Progression

I have decided to continue my education at the college by doing the HND in Typography and Advertising. I feel this course will be a good continuation of the current Diploma course. I have always leaned more towards advertising when participating in the diploma. I really like the ways in which products are advertised weather it be on posters or Television adverts. I have friends who are currently doing the course who comment on how good the course is which has further influenced my decision to undertake the Higher National Diploma.

I was first considering taking a year out but I soon decided that this may be not the best idea due to the current annual rise in university fees. I may revisit the idea of traveling after I have completed the university course as this is something I have always wanted to do. I have never considered going into full time employment as i feel the two years studying the course would be wasted as its impossible to get a full time graphic design job without a degree.

Live Projects

Whilst at college I have participated in many live projects. I found taking part in these projects an interesting learning experience.  It gave me a taste of what the design industry may be like.

The first live project that I participated in was a Christmas card project we were task with producing a Christmas card  for the company Paperchase. The design chosen by Paperchase would be made into a card that would be sold in shops. I produced three designs that were presented to Paperchase however the designs that I created were not very good they were very simple and lacked the style of the current Paperchase cards this was mainly due to my lack of mac knowledge, as this competition was at the start of the first year.

this was the best out of the three designs this was probably due to me not creating it on the mac. the majority of the image was created using watercolor and gold foil ink.


                                                 

the second live project was for the Artist Laure Thomas we were tasked with producing a poster that advertised her work and the Beaney Art institute. Laura was producing a stain glass window made of thread for the exhibition y, the exhibition was sponsored by muse maker and the national lottery, so it was important that the design had some strap-line related to the window or weaving.

I produced three designs for Laura all based around the muse maker logo and weaving. I focused on producing work based on the muse maker logo as Laura felt it resembled her work. the designs i produced weren't to bad but i felt that focused on the wrong thing to design around.


This was the design I focused on. i tried to make each block resemble and stain-glass window to tray and relate it to Laura's exhibition piece.










The final live project that I participated in was to produce a logo for the new addition to KMFM, KMFM Extra they wanted to create a design that would target a younger audience they thought a design based on graffiti would be a good idea. I focused on this a produced a number of designs based around this concept.



 This was my strongest design however I feel the design isn't very strong. once again I was focusing on completing other projects.

Although my outcomes weren't the best, due to my lack of mac knowledge, I really enjoyed participating in the live projects and found them a great learning experience.

Finshed Website

I have produced a website to display my work and contact details. I feel the website I have created isn't the greatest I should have spent more time on the designing of the site as i feel the current outcome is very childlike and quite boring. the only positive  aspect of the design is that i have allocated plenty of space to display my work. this is very important as these are the things that will grab the attention of potential clients.

my website has information about myself and also contact details so that people can contact me if they require work to be produced.

To be honest I didn't really enjoy the web unit hence the reason why my website isn't the greatest piece of web design. Lots of improvements are need to help push the design to a higher standard. One of the main reasons why the design isn't to great may be the fact that I was focusing on doing other work for different projects instead of focusing all my attention on the website layout and design

Vintage Show

We have now completed the show and all the work has been mounted and presented. We called the show vintage as we felt it would be a unique and interesting name. We did all signs for the show in a vintage style and also chose older music to help keep to a vintage feel. I really quite like this old fashioned feel to the show even though it doesn't really fit with the work on display as much of the work uses bright bold colours that doesn't really reflect a vintage style.

We mounted the work on foam boards to be displayed, I helped cut out the work before they were mounted on the foam boards, once they were mounted we placed them on the display panels to help give the show a professional feel. It was important that the work that was displayed together had colours and styles that complemented each other so the work had a professional look.

The feedback received about the show has been very positive many people have commented on how professional the work is and how well the show has been presented as a whole.

FMP Upgraded

I have completed upgrading my FMP project to distinction level, which means I have received the full 36 points available. I will now continue upgrading my projects so I can achieve a higher final grade.

Improving Grades

Now that the show is completed I can now focus on increasing my grades.Thus far I have achieved the grades Distinction, Merit, Merit. I will mainly focus on upgrading my Final Major product as the B-tec points received are doubled. My currant grade for FMP is Merit ( which is 24 points) I wish to push the grade up to a distinction level ( 36 points) so that I can achieve the maximum amount of marks for the project.

End of year show

 Now that the FMP's have been completed we have been working on our end of year show. We were given the oil panting room to display our work however before we went about mounting are work we first had to completely clean and re-paint the room as most of the walls were covered with paint.

Now the walls are painted and the floor is cleaned we can begin mounting and displaying the work. I will take pictures of the show once there up so they can be posted on my blog.

FMP Completion

I have recently finished my FMP project. I have produced an era of products each with the new ouzo logo located somewhere on the design. I have produced a number of products ranging from posters to shot glasses. I really liked the anise pod design I made when creating work in Paul Caridads style i decided to carry the design forward as I felt it could create and interesting stylish design.

FMP

I produced these design based on Paul Caridad's artwork. When I first created the designs I thought I could use them for my final logo for my bottle labels however I soon realized that they were far to feminine and would probably look better on fruit juice carton than on an alcohol label.

I really liked the anise pod vector drawing  from the designs so I thought I would carry the design forward and develop it further.   

FMP

Over the past 5 weeks I have been working on my final major project. For the project I decided to re-brand the traditional Greek drink ouzo as I had visited Greece recently and I felt i could link the drink to Greek mythology which is a subject that has always interested me . I thought it would be a good project to try and help improve my mac abilities and knowledge.

I tried to create a Greek mythology inspired design but I felt the idea would not hit my target audience of 18-25 year old, as many people of that age have know knowledge or interest in Greek mythology. I began researching into the properties of ouzo and focused on the anise ingredient as I felt that anise pod had quite a stylish modern look to it.

I researched into artists and found the artist Paul Caridad I really liked his work and produced a design similar to  his style.




Paul Caridad work

Uni

I recently heard back from Greenwich university saying that I had been accepted on their course. I felt the interview went well so I was expecting for some good news. now that I have my university place I will now focus on improving current project to achieve higher grades.

My Units At College

Unit 1( Visual Recording): Full Pass,Part Merit, life drawing to be marked.

Unit 2 (MTP): Full pass, Narrative and FMP needs to be marked.
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Unit 3 ( Ideas and Concepts): Full pass, needs updating.

Unit 4 ( visual communication):Full Merit

Unit 5 ( Contextual influences): Part Merit.

Unit 6 (Application, Exploration and Realisation in Art and Design): Working on this unit.

Unit 7 (Designs Method in Art and Design): Full Merit.

Unit 10 (Personal and Professional Development in Art and Designs): Working on this unit

Unit 12 (Computers in Art and Designs): Full pass, needs improving to Merit

Unit 29 (Image Manipulation in Art and Design) : Full Merit

Unit 32 (Desktop Publishing Computer Application) full Pass, part Merit, needs improving to full Merit

Unit 33 ( Type and Letterforms) Full Merit

Unit 34 (Typographic Designs) Full Merit

Unit 39 ( Website Design) Working on this Unit

Unit 40 ( Graphics media, Techniques and Technology) Working on this unit.

Unit 42 ( Design for Advertising) Full Merit

Unit 43 ( Graphics for 3D Application) Full Pass, Part Merit, need to one more piece of work to achieve full Merit.

Unit 44 ( Narrative Image Making) Need to complete the project..

final Narrative Images

I have recently finished my narrative project. I feel i have designed three effective outcomes that clearly show the narrative of the story. The designs clearly show inspiration from Dave Mckeans dark and Gothic style. i first drew the designs and then adjusted the colours in Photoshop to give it a darker feel. To get the splatter effect i produced various splatter effects using ink, scanned them in and then adjusted the colours in Photoshop.

Narrative Project

We started on the narrative project. We were tasked with producing a narrative image for a piece of text in a style that you wouldn't associate with the text. I have chose the story ' the four clever brothers' the story involves a princess who has been kidnapped by a dragon and is saved by four brothers with their own individual skills.

I have deiced to try and create my designs in a similar style to David Mckean. his style is very dark and Gothic. I feel his style would be perfect for a dragon as dragons are usually drawn in a dark Gothic style.

Dave Mckean's work

 I really like the images created by Dave Mckean, shown above, they dark frightening and really brings the narrative of the story to life. i will try and create my design in a similar dark style to his as i feel they would create a dark effective narrative image for my chosen story

Final Type Poster

I finished my final poster for the thinking with type book. my design consists of the thinking man completely made of type. I used a white background as i felt the design and text looked far more effective as creates a more narrow focus on the design.

I feel the design is a effective one as it creates some form of image for a text book cover instead of just a solid, uninteresting, text front cover . I feel this will draw more attention to the design as looking at an image is far more interesting than reading solid text.

UCAS application completed

 I have decided to continue my education at Canterbury College studying the HND in Advertising. I feel this is the best decision as i enjoyed the advertising project immensely. I hope studying the course will extend my knowledge of design and allow me to attain a good design job in the future.

Now that my application is completed I will focus on building an extensive  portfolio to take to my interviews. i will try and create a variety of work to show off all my skills within graphic design.