Help Japan

I was just looking through some of my folders and I came across a couple of designs I had done when the recent Tsunami hit Japan. The original goal was to make t.shirts and sell them with all profit going to the cause, but moving house got in the way and they never got printed, but I thought I would share them anyway. I did both of them in Illustrator, and drew the cherry blossoms using my wacom tablet.

vecto ninja's

I am always trying to teach myself new things with CS5. I have the books "classroom in a book" for Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, but I also go online to see what tutorials I can find. I found this one for vector ninja's and I really like the ones I did:

Typography pictures

So, besides from school work, I also do things on my own, and something I have fallen in love with is typography, so I am always trying to do things with it to make it interesting. When I was on the train going in to central London the other week, I came up with an idea which I executed when I got home and I really like the outcome:

What is graphic design

Our next project was to come up with a way of representing "What is Graphic Design". I did a lot of research and technically there a lot of things that go in to making graphic design. However I decided that in it's simplest form, to me anyway, graphic design is essentially art. So I decided to do this in a typographic poster.

Movies

We a project where we had to come up with a way of representing either 12 movies or books that have shaped our lives in some way. I thought that the movies would be a little easier to do rather than the books. I had originally decided to do each one as a press kit, but this was a lot harder to do in the 2 weeks we had to do it, so I eventually settled on doing movie tickets. My twelve films were:
Unico
Father of the Bride
Adventures in Babysitting
Beverly Hills Cop
Man of the House
Toy Story
Robin Hood
Sword in the Stone
Never Been Kissed
Three Men and a little lady
Bugsey Malone &
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

I tried to be sympathetic to the original movie posters and I went on a mad hunt to find the same fonts that were used in the posters. I used similar ones or appropriate ones if I couldn't find the exact fonts. I used pictures that were associated with the films and I found out the release dates of each one - including the actual day of the week. I designed both front and back of the tickets. I used the character names for the cast list and put actual details of key contributors to the film. I also found the rating logos and film company logos too. All designed in Illustrator with a little help from photoshop.

Permutations

Permutations was the project we had where we had to come up with 12 wine labels for a brand of wine called Permutations. We had a list of famous people on which we could base the wines on. I decided to base mine on Grouch Marx. My boyfriend got me in to the Marx brothers as he is a huge fan - especially of Groucho.
The meaning of permutation is:


permutation |ˌpərmyoŏˈtā sh ən|
nouna way, esp. one of several possible variations, in which a set or number of things can be ordered or arranged : his thoughts raced ahead to fifty different permutations of what he must do.• Mathematics the action of changing the arrangement, esp. the linear order, of a set of items.DERIVATIVESpermutational |-ˈtā sh ənəl| adjectiveORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [exchange, barter] ): via Old French from Latin permutatio(n-), from the verb permutare ‘change completely’ (see permute I decided to play on this a little bit and have each one of the different types of wines with a letter from Groucho's name (I realize that equals 11, so the last wine was simply named Grouch). I then decided that for each letter would be a sum of some sort that would equal the number in the alphabet that made up his name. I then color coded the lettering in red and white to symbolize the color of the wine.

Mirrors

The mirrors project was about our lives and/or homes. I did two things for this project. Both were very typography based. The first was in the form of an article in a magazine, and the other was completely handwritten/drawn out. The article one was more home based while the hand rendered one was more about my life and things that are important to me.

Carnival project

So, our next project was to come up with a series of posters depicting a carnival/festival of some sort. I decided to the Cherry Blossom Festivals in the USA. I have a huge fascination with Japanese culture and tradition, and I particularly love cherry blossoms, so I thought this would be most appropriate for my posters. I initially drew everything out with pen, then using genius scan on my iphone (I am without scanner at present) I took pictures of then and sent them to the computer. I then used live trace and paint in illustrator to "perfect" the artwork and then added text. Out of all my projects this is the one I am most proud of.

Quoter

The second project we had was to come up with an A1 size typography poster, for a randomly selected quote.
My quote was; " I shot an arrow in the air. It fell to earth I know not where".

The quote is from a poem called, "The arrow and the song" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The whole quote can be found here.

When I read the whole poem I felt it had quite an ethereal feel to it and decided to put the text in a shape of an arrow after being shot in the air. The font I used was called Zapfino and I felt that it was sympathetic to the context of the text.

BIg upload of posts!

Hi! Welcome to my blog. As part of my degree, I recently found I have to have an ongoing blog, documenting all my work! Well, as, like I said, I haven't long found this out, I am having to do a big upload of my work all at once - hence the title.

I'm going to use my blog as not only a place to showcase my work (both school related and personal) but I will use it for showcasing other designs I have seen and love - hence the title of the main blog.

Thanks for visiting and feel free to ask me anything (within reason anyway!!)