Message and delivery, crit

Here are the 3 sheets from the crit we had last week, I felt a lot of the feedback was constructive but also at the same time no one really knew fully what the project about. Some of the crit sheets said they didn't no who Fidel Castro was, and I feel this is quite an important factor in understanding the project as a whole. If there was a way I could include some background information with the brief then it would improve the understanding of it, at the same time though it will take away from the messages in the posters.

 

Message and delivery, Poster OUGD403

As my chosen news story was about the wrongly reported death of Fidel Castro I chose to focus on all the previous attempt to kill him by the C.I.A. I knew a bit about Castro to begin with, all the pretty basic information. When I started to look a bit further into his past it really got me interested.
Their was some really crazy plots to kill castro that I read about and I wanted to put this message across in my posters.

This is just some of my development work from my sketch book

I watched a documentart called 638 ways to kill Casto on BBC iplayer, this gave me really good insight and knowledge on everything to do with Fidel Castro during the time his life was most under threat. It really helped me in my research as well.
638 ways to kill Castro
I used several articles online to develop my research but as I decided my posters wernt going to be directly linked to the news story a lot of my research was done generally around Fidel Castro.
here are some of the articles and web sites I looked at.
The Guardian
The Independent
Article on assassination plots
This is all research directly relating to my posters.

The first poster Idea I started creating was the just image poster, I began by collecting lists of all the weapons and techniques used to attempt to kill Fidel Castro. Once I was happy with the list I started to sketch out the outlines of the different weapons I wanted to involve in the poster. From my research I found other interesting items that were used in attempt to kill Castro. The sea shells for example on the poster are there because Fidel Castro liked diving and the C.I.A. planned to pack a shell full of explosives and paint it bright colours, when he dived down to pick it up the shell was to explode underwater.  This obviously never happened, but it is another example of the amount of ingenuity that went into some of these plots.

My second poster, image with type was the only poster that it was completely necessary to include type at the bottom of the page just to give a brief explanation of what the stars meant. There are 638 of them and i did this just to show the sheer scale of assassination plots or attempts taken out on Castro. When a figure is seen as something more visual I think it helps to show the true scale of it. I also coloured the stars in according to the Cuban flag which I think helped tie it together with the relation to Castro.

For my final poster, just text, I had a good idea that it would need a quote relating to the research I had been doing to make sense with the other posters. I didn't want the tone to be too serious because it is almost a joke how Fidel Castro couldn't be killed. I eventually found a quote he said,
"If surviving assassination attempts was an olympic medal, then I would win the gold."
I felt this quote worked well with the other posters.
I chose to do the type in this way because I did some research on cuban typography and graffiti and a lot of the street art has this very simple angular look to it, often using bright colours. I quite like the way the type turned out I think it fits well with the other posters.

Message and delivery, Mail shot OUGD403

This is the picture I used for Castro's illustration at the bottom of the inside of the mail shot.

For the final part of the message and delivery task we were asked to produce a set of 5 envelopes with a message inside to be sent to relevant adresses regarding your chosen subject. At first I really struggled at this task and it took me some time to come up with a solution to it. Fidel castro was my subject so theres wasn't much direction I could take it in, it was only until I asked Simon for help that he suggested maybe writing to the newspapers that wrongly reported on his death. This was my  starting point where my development could grow from here.

I had used a lot of time trying to develop and think of a solution to my problem this meant I had to think cleverly about how I was going to produce my mail shots, I decided to instead of produce a separate piece of work that goes inside the envelope I combined the two so that the envelope was double sided and folded out with a message on the inside.

This is the outside and inside of the letter, aligning the two correctly for it to be printed double sided was the only real problem I had.

Designing the actual envelope was relatively simple, my message really related back the the original news article that got me interested in the first place. Fidel Castro was angry about that fact that a rumour had spread that he had died and my message was a sort of retaliation to the 'Imperialist media'.
I found a quote from him attacking the media, saying they publish all these lies that people are beginning not believe any more.

Completed alphabet, Illustrator OUGD403

For the alphabet soup brief we had to choose a letter from the 10 we made relating to the world we were given from the randomiser. I was given boom which from the start I felt was a pretty straight forward word to represent as a letter form.
The task was to take your chosen letter and produce an alphabet using the same techniques you used to create your original letter.

I chose a combination of the two effects I created from the original 10 letters to make my final alphabet. I liked the way they these 2 letters looked, but I felt that they didn't represent boom well enough so I used the different effects to make a slightly different looking letter form.

I used a pretty simple technique to achieve my 'boom' effect, it did take some trial and error to achieve but when it came to producing the alphabet it took me a relatively short time.
The original letter form is at the top of the image, I then use the roughen tool to give the letter some texture. I used the pucker and bloat tool to distort the roughened letter to give the exploding effect.

I chose a font off the internet to use as the basis for my alphabet, I liked the way the font was bold and pretty simple, I though that the original letter form would have worked well representing the word boom even without and manipulation.

For the final alphabet some of the letters worked much better than others, for example the letters with curves like the O or the G spread out much better creating a more realistic explosion sort of shape. I dont think the letters would work very well if they were to make words, but I did have a play around and the original word boom that I was given works really well.

The orignal work for this brief is on my PPP blog.

Typeface Contextualisation

With the typeface I created I decided on a label that in a way resembled how my typeface looked. I think Tate & Lyle fits quite well in the way that the letters almost look like grains of sugar, I also like the way it fits together and looks like a pattern. Ive done two versions of it i prefer the coloured in one more.

Victoria's Typeface OUGD403

This was the badge i designed out fo my typeface for Victoria.

At the start of the project we were each given a sheet with a list of questions to ask our partner to get us going on the project. I decided that i was going to give my self a boundary of only using the information on my sheet to construct an alphabet for Victoria. Some of the aspects i considered looking into was invisibility, this was from the question what super power would you want? I felt this though didn't really portrait Victoria though as this was really one of the main focuses in the task.

here is some development work for Vicky's typeface

The aspects I chose off the sheet to start research were Pocahontas, I look into the native american  aspect of that and the parterrens that you see one some of the clothes and rugs. Victoria also chose Kate Moross as her favorite designer, so I looked at some of her work and how she uses geometric shapes in a lot of her design. 
These two different aspects tied in well together so then I started to draw out some the first letters on graph paper. This was initially how I wanted to present it but the graph paper had no real connection to it aside from being there to draw squares on. 

After I was happy with the initially draw out letters I traced them onto a sheet of A1 tracing paper in fineliner. I chose to loosely base the patterns around the letters by having my letter form underneath the graph paper and copying over that,  some letters are a lot more visibel recognisable than others, but when in an alphabet format its easy to see whats what.

After I had finished tracing the new letter forms in fineliner I scanned them into illustrator to play about with them and see how the worked with colour on them. As this was a 2 week project I didnt have that much tome to really play around with them and get the best out of them. I was happy with the way my alphabet turned out but I did was to try different was of presenting the final piece.

For example I would have liked to print straight from illustrator onto tracing paper to give it an even more cleaner feel, I also wanted to experiment more with using letters behind my alphabet, In the end this is how i presented it but was given some feedback in the crit which said that they might have looked better without the real letters behind them.

I felt the final group crit for the work was really useful. It was really interesting to see everyone else's work and how they had approached the problem. I though everyones looked really good and very individual.

Alphabet Summer Brief

We were given a summer brief before we started at Leeds College of Art. In the brief we had to come up with an alphabet that visually communicates you as a person. 

I thought at first of making an alphabet with one aspect in mind that ran throughout each letter to make  it look like more a of a standard alphabet. I developed my ideas further and decided that each letter could represent one thing about me. As it was an alphabet I wanted to have something remain constant throughout it so i decided to work from the already excising alphabet of helvetica. I also kept a theme by drawing each letter with a fineliner, with the exception of a couple letters.

Each letter doesnt necessarily relate to the image but individually represents a part of me. I also wanted to keep the images pretty abstract and not to obvios to what they are. Overall im happy with the way this project turned out and I think it represent me as a person quite broadly.

Sorry about the pictures, not the greatest qual. 

How To

After choosing a subject from 5 different problems or difficulties freshers face we decided on designing and producing a freshers survival kit for when your student loan is late. A problem lots of new students seemed to be face.

Who needs to know?

Freshers mainly but the target audience can very broad

Why do they need to know?

Beneficial for new students just starting university, some extra help 

How will you tell them?

through a pack that includes a flyer with helpful tips on it, a savings card, a tote bag, multivitamins and a packet of seeds as a joke.

Where will the audience look?

It will be available at freshers fairs or with the free give-aways in the uni canteen.

How will they interact with it?

By using the advise given on the leaflets and the potential savings they can make with the card we created.

What is the tone of voice?

Informative but a joke at the same time.

I drew the illustrations whilst we were coming up with ideas to then put them through illustrator and make them into a formation, initially as an idea for the flyer. The camouflage was used behind the images to give the whole project a theme, as it was using the ideas of survival. Im really happy with the way it turned out as we used the image on the tote bag which looked pretty smart.

Sarah in my group designed the lifesaver card, she also designed another piece that the card sticks to like you get on the itunes vaulter cards.

underneath is the label I designed for the multi vitamins I made it really light hearted but still put across the point that healthy eating is important.

The logo at the top was designed by Adam, you can see how the camo runs throughout the entire project which really ties the whole thing together.

Letters

Using the letters we collected for our summer brief project we arranged them into categories, lll admit that I forgot to bring in my letters so this is down to my groups efforts, but you get the idea.

 Serif

 Sans serif

 Geometric shapes

 Illustrated

 Detailed

 Image as type

 Lower case

 Scale small to big

 Uppercase

Line weight