Laser Cutting Induction

Today we were given a quick lesson on the basics of laser cutting. I found I couldn't stop watching the little laser go! It cut out the shape of a scalpel and emboss the letters onto the shape .. I am looking forward to using it in the future!

But anyways this induction reminded me of the work of Rob Ryan ... 

I really love his work, while the cuts look really nice it's more of what they say that I like. The messages are always warming and inspiring and make me smile.


I went to go on his website but it's under construction, however, this was on the splash page and I always find that when you see something like this it makes you feel better .. could be to do with the bright colours or just the message itself ... but it made me realise that not everything is so bad.
see ... www.misterrob.co.uk    (when it's back)

blog:   rob-ryan.blogspot.com

D&AD

Start of a new brief today! After looking and looking through the briefs it came down to two... The Body Shop ... or Quaker Oats.

I've decided to run with the Quaker Oats brief which is to create packaging for Quaker's 'Chilled Creamy Oats'. I had my first tutorial today and some good tips I was given from my tutor was to try with visual experiments with key words from the brief such as cold and hot and sweetness .. and how to convey these words? So from now I plan to experiment and see how I can show these words and hopefully that will be a good starting point for this brief.

Last Wednesday I with my group went to visit another elderly people's home and as we got there were told no you cancelled... which we knew nothing about but apparantly we did. So we thought about our previous visits and looked into the conversations we'd had to realise a problem from that.

After talking to Albert, we discovered that people now in homes can't take part in hobbies they enjoy because the homes can't facilitate that so though conversation we had a problem to solve ... how can people in homes take part in their hobbies?

This was what we worked on for the rest of the week after we had an idea to design a service where elderly people could register with an organisation for hobbies or interests they had and if they wanted to take part they could book in for a day out doing their hobby at a place such as a community  hall. 

We created the idea of their being a card which held all their details and their fingerprint and the authorities were able to stay in contact with this person while they were out and track them to their location.

For our pin-up crit we presented the card design, how this works with the fingerprint and a website where people's key workers could book them in for the sessions.

A suggestion made in the crit was that there could be a better way for keeping track which I agreed with, such as a small chip that could be within the card which could be used as a tracker and will show the very location the person is. 

This is something that could be considered and carried forward with developing the project, however I felt the crit went well and I could definitely feel the benefits of this brief and writing our own one and gathering the relevant information to proceed with our subject. It was a hard one but worked out well in the end.

Since last Tuesday (13/10/09) following the pin-up crit for the 'True' brief, I have been working with 2 other colleagues on a brief of which we had to write ourselves. The idea is to design a system/service for a target audience that solves a problem we have found in the environment. So we began by going out into the environment to find problems that we could potentially solve. We visited the hospital/libraries/town/shopping centres in order to observe and try and find problems. We then took all these ideas into uni on Friday 16th October to work on and to narrow down to just one idea we would develop. 

Friday proved to be a really difficult day as our idea we decided to go with had such a broad audience and we had to narrow this down too. Eventually we had our brief .. which was a tough task to complete as no assumptions could be made. 

Our brief is to design a system/service where elderly people within a rest home can take back ownership and have their freedom and to take part in hobbies and interests.

Since Friday we have visited some homes to have a general chat with some residents to find out what they like, what they used to like and just to find out a bit about them, where then we can take a significant piece of information and to work on it. 

Today we have one more home to visit to a home to hopefully give us any last minute important information before we finalise a service/system design.

Graphic Design 3rd year!

So a new year on a new course ... and it's time for me to knuckle down! ... not just on work .. on my blog!

The course began with being introduced to a short brief called 'True' as part of our specialist practice unit, so the idea for this brief was to take a statement or proposition and to show that it was true or to at least convince it was and to get evidence to show it. The good thing about this was that it could be something really simple but I needed to be creative about it. 

Whilst looking for inspiration I came across this piece of work...

(by Andrew Dyjak: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/12/sexy-bold-and-experimental-typography)

 I found that with this piece of work I could understand what it said which reminded me about not using vowels in text messages and how words could still be read. I thought this would be a good idea forward but I found that getting a statement which should be true but without its vowels proved difficult. For example ... "You can read a sentence without its vowels" .. would read "Y cn rd   sntnc wtht ts vwls" .. to me that just looked like nonsense and that statement wasn't true for everything. 

This lead me on to thinking about words that are misspelt and to try and prove that misspelt words could be read as long as the first and last letters are in the correct place. I did a few examples handwritten and on word and asked people to read them for me and this proved to be a successful idea. 

Next I had to think about how I could present my statement.

I thought about why you can read the words misspelt and who gets spelling of words wrong or mixed up... this lead me to children.

I thought that presenting it in a child's play way could be a route to go down. I had my statement and I was ready to explore with different objects to show my statement was true. I researched into buying children's building blocks but found that this was going to be expensive as there were only so many letter blocks to a pack and I had a lot of characters in my statement. I next thought about magnets as they were already on my house's fridge so I tried a few ideas with them...     

I went on the concept of being muddled up as some quick ideas to try but thought that one word wasn't enough to show my statement and that it was true, so I took my statement of which I already had and thought I would try and spell it out.. however as you can see from the third image it's only half a sentence as I ran out of certain letters. I didn't think that this idea would work as I had to use upper and lower case letters and didn't want my idea to be confusing.

I took a trip to WHSmiths and was lucky enough to come across some adhesive blocks which looked similar to scrabble pieces and had to buy them to experiment with them. I didn't want to throw my idea of magnets away, as I liked the interaction with them. I decided that I would incorporate the blocks with magnets, buy a metal tray and I could then show that my piece of work could be played with and the letters could be moved around. This was my final piece...

So I have summarised my first small brief within the unit .. and promise to be more regular with updates from now on. 

This afternoon I had a small presentation on my ideas and some suggestions were made which I will take into account. Because my target audience is for 10-16 year olds the box needs to be exciting and have some level of interactivity to it so I will take these comments away and include them into my design as at the minute my designs are quite focused around the Animal logo.

I've been looking at other box designs for watches to get an idea about what's on the market and how to approach my design. My main aim this week is to get some sketches/mock ups of nets and some graphics to help me with developing my box.