At The Peak Of Things

As of Thursday the 23rd of May I and my course mates officially finished our second year of university. Its incredible how quickly the year has gone past and I'm honestly shocked I made it through, of course not without a few mental breakdowns here and there.

Seeing as I had finished my work a couple of days early I decided I wanted to go for a walk and called my trusty rambling buds for a day out.

We decided on the Peaks and seeing as it was only about a 5/10 minute bus journey away from where we live we thought it was about time and of course I took my camera along for the ride.

I think we managed to get a good 4/5 miles out of it and it lovely. The views were beauty, the walk was refreshing as well as tiering and here are a few pictures from the day.

And what better way to end the walk than enjoying a nice pint at the pub, much deserved and wonderful. This is something we plan to do much more next term and I can't wait to get some more shots. 

The Self Directed Brief//Pt2

After coming up with a name and a logo I felt better about coming up with a design for my website. For research I looked at other website designs as well as magazine layouts. This helped me to come up with a composition that would suit my theme. I used InDesign to create my website and was pretty happy with my outcome. Along side the website I designed a couple of postcards which would be given out and placed in bars, cafes etc around.

I'm not really sure why I went with the shaping other than I thought it fit in really nice together, In all honesty by the end of the project I had lost all motivation and was/am kind in the middle of a designers meltdown so I just wanted to get it finished as soon as possible. I think I could spent a lot more time making it better and producing something other than just a website, this is something that I might come back to at some point as I think it has potential to be something really good.  

The Self Directed Brief//Pt 1.

I'm coming to the last few weeks of my second year at university, a terrifying thing which in my opinion has come far too quickly and the last couple of projects of the year. Along with an essay we have a Self directed project, this enabling us to come up with our own brief tackling any design problem we wish. I decided to take to take the root of trying to get freshers more involved, to encourage them to explore their new environment and to hopefully make the experience of starting over in a new place easier.
At first I decided upon producing a leaflet/booklet noting down the top x amount of places in Sheffield that a fresher should visit. After spending a lot of weeks researching into brochures, maps and guides I decided to expand my idea slightly, I didn't want to just produce something that would be useful to Sheffield students but to actually help freshers all over the UK. Obviously this would be quite hard to produce so I opted for a website. I created an organisation which would be run by students for students.
The idea of the website is for say a selected amount of students from all the universities across the UK to submit places, locations to promote. With this idea I was thinking on a large scale and quite big, if this were to actually become a fully functioning project I didn't want to just limit myself to places I knew. This project would of course need a team and would take a while before it would eventually go live but I thought the idea was good. There doesn't seem to be anything on the market like this, aimed at freshers.

Here are a few logo names and designs that I had been working on over the course of this project before finally coming up with the name Who, What, Where? / W,W,W?

The bottom images being the final logos.
I started the naming process by first noting down words that I associated with exploring, adventure etc and worked from there. It such a simple process to go through but it really helped me to narrow it down and dismiss some of the terrible names. I wanted to keep the logo design quite simple and something that would look good on leaflets, the web and also printed items such as badges and tshirts. I eventually ended up using simple shapes. I wanted to make sure that the logo would work in black and white before I added any colours to it, which it did and used bright encouraging colours with have remained a theme throughout.