Limited Edition

This was our second ‘Visual Expression’ project of the year.

We were each given a newspaper article, which we would have to read and form an opinion on. We then had to portray this opinion through a poster which would be produced on a limited run of 6 copies. Hence the name ‘Limited Edition’

My article was about the recent trial of Ilich “Carlos The Jackal” Ramirez. A terrorist who is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of a French secret agent. The trial relates to a series of bombings that took place in France in the early 80′s which killed 11 people, Carlos is being charged with masterminding the attacks.

He claims he is innocent. As a man who has admitted to the killing of 2000 people in his terrorism career it seems strange that he would lie. However, if found guilty he would never leave prison, if found innocent he would leave jail in about 20 years. He has gone on hunger strike in protest of his innocence.

I wanted to show this curiosity in my posters. Is he lying in the hope of eventually leaving prison, or is he actually innocent of these murders.

The only real rule was that the poster had to be made using a process from our University print workshop. No digital printing whatsoever was allowed!

This hands-on approach was really fun and meant that we all got involved as a class, rather than slouching in front of a mac.. As I’m doing now.

Some of the initial sketches I had for poster designs:

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I then began work in the print room. I wasn’t sure which process I wanted to use, I also hadn’t picked a final design, so I tried silkscreen, lino pressing, collograph plates, embossing and monoprinting.

Eventually I narrowed it down to these three ideas. The last one being my chosen design to be created in a run of six.

Lino press

Silkscreen

Silkscreen (final)

A photograph of all six prints together will be posted. They’re currently being marked (fingers crossed)

HNY x

Happy New Year

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I have two projects at the finishing line, one of these will be updated soon. The other is a competition entry for YCN, so I’m not sharing any of that yet!

Over the Christmas period I’ve been taking a lot of photos on my iPhone using the Instagram app. Nothing too serious, casual snaps.

Here are some of my favourite images. To follow my Instagram feed, search ashwatkins1.

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Type Rules, Don’t Use Arial

In groups of 4 we where each given a rule for practising good typology. My group consisted of myself Sam Weston Harry Winfield and Alice Caines.

We would have to create a 60 second film using any medium (animation, stop frame, movie-style etc) which would show the type rule effectively.

Here is our contribution, in the style of a kind of typographical sitcom.

‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’… Part I: Magazine

Alongside the re-brand brief we where given a project based on the 1962 novel ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ by Ken Kesey. This project was run in two halfs, the second will be covered later.

Part One

For the first part of the brief we where asked to ‘evolve’ the classic book layout to become more like a magazine, where there are less boundaries for designers. This could be done anyway we wanted, so we could focus on type, layout, illustration etc. Our interpretation of what the book could become was left up to us.

We where asked to produce the first two chapters in this new magazine-style format. My spreads focus on large illustrations, with a slight edge of abstraction to them to depict what is happening in the text. I made these through a combination of screen printing and paper cutting. Some of the smaller details where created digitally, but the majority is handcrafted.

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Pepsi Re-brand

I finally have something worth while to blog about.

I’m back for my sophomore year at the University of Lincoln and have been looking forward to the avalanche of work that it brings. As usually we have a minimum two projects running at a time, the second one will be blogged about after this post.

Over the summer we had been asked to research three brands from the ‘Top 100 Brands List’. One that we admire, one we didn’t know much about and one we are critical of. I chose McDonalds, eBay and Pepsi respectively.

On returning to Lincoln we where told that we would be re-branding our critical choice. In my case Pepsi

As well as redesigning the logo for our brand, we where asked to revamp three other applications which the brand would use. I chose the can design, billboards and the Pepsi website to redesign. This is what I came up with.

logo I wanted to drop the Pepsi ‘globe’. After their 2008 rebrand I just felt that they had taken it too far and I didn’t want to included a new version in my mark. I have integrated the ‘wave’ to make it easy to recognise as a Pepsi logo and have altered the colour scheme by using a lighter blue. I feel it looks more up to date than a navy blue.

Can Design I kept these really simple, they use a banding system to display the type of drink by using the different colours associated with each variation of the cola, while keeping a lot of white space for the logo to sit in.

Billboards For my rebrand I wanted to remind people that Pepsi has a whole wealth of history, it’s only 10 years younger than Coca-Cola, although most people perceive Coke to be the much more established brand.

I have used Pepsi adverts from the company’s birth in 1898 all the way to the ’60s to show their heritage. I didn’t want to include adverts after the ’60s as this is when Pepsi’s ‘modern image’ started to develop and I wanted my billboards to focus on what came before that period.

Website One of my main problems with Pepsi’s current website is that it has too many links for the same page. For example the X Factor page can be reached from four different links, all on the same page and all very close together. To me this is ridiculously messy, so for my website I have cleared away all of the unnecessary extra links from Pepsi’s website and made one which is much easier to navigate.

Richard Bartle/Ian Anderson Exhibition

On Thursday I was lucky enough to be invited to a preview for an art exhibition at the DLA Piper building in Sheffield.

The event was being held to exhibit the recent works of artist Richard Bartle and Graphic Designer Ian Anderson (who i had met the previous month). Both men’s work was very different to each other but this ultimately helped compliment the different styles.

Artist, Bartle’s huge colourful oil paintings are a comment on the human exploitation of natural resources and economic bullishness, depicting uneasy subjects in a beautiful context to create an interesting juxtaposition.

Whereas Anderson’s work focused typewritten fragments of stories, projecting the mundanity of everyday life. The sheer banality of these conversations make them all the more entertaining, often humorous and always leaves you asking where and what the characters are talking about.

The Bartle/Anderson exhibition gave me a much needed six hours off from my first University projects of the year, I’ll be blogging about those later on.. And the differences in the work made it a very interesting evening.

Designer Visit II: Ian Anderson

Last month I had the pleasure of meeting Ian Anderson, head of legendary design company, The Designers Republic.

After my visit to Strawberry in July I got the opportunity to meet with Ian through a family friend. Obviously, I jumped at the chance to meet such an important figure in the design world and on the 9th of September we all met up at the Forum pub in Sheffield for a chat.

Having some 35 years experience in the design industry, Ian has worked with a wealth of clients including Nickelodeon, Orange, Coca Cola, Adidas, Sony, Marlboro and MTV. He has also designed many Famous album covers for bands such as Pulp and Supergrass. This particularly excited me because music artwork is my favourite area of graphic design and I had only recently seen Pulp live at Leeds Festival.

Having worked in so many areas of graphic design, Ian was able to give me honest and constructive criticism on the work in my portfolio. He also gave me advice on the amount of projects to cover in my portfolio and the most effective way of ordering them, as well as thinking about where you should sit in an interview and how to conduct yourself to bring out the best in your work.

He also talked about what kind of projects that I should be looking for outside of my University work to improve my skills as a designer and get experience in live briefs and how these can improve your chances of landing a job after you have got your degree.

Having a lot of experience in the music industry with graphic design, Ian told me about how it had changed over the years and the bands he had worked for in the past, as well as sharing some highly interesting stories about his time as a designer in general.

Talking with Ian has been a great experience and also great fun. As a graphic design student he is somebody I strive to be as successful as one day. To meet him has been a pleasure.

NYC Surf Shop™

This was another contest brief I came across for a New York-based surf clothing company.

They asked for the logo to be based around the phrase “surf lifestyle with a NYC culture”.

The logo had to appeal to their target age group of 13-26, be bold, simple and work as well in colour as it does in black and white.

The logo would be used on the label of every item of clothing the company sells. Or the feature of the design in some cases, like a Nike sweater with a big swoosh on the front.

These are my entries.

Dude L♥ve

This is something I’ve wanted to do for ages.

I love the homemade aesthetics of tie dying and I need some clothes which can get ruined at Leeds/Reading festival so I decided to make my own.

After buying some dye and cheap (and I mean cheap) T’s, I got to work and made four groovy as hell shirts.

Yo.

Attikis

This was a live brief posted on Design Crowd. I’d been looking for a new project to bridge the gap between July and September (back to University time!) and this one sounded quite interesting.

It was simply a logo design for an Australian company called “Attikis”. They offer “economical security alarm monitoring… approximately 18 times cheaper than [their] competitors”

Attikis want to be seen as an innovative, breakthrough company who are extremely customer focused.

Being focused on their customers; the brief expressed itself strongly against any typical scaremongering security imagery “no burglars, grills, police, etc”. Opting instead  for modern, personable and professional designs to be entered.

Attikis’ desire for a modern logo which avoids stereotypical security imagery is what I enjoyed about this mini project. It allowed me to think outside the realms of what people see in their minds eye when they think of safety, protection and security.

Below are the six designs that I entered. Some are simple variations of each other. Most of them use Futura Extrabold Condensed or something similar, I feel that the thick variation of the modernist typeface works well for Attikis’ company image.

I looked at Attikis as a being who dwells in the street and protects the neighbourhood.

I like the idea of using a key hole as it symbolises security and it fits nicely into the A of Attikis in this design.

These designs look at fences, often the first line of security in a person’s home.

On this design Attikis is partially covered by the fence (which makes it more desirable to read) this shows Attikis as a kind of nosey neighbour, keeping an eye on your home.

The black sky and moon shows nighttime (when most burglaries take place) to show that Attikis is protecting 24/7.

This again looks at the idea of Attikis being a nosey neighbour, with a peephole in the fence.

This is probably my favourite idea for the logo as the eye inside the keyhole shows the idea of security monitoring in a succinct format.

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The competition deadline is tonight, so far 119 designs have been entered.

After the deadline has passed, all of the other designs entered can be viewed by entrants. As Attikis are looking through all of the ideas, they can ‘cross out’ designs which they don’t like and leave the designs that they like until the end.

I’ll post again if any of my designs make it far into the competition, if they are all instantly crossed out… I won’t say!