament that also had Jesus on it, making the first image represent the religion christianity, and the pain and suffering Jesus endured. I decided that the most universally understood message of the opposite of god was by turning the cross upside down, I felt that this would be a good way to show how God may in fact act more like the Antichrist. I pinned the cross to my dorms notice board, allowing the cross to be upright, and still have shadows falling down in the correct direction. I knew that I couldn’t just flip the image as the shadows wouldn’t be in the right direction, so I photographed the second image with its bottom sellotaped to the board so it wouldn’t fall forwards. I then uploaded the images to photoshop. I wanted to erase the pins and the sellotape, just to show the cross, which I did through using the clone tool in marked off areas via the section tool. I felt that this symbol and idea of God was very old fashioned so I wanted to replicate that feel. I increased the contrast and turned the images black and white to create an old illustration effect, whilst cleaning up the background. I didn’t want to overcrowd the images so I left them on white backgrounds and liked how the negative space became apart of the cross, suggesting purity. I thought that I could show resentment to the idea of God being the Antichrist through some sort of relic effect, as if someone had scratched and abused it in spite after reading it in a book. I found pngs of scratch marks by pens on paper and selected the outlines and and pasted it onto of the second image, putting the blend option as divide, which broke up the marks and made them distorted and more authentic. I decided to target the face and the script on the cross to emphasise a rejection of the identity and ideals of christianity.

Typography iSpy in UoR

During the 2nd week of mini-projects I was honoured to meet Eric Kindel who presented me with the brief, that, unlike many others, involved going out and exploring real-life examples of eye-catching type around us. These could have been photographs of logos, singular letters/numbers, 3D type etc. Quite luckily that day the weather was quite good, hence providing us with good lighting and subtle shadows that accentuated any raised type.
While outside I focused on finding hidden type, one that wasn’t visible straight away, or its features weren’t as obvious from the distance, as opposed to up close. I also tried photographing these examples of type from different angles, especially if it was raised, to see whether that affected how we see it. After we have taken the photos in the given amount of time, we were asked to produce visual collages based on the common similarities between the typography we have taken photographs of.

Beforehand, I edited any images I wished to use in this mini project via Adobe Photoshop, which allowed me to emphasise some of the features, and make sure that all images within the collage look visually similar to one another. In some cases, I have also straightened up the photographs, making sure that they have some logical perspective, and are overall pleasing to look at.

Working outdoors really reminded me of what it means to be a graphic designer. Having spent a year in London last year, I learnt that working from home is a challenge, as the best and easiest source of inspiration is the world that surrounds us. During this activity, I also consolidated my skills as a Typographer, as it taught me to explore and type that I haven’t paid much attention to in the past.

Monograms – Illustrator design task

So far Kim’s project was one of my favourites as it allowed me to explore something that I’ve been putting my free time into – Illustration design. Although the task asked us to design a monogram using our initials, it felt a lot more personal and therefore really allowed me to express the way I work and approach tasks.

As mentioned previously, the aim of this task was to create a monogram – a combination of two letters, using either Garmond or Futura typefaces. I personally chose Futura, as I am more attracted to the ‘orderly’ aspect of sans-serif typefaces.  Initially, I started sketching out some ideas on my iPad, however, I then decided to go back a step and start designing on paper. Personally, I found this a lot more helpful as I noticed that I was generating more ideas while working on physical paper. After generating some sketches in pen etc, I then decided to go back to working digitally. As we were designing monograms (logos for our initials essentially) I decided to use Adobe Illustrator for this task. I first began recreating some of the sketches I have done previously to see what works best alongside the Futura typeface. The first ideas were quite simple and straightforward, a either one or both letters were upright and looked like two letters put together (literally). It wasn’t until I started looking at more abstract versions of my monogram, I began designing monograms that had some interest to them. The 2nd photograph on this page presents the design development process based on one of the more abstract ideas I have created previously. First I started by rearranging the orientation of these letters, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and then once I was satisfied with the result, I began rotating the monogram in order to see if it looks different/more effective when looked at from a different perspective. My hypothesis was quite right, presenting the monogram at a slight angle made it look more stylised, almost like a logo.

Lastly, I added some colour and drop shadow to the monogram I liked the most. I chose mint green as the primary colour and then matched it with a purple tone that I chose using the colour guide tool in Illustrator. Besides the overall look of this monogram and its colours, I personally like how the letters complement each other, without masking what they are; both ‘n’ and ‘b’ are completely readable but have a more abstract aesthetic to it then.

Stairs

For todays task we were given the freedom to let our creativity flow in this Broken narratives activity. We were given the choice of four themes. I chose the theme ‘stairs’. As stated in the brief a man has been hospitalised for an unnamed disease, the hospital has 7 floors for people like himself, the lower floors are for the more ill patients. He is moved the lower floors as the day goes by he moves further down along the way he reaches a state of hysteric and therefore begins to hallucinate. He eventually reaches the lowest level and therefore death.

Throughout my work I wanted to portray images of illness, death and doubt. I think I did this pretty well and I really enjoyed this task. I wanted to tell the story through a series of different ways and techniques and feel like I achieved this relatively well considering the short time frame.

Some of my techniques failed but it was all about the creative experience. I tried to create stairs going deeper and deeper as every page turned but I couldn’t seem to get it. However i do think the stairs on the front cover are effective. I did the painting of the Earth because i wanted to try and make it as if he was moving further and further away from earth as mentioned in the brief but i didn’t end up finishing this. The black pages with the cut out lines is what i imagined the man would’ve been thinking in the dark times during the storyline because i wanted to make it more emotionally evoking.

Money

My word was Money so I was thinking about making something which represents money and the current situation of  (Covid-19 ). My first page  I had  a bank and then I have  made  money floats outside which then connects to toilet roll.  For my second Illustration I have created a wight scale which shows that toilets rolls are more important now then money.

Penguin Covers

Initially we recreated a cover of the Great Gatsby in classic penguin style, I then used this template to create covers for some other books. I did however chnage some aspects of the template to better fit with the book contents. The Norwegian Wood cover is a deep red in fitting with the orignal cover, Call Me By Your Name uses a royal blue for the same reason. In this cover however I changed the penguin logo to a peach, the peach is a symbolic part of the book with a lot of relevance; I also used a font similar to the one used on the latest edition covers of the novel. My favourite design is the Fahrenheit 451 design, this book is an incredible look at censorship and the importance of literature in our society, i therefore have used text from the first page of novel but censored some of the words. I have chosen to keep the original penguin orange because it had good connotational links to Fahrenheit 451.

Transmogrification of my initials

Creating a monogram

Kim’s project

In today’s brief, our task was simple: to create a graphic representation of our initials. I began by sketching out some initial ideas using the Garamond font, as I liked the serifs that this typeface contained. I brainstormed some ways of how I could combine my initials ‘M’ and ‘H’. These two letters have similar forms, so I tested out different ways of intertwining them in an interesting way. I found that drawing the ‘M’ and ‘H’ separately and then photocopying them in different sizes allowed me to quickly experiment by cutting them out and rotating and shifting the letters to find a monogram that worked, before sticking them onto my page as a series of experiments. This was an efficient and effective way to work for me and produced quick results, rather than sketching out the letters each time to come up with a different design.

After having chosen the compositions that I liked best, I decided to develop my ideas further with use of colour. One idea I tried was inverting the white background and black letterform to create black negative space and a white monogram. I liked the finished look of this, and then proceeded to try a combination of  black and white negative space, switching between the two in different sections of the letterform. I tried this with coloured pens as well, which i liked, but not as much as the black and white one. So, to finish, I drew out the black and white version in a slightly bigger size to produce a final, neat piece.

I really enjoyed this task and the way it encouraged me to think about design in simple letterforms, I effectively developed and created my own glyph based on my two initials which I thought was really fun and creative!

My name and finding ways to shape it

Creating a monogram. Today we took the time to experiment with making a monogram out of our initials, my initials being S and C, meant I did at times find it difficult to draw, and keep as clean cut at possible, however the curves in both letters meant I had a wide range of experimentation to do fitting the letters with each other. I started by just sketching the letters themselves and becoming familiar with their shapes. I drew them as both lower case and upper case. I then did a load of rough sketches on a piece of paper on how they could fit into one symbol and decided on two designs to make a final clean copy of.

I chose two designs, and each one containing where the S or C was large (being the letter that had the hierarchy in the design). The first design has a capital S, with a lowercase c in the top of it, I liked this design for its simplicity, and at first glace it almost looks like a normal S. The second design was a large C with the S fitted inside of it, I think this design was my favourite, just for how well the two letters fitted together, and I feel like it would be a good logo for a company to do with water (just as it looks like a drop of water in the centre). I manipulated the S slightly to make it fit better, and cut off part of its tail, but overall was quite happy with the outcome.

Lastly I experimented with a bit of colour using an app on my phone, just to see how they would look with different colour choices, but I still personally prefer the black and white.

From Political to Social issues

For this project I split my collection into 5 different categories:

  • Magazines
  • Posters
  • Social distancing
  • PDF downloads
  • Covid-19 street art

For magazines I focused on Vogue and Time, as I found that they both covered controversial views on covid-19. I particularly liked these two covers from Times. (I found both images below in the vault for Times, under covers from 2020 https://time.com/vault/year/2020/)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are following the news at the moment you will find that America seems to believe that they are immune to covid-19. Or a better way to put it, is that it is a myth (according to their president Mr Trump).

I found the Trump cover ironic as when it was published (14th May 2020) it states “over the past 14 weeks 84,000 Americans died of Covid-19.” Yet America did not seem to be doing much to slow down the death toll. I found this magazine cover portraying the political     side of covid-19. Bar the controversial message the image is portraying. I particularly liked the graphics and typography that was being used. It’s a fairly simple image with type and an illustration of Donald Trump with a mask (that is not being used affectively), yet it is clever. I like the message of the mask not cover his mouth, as he believed masks to be stupid; yet we all sat here wearing them everyday.

The second magazine cover, covers a social issue during the pandemic. Of the youths of this time and how this will shape their life forever. I found this one a good one to use, as we right now are in education and we are the youth being affective by this. The photographer Hannah, has been virtually photographing her classmates in quarantine. This imagery was done by a student which is why I think it is a good one to study. The issue Hannah wanted to portray was that she found that she was stuck in limbo due to covid-19. These years are the ones she’s meant to be transitioning into adult hood, yet she’s feels like she’s going backwards being stuck in her childhood bedroom for the past several months. I found this topic interesting as I don’t think its normally portrayed. I found a lot of social distancing and instructions graphics for covid. But this was the only ‘generation pandemic that I found. Which you would think there would be more off with the amount of students and people being effected in education by this.

For both these topics, I believe that the target audience is meant to be different, yet has ended up the same. They are both a cry for help to the general public of this issues following this pandemic; outside of the deaths.

Pairing ‘m’ and ‘b’

For this brief I wanted to experiment with different ways my two initials could be joined together to create a monogram. This was an interesting task as I felt as though it forced me to look closely at the specific details of letter forms. I wanted to keep my design simple and I wanted the letters still to be legible despite the brief stating that it was fine if they weren’t. I felt as though if I joined the letters in a way that made them no longer legible then the monogram would lose meaning. I developed my idea by playing around with colour and sizing of the two letters, this resulted in a few different outcomes that I was pleased with.

Sketches for Initals