Inspired & Inspire Brief

Just before we went to London for the AGI Conference our tutors gave us a little project to reflect on the two days and come back with some quotes from the designers that we found to be inspiring or inspirational and to produce a poster from them. I will admit at first I wasn't completely into the task but once I started gathering quotes and after feeling very inspired after leaving London, I  thought this was a really good idea. The quotes I went with was;

"Design makes me frustrated, Art makes me crazy" - Paula Scher 

I went with this because I can totally relate. When I start designing something or have been staring a piece of work for so long I start to get frustrated and the same with art and in an odd way it almost makes me feel like it shouldn't make as frustrated as it does. As in "I'm a graphic designer, doing design shouldn't make me frustrated" but after hearing her say this out loud, it kind of made me realise that of course everyone gets like this from time to time. So I thought this would be the perfect quote to use. 

I wanted to use a mixture of hand rendered design as well as working it up on photoshop. I really enjoy using and making collages so this is what I started with. I used scans from magazines and in particular found some great images taken by Rankin of mens faces squished together. I thought this was a perfect representation of frustration and used them in my final product. 

I also used a range of faces, shapes and colours to produce a messy collage of patterns to show the craziness and nonsense of putting an "art" piece together. I then after worked the scans up on photoshop, I messed around with layering the images together, changing the colours, contrasts and balance.
I knew for the two posters I wanted two different tones layered over the images, one for frustration and the other for crazy. I went for Red and Blue, as red was the first colour that I would normally associate with frustration and blue because I thought it was a nice contrasting colour.
After working it up in photoshop I added my type to the posters and this was the final outcome...

I'm actually really happy with the way the two posters have turned out, I think the frustration posters is the strongest of the two but I do think put together they look good and fit the brief completely. 

Deconstruction Brief.

With graduation projects and briefs coming up soon our tutors have been setting up workshops to help us get a better understanding of briefs and to help us dissect them and come up with some ideas for the current projects were doing.
Last week in uni we were given a talk on deconstructive designs and about dissecting briefs and pulling out the most important pieces of information.  In the session we were given large scale prints of the 5 grad projects (which I will expand on later) and told to dissect them, so we cut them up, and stuck them together in odd deconstructive designs.

After the session we ask told to go away and design our own deconstruction poster of the brief we had chosen for our graduation projects, picking out what we thought we the important parts of the brief and to experiment with typography, layout, space and composition.








This is something that I haven't really done much of before so It was good to get in practice with this as the graduation brief I have chosen might be quite typography based.


For me this workshop was actually quite useful, I'm very much one of those people who loves working with grid structures, especially 3 column grid structures so it was a challenge to try and get myself to ignore that mindset and be a little bit more creative and try to use the space in a more informal way and like I said, typography isn't something that I'm particularly great at so I found it useful to help me get into going though the process.

Anyway this was my final design;

For a first attempt at a deconstructionist design  I was actually quite happy with the outcome, it was interesting to mess around with font sizes and angles and to produce something that didn't necessarily have to make sense or look clean cut and perfect. Although I really like working with grid structures and having things very strategically placed, I actually really like the look of deconstructive design and in my design the use of extra large font sizes and colour. This is something that I think I'm going to keep working on and could actually turn out to be really useful when it comes to my graduation project.

AGI Open

This post is a little late as this did take place a little under a month ago but it's finally here now! AGI Open in short is a large design and education conference held by the members of AGI and is a two day event which includes over 30 of the worlds leading graphic designers giving talks, debates and sessions. AGI is held in a different country every year and this year it was based in London and held at the Barbican theatre. 

Now we are pretty lucky to have the tutor we do as they booked us all free tickets to the conference and it was two of the most inspiring days I've had in a while. 

The range of work and design that was shown throughout the conference was incredible and to hear from such designers as Stefan Segmeister, Chip Kidd, Roger Law, Marion Deuchars just to name a few was amazing. 

I didn't manage to get too many photos in the conference as I just got completely sucked in and completely forgot to document everything. 

I did manage to get a few snaps on the second day of the conference and personally my favourite of the two days. I was really excited to see Segmeister's talk as I had perviously looked at his work for research on a project and also left that day with a few new favourites such as Chip Kidd and Paula Scher. 

Here is a selection of pieces from some of the designers there; 

1,2 - Stefan Sagmeister // 3 - Chip Kidd // 4 - Roger Law // 5 - Paula Scher // 6 - Marion Deuchars

Please do excuse the poor quality of these photos! 

The debate between designers on day 1. 

Stefan Sagmeister giving his talk and getting the audience to sing along.. 

The ending to the conference, Brazilian dancers (as next years AGI Open will be held in Brazil). 

I'll leave some links to the AGI website incase you want to know more about AGI or was there this year. I honestly can't thank the university enough for organising such a great event and I honestly don't even think this post could of done it any justice but it really was a great experience. I hope you've enjoyed this and until next time! 

AGI Open website || Speakers at the event 

Holiday Post Pt 4. The City

The 4th and final instalment; The City, Buildings and Architecture. 

(I am in no way an architect or know anything about buildings and their design so please bare with me, these are just my thoughts and I will try very hard to not ramble on too much!). 

It has to be said that in my opinion Copenhagen is one of the most beautiful cities I've even been in. Whilst walking around the city I properly spend about 80% of the time looking up and staring at the top of the buildings and being amazed at how beautiful they were. The delicate details to the bright, interesting colours and the size of the buildings. Being from quite a small town in suffolk, I'm used to quite small, boring and uniform buildings, and even in Sheffield there tall, industrial buildings, a lot of mental, aluminium and of course, steel. It was such a difference to see everything so close together, so gigantically tall and so many windows. I think it was the old style of the buildings that really grabbed my attention. Okay enough of me trying to sound like I know whats what, Here are a few pictures of buildings that really got my attention. (I hope you have time because this might be long!). 

This street we came across on walking tour and couldn't get over how pretty it was, the combination of colours, the details on the windows and the rooftops. 

The town centre, again I love the tall exterior of the buildings and how they all look collectively.  

I'm not going to ramble on about each and every building because we really would be here all day but I just want to share a few pictures and hopefully spark some kind of want to travel because Copenhagen is such a beautiful city and if you haven't already guested a city that I am very much in love with. 

One thing that I haven't mentioned but really must is the amount of bicycles around. I've been to Cambridge and I thought that was a lot of bikes, Oh no, thats nothing compared to Copenhagen. I think it's such a lovely thing that Copenhagen is such a pedestrian friendly city and that there isn't too much traffic and cars everywhere, but bikes, my goodness. The amount of times we nearly got run over by bikes was insane, even thought they had their own lanes in the road. Within Copenhagen most things are pretty much within walking distance and because of this I can see why so people chose to cycle rather than drive.  

I'm not sure what else to say about them really other than they are beautiful and it's amazing that even after the city has had so many great fires, they have still built it up into such a beautiful place. 

I'm going to leave a few cheesy holiday snaps and phone pictures from the holiday and end it here! 

Taken on the walking tour, photo from facebook page. 

  

I hope you've all enjoyed the posts, me rambling, enjoyed looking through my pictures and hopefully I have inspired some of you to book a trip to Copenhagen soon!. Thanks for reading and new posts will be up soon! 

Holiday Post Pt 3. Tivoli Gardens, Freetown Christiania & The Blue Planet.

[ Link to website ] 

On our first evening as were having a stroll around our hostel we stumbled upon Tivoli Gardens. The first place I heard about this and in fact something that I used as a good reference point for this trip were  from a blogger/youtuber Essie Button [Link to youtube videos] who had made a couple of videos of her trip to Copenhagen. 

After walking around almost the entire park before finding the entrance we paid about 9 Krone to get in (which I think is about £8, don't hold me to that!) I would suggest if you're going to go to like us go in the evening because my goodness it was beautiful! The park was made up of amusements, lakes and ponds with bright light displays, bars and restaurants and reminded me a little of Disneyland Paris in the sense that it was bright, exciting and made me feel like a child again. Now although it is an amusement park if you don't like rides that much I would still recommend going. It was so lovely to spend the evening walking around, listening to the live music, having some caffe lattes (which we drank a lot of on this holiday and were delightful) and enjoying the light, water and lazer show which was put on before closing.  Now enough of me rambling, here is a little influx of pictures from that evening. 

It was honestly so beautiful and definitely somewhere to come if you visit. I think this was a really good way to set off the trip and although it is quite a touristy place and a lot of people don't really like that, its worth it. 

Another location that we were really interested in checking out was Christiania.

Sadly in Freetown Christiania because of how things are run and how they live, they like to be private about it and therefore we weren't allowed to take pictures on the main land, But Its still something I really enjoyed and want to talk about.
For those who might not of heard of it Freetown Christiania is one of the most infamous alternative community. The community was founded by militant squatters who broke into disused barracks in middle of Christiania. The communities ideas about recycling, free love, organic food and drug enlightenment were once seen as completely radical ideas but are now being adopted.
Personally I found it to be really eye opening and interesting to see such a comparison from the rest of the city. It almost seemed like we were in a completely different city. Pusha St is properly one of the most famously known streets which we did of course walk though and it was amazing and odd to see people smoking and selling so openly and freely without a worry.
I think if you are on a family holiday that this may not be the best place to go but I think if your up for learning about a different culture its great. When there you really get a sense of what life and the people are like.

We walked around the whole of Freetown and over a bridge we found a cool little dirty road filled with houses made from frames, odd pieces of wood, everything. Here we were able to take a few pictures of the houses.
[ Link ] Heres a link to a website that explains about Freetown much better than I did ah!

On our final full day of the trip we decided to visit the the aquarium;

[ Link to website ]

The aquarium was about a 10/20 minute ride on the train and I think about the equivalent of about £20. The Blue Planet Aquarium is the largest aquarium in Northern Europe with more than 20,000 animals and 7 million litres of water.
I have been to quite a few aquariums in my day and this one completely blew them all out of the water (excuse the pun!) I couldn't tell how long it actually took us walk around the entire thing but it definitely didn't feel like a chore. In my opinion a great day out for any family or friends, I know for us it did makes us feel slightly like excited children on a school trip, especially as we got to watch the Sea-lions being fed and have a go in touch pool. It honestly was so breathtaking to see so many beautiful creatures and even learn about creatures I didn't even know existed. I think this would be a great place to come on a rainy day or like us something to ease ourselves out of the trip so I really would recommend it.
Sadly because I was using a film camera I wasn't able to get too many good pictures but I did take a few on my phone which I shall share with you.




and thats the end of pt 3. I hope you enjoyed this section of the Copenhagen posts and pt 4. will be up soon!