Effective Research

Looking through my work I have realised that I have forgotten to mention “what is research?”

Definition of Research:

noun[mass noun] (also researches)

• the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions:the group carries out research in geochemistrymedical researchhe prefaces his study with a useful summary of his own researches
• [as modifier] engaged in or intended for research:a research studenta research paper

verb[with object]

• investigate systematically:she has spent the last five years researching her people’s history[no object]:the team have been researching into flora and fauna
• discover or verify information for use in (a book, programme, etc.):I was in New York researching my novel(as adjective, with submodifier researched)a well-researched and readable account

What is research for?

Research is for expanding your own personal knowledge, gathering images, text for influences. Research is for finding out that ideas were not correct, research is for providing material that can be an inspiration or a springboard for new ideas. It can be an area of experimentation and free exploration of a topic.Research is an important component to any successful design so it has to be done right, know what you are looking for and were to look for it, in knowing this your researching will be more progressive and faster often helping you save time on a project with a deadline.

Know where to look:

• Internet
• libraries
• Galleries
• Museums
• Magazines
• Books
• Other People

These are a few of the most common sources of good research but research can be found anywhere.Research types:Primary Sources are those that are direct, first hand and immediate.Secondary Sources are the repetition of the primary ones in other media.Research Must’s:

When collecting research for a project or a job there are certain thing you must do:

• Annotate your research as you go along, not just at the end. This will also tell you what you still need to find out, but it will also help you to understand your finds, their value and your reaction to them.

• Acknowledgment, You must have where you got your research from clearly stated somewhere along with the research, if not you can become under suspect of “Plagiarism”

Final Poster

When checking my design I found a really obvious mistake in the title I missed out the letter P in the first word of the title “TYPOGRAPHIC”.

This is the design that I have chosen to go with:

 

Final Poster Design: 

Pluses: The main pluses for me on my final poster designs it that it is nice and simple, all of the components work well together and everything is evenly spaced and correctly coloured, I gave the image a ting amount of colour in the way of a light “Sepia” filter and I feel this makes the image very subtle and appealing to the eye. The Typography for me has been correctly spaced apart from one another and the font really aids the central design.

Minuses: To honest the design wasn’t what I originally wanted but after developing it to a printable final piece I don’t feel this way any more.

 

Idea Development

I have my project deadline on Friday 23rd at 10:00am, so I’ve decide to take the idea that I had already developed a bit further all the way to a final piece.

I did have some better idea’s I feel but because of issues I have had with my laptop I have fallen behind from where I wanted to at this point of time in this project so I decide to develop this idea above. I will start from scratch when designing this piece using the techniques that I have Learnt over the past month during this project.

 

As usual I started this piece by creating suitable layers.

 

For me to get every thing in line and were I wanted it I created on the grid layer a grid using what I had learnt earlier this month, the grid I using was 15 by 10 in the end this is because a smaller grid wouldn’t allow me to place certain components were I would have liked them.

 

After re-editing the photo that I have been using throughout my development phase I inserted it into the document and began placing it were I wanted it roughly for now.

 

After hiding the photo component of the piece I created the components that I used before to create the rectangle with the whole in it, this part of the design has to be perfect because once I create the whole I can’t adjust it without undoing or re doing it from scratch. I made each of the components slightly translucent so that I could adjust them using my grid for the correct placement.

 

After un-hiding everything I changed the colours and moved the components to the correct places for now and It looks Ok but it will still need a lot of work.

For my design I wrote that I really wanted an old-looking font that was bold and strong and empowering, well I didn’t really have any luck with the standard fonts on this computer so I went onto “www.dafonts.com” to search for one and I found one relatively quickly called “American Captain”, so I’m going to see how this font looks and develop this further.

 

 

I really like this font and I feel is it exactly what I have been looking for but I still need to see if it works with my main Title.

 

So this is the first out of a couple of different variants of this design, the main difference between these designs will be the text placement and colour.

Design 1:

Pros: I think that the placement of the circle this time round is better than the previous version, the fonts is a whole lot better and I think that It suits the piece as a whole and the small print text looks very eye-catching in the black rather than grey shade I used before.

Cons: I would prefer it if all of the text was the same colour and the poster is looking at bit simple.

Design 2: With This Design I changed the placement and the colour of the text, the placement because I wanted to see how the design could look different and the colours because on the previous design I didn’t like the fact they were two different colours.

Pros: The placement of the text I feel works very well because natural we follow text down once read and at the bottom I have my Image, this works here also because of this fact. I also feel the text works better now because it is all the same colour.

Cons: There’s not much I don’t like about this poster, the only thing I don’t like fully is how bland the text looks.

This poster design could be a strong candidate for my final poster.

 

Design 3: I Fell that this layout works better than the previous one because of the text placement, the small fine print is right at the top out-of-the-way for the more important text at the bottom.

I’ve got a hard decision ahead of me to choose the design that I like the most and that I think will work the best.

My Audience and Choices I have Made

At the Start of this project I overlooked something very important, who’s my poster audience? I knew this but I forgot to mention it on here.

Audience:

Who the audience is for anything to do with design or the arts is very important because it dictates how certain components and idea’s have been chosen over other ones, for my project I personally feel that the audience for a “Typographical walk along the strand” would be students, artist’s, designs or possible general members of the public, this audience would be from the age of 16 upwards.

Now because most of the people looking at my poster would be design’s as such them selves I know that everything on my poster must be in line and spelt right because they would be able to see a piece of bad designs from a mile way if these fundamental things aren’t right.

Choices:

Designs: Most of the time I feel that the simpler a design is, the better it can portray its message, but this can also be a bad thing because a design could be classed as stale or boring but tis is a risk I’m willing to take with my designs, I did come up with some more detailed designs that used a lot of different components but I went for the simpler ones. Not because there easy, because it is something that I would like to be better at and develop my skills in.

Fonts: A lot of the fonts that I have been looking at do look old, but I feel that these fonts will aid my design very well, because the strand is an old and historical part of London, so I feel that an old, bold and recognisable font will be fitting for my poster designs.

Colours: For my poster I have decided to just go for black and white colour scheme in my designs, the main reason that I have concluded on this is because If I’m going for old text and a simple style I think that Black and White will be very fitting for my poster designs.

These are some though upon choices that I have made but I could change them at any time if I feel need be.

 

 

Taking My Idea’s Further

A lot of the time I would just sketch up some idea’s in detail and develop them on paper but for this project I’ve decided to develop some of my chosen few on the computer using “Abode Photoshop and Illustrator” The reason I am doing it on a computer rather than paper is because of the image aspect of my designs, I can’t really see if a design is working or not without one of the main components of the design.

 

With what I have learnt earlier in the week I created a simple 4×4 grid to cover the whole canvas, in doing this it would help me line up the different components of my yet to be made poster.

 

Using what I learnt when I did the portrait Illustrator task I created layers with suitable title to aid in my design creating process.

After increasing the tones, contrast and making a photo that I took up in London black and white, I Inserted it into my design document on the correct layer.

 

I hid the photo layer to make it easier for me to work on the document, to create the whole in the middle of the rectangle I first had to draw out a circle to my the correct size and in the correct position on the document,after that I have to draw a rectangle to the same size as the canvas on top of that. Once I have selected both of these shape I go to Object, Compound Path, Make, this will cut out the circle out of the rectangle to give me a single object that I can move and free transform.

I now reveal the photo layer and adjust the Image to the correct position.

 

 

Inserting and positioning the text I found easy because I already knew that I wanted It Inline with the centre, the outline around the text in the centre circle wasn’t to plan but It Sort of works, I can easy fine tune this If I decide to take this design further in my project, but overall it came out well for a quick edit.

Word Meanings

 

Our teacher today was talking to us about how we need to think about each word or sentence in our work, we need to think what does it mean? So he gave us a quick task to experiment with some words to see if we could replicate there meaning into the way they are seen.

My teacher showed the group about a nice option in object, envelope distort, make with warp.

 

 

 

This option came in handy trying to think out of the box for big and small.

 

Overall I didn’t find this task hard I just got bored but this did make me think of other ways my poster and text could look.

 

Sketches

As I wrote earlier in the week I was finding it hard to come up with new and exciting idea’s for my “Typographic Poster” project, well today my teacher helped the group to think outside the box and not to censor rubbish or unusual idea’s because they could become or have elements that can be used in my final piece.

The way she got us to do this was to make us open our minds up to every idea, she got us to write down every use that we could possibly think of for a “Brick”, now I know it doesn’t sound like much but I found that this task really helped me, anything that a brick could be used for write it down, e.g. build a wall, a brick sandwich, door stop, a paper weight or even a brick dog, all idea’s no matter what is an idea’s so use it.

After this task I was just getting new idea’s for my poster, new designs were just coming from the most unusual places like the class room door, lights, boxes anything that I could translate into a design I did and it worked, I’m not going to use all of these designs but have more is better than have none or a few.

I know that these designs and sketches aren’t great but they were just quick for me to get my idea’s down.

 

 

Letter Abstraction

Our teacher today showed us something very interesting and unique, “letter Abstraction” he first showed us some poster and adverts that use this.

He showed us a good way to experiment with it and really look at the shapes of each letter in different fonts.

First off we had to draw a rectangle, it didn’t matter what size it was up to us.

Using what I had learnt earlier and posted at the being of the week we had to split the rectangle into a grid.

Using the text we I inserted a “A”, which ever box I was going to use I had to select it and bring it to the front.

This next part was the most important part to get right I had to select the letter and the box I brought forward and go onto the Object drop down menu, clipping path and Make, this would make the box become almost a frame to stop what ever is outside the box being shown.

After double clicking on the box and opening up the “Group” I can adjust where I want the Letter to be, depending on were the letter is I can change what is being shown in the box.

        

I decided to make it easier and to make it have some purpose I decide to do each Box in alphabetical order along with numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0, all in the same font.

After the long and tedious task of doing this to each box you end up getting a very unique design which could be ideal for a poster or an advert, personal I don’t think that I will be using this in my current design project but it could be useful for my to use in future projects.

Grids

I personally have never though about using a grid in my own personal work but me teacher today was making some good points about why they are used and how they are used.

First he showed us how to create one on “Adobe Illustrator ” free hand then how to make one using the shape tool and options. So here’s a couple of screen shots to show how I’ve learnt how to make grids.

First I create a rectangle the size I want my grid to cover(In this case the whole canvas), keep in mind that you can make a grid any size not just the canvas size.

I select the box and go to object, Path, spilt into grid, this will bring up the grid option box.

Once the box is up you can choose how many rows and columns you want your grid to have and how big the space is between each box.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of some of the grids you can create.

Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is a great program for people in the design industry, it has more option and is more user-friendly than other design programs.

As an introductory session on Illustrator we were first shown the basics, how to create a new document, how to create layers, how to draw objects and use the brush tools, all of this is very basic and we all got on an played around becoming more familiar with it ourselves.

Next we were show how to use the Bezier Curves “The Pen Tool”, I personal found this very hard to get to grips with simple because I was over thinking how to use it bellow is diagram that help me a lot to understand this tool.

This tool came I very handy with our next task, we had to trace over a portrait of a person, it didn’t matter were they were looking but it would be easier if we chose one with a side profile. I did to start off with but after a while I got bored with it and had enough, I decide to choose my own image off of the internet and trace it myself.

I decide to use this image mainly because of the solid outlines and colour, I really wanted to push myself with this “Pen Tool” so I set myself a challenge to get this completed in 30 mins, in the rest of this post there will be screen shot of my process and what techniques I am using.

First I created suitable layers with suitable name for me to easy distinguish between them.

Making sure I was on the correct layer I drew around the section using the “Pen Tool”, when it came to the top of the face I didn’t need to trace perfectly around because it was going to be covered by the subsequent layers that I was going to create after.

I decided to first draw around each element before choosing colour, doing this allowed me to see where certain layers and section would cover and where they wouldn’t. It’s very important for me personal to use a bright out standing colour to see were I am drawing to not get lost and confused.

Next I select each section of the drawing and chose a suitable colour using a real colour from the image I am trace using the “Eyedropper Tool”, this allows to copy a colour exactly. I have to adjust some colours because they wouldn’t look right but most of the time it is just trial and error to find that right colour.

 

 

This is my final outcome after the 28 mins it took for my to draw this all out, I know that it isn’t that good at the moment but I will develop this further and make lines and tones better in the future.