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