On the Prowl in Leeds

31.10.13 — Leeds

How ironic that I should be writing this post on the train on the way back from Leeds! I thought I’d take a quick look over some of my adventures around my new home, Leeds!

First up there’s me and Rhea’s couple of trips down to the market, where the fruit and vegetables are both irresistibly good and ridiculously cheap! Picked up a huge bag of my favourite apples (Pink Ladies) for just a quid! I didn’t manage to get a photo inside the amazing market but I shall do now I have a phone which actually responds when I click something.

Then there’s our campus – here’s the entrance to the Graphics building during a lovely stint of weather we’ve been having!

The entrance to the Clothworkers Building

Anyway for now I’m heading back to Burnley for the weekend to pop into work at Burnley Youth Theatre and catch up with my family. It’ll be nice to eat a full meal and have a glass of nice cool cordial again! No rest for the wicked however, I’ve still to be getting on with my first two graphics briefs and an Art History essay – ah, the joys of student life…

Alton Towers

30.10.13 — Alton

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but once again the whirlpool that is university life has had me tangled up for the past few days – mainly since I spent all of Sunday at Alton Towers with some friends from Graphics and the School of Design Society (or SODS).

We managed to sneak onto two rides in the first twenty minutes – Air and Nemesis – which is quite an achievement seeing as though they’re two of the larger coasters whose queue times tend to exceed an hour!

But then it all seemed to go wrong – we queued up for 45 minutes or so to get on their newest and supposedly greatest ride, “The Smiler”…

Just to be told that it had broken down and was closed. To cheer ourselves up we went for burgers and then headed to Rita, a ride which I assured everyone would not break down.

It did.

We then decided to get on some rides which had next to no queue – the log flume and then the rapids! Which Rena had a really good time on…

All before heading off to Oblivion – which we managed to get on within five minutes! It was a great end to the day. Somehow we managed to walk onto half the rides and the other half we managed to break with our mere presence.

But all in all it was a great day with some great people. Nothing much productive occurred (as you can probably gather) but it was great to take some time out with people of a similar mindset. All geared up for the Graphics ‘disco’ later in November in Leeds city centre – even if I do still have the creepy music from The Smiler stuck in my head. Listen at your peril.

The Crib

25.10.13 — Burnley

Today I thought I’d take a look back at one of the projects that I finished just before uni – this time a branding/visual identity job assigned to me by Lancashire County Council. The brief was to create a logo and visual identity guidelines for The Crib @ Burnley Library, a space which opened in 2005 which the council wanted to promote as a venue for creative workshops.

The project was an intensive week long job and consisted of me working alongside library staff and young people who use The Crib to create the general look and feel of the logo and brand. On the first day I set about sketching some ideas for colours, shapes and logos which represented the space…

Admittedly, the first attempts at some logo mockups were a bit dated and cliché. The first used the idea of a ‘ring’, a circular space with a gap for people to enter, which reflected the actual interior design of the space.

The second one was an idea taken from my sketchbook, which made the word ‘Crib’ the prominent feature using some simple yet tacky 3D effects.

I even sunk to the lowly depths of considering an ‘indie’ style logo design.

This may have been a disgrace, but it birthed a new idea which I soon started to hone in on – simply putting text in a circle. I started to experiment with colours, fonts, layouts and extra decoration and came up with a few slightly varied prototypes.

Soon enough the shadow had been simplified to a solid, semi-opaque drop shadow at 45°, but then I began to consider putting it on an angle. Naturally it took a lot of careful consideration before I chose which angle at which to set the logo…

I ended up setting the logo at a 7.5° angle, and eventually settled on the shade of purple to convey creativity and to stand out in the red, yellow and green colour of the space.

And I also put together a set of Visual Identity Guidelines. I hope you enjoyed reading in on my work – be sure to leave a comment, no matter whether you think it’s terrific or terrible.

Optima is Optimum

20.10.13 — Leeds

Today’s been a hectic day of running around and catching up with the Monday morning workshop I missed just this week – I needed to get my skates on and work on Brief Number 2: to create a poster promoting a font that we’d been assigned. I (thankfully) ended up with Optima, and so I got to work on some research and sketching…

Then after another full page of research which I won’t trouble you with, I sketched three quick ideas for possible poster copy, layout and design, and then, using my favourite go-to program for super quick mockups, Adobe Fireworks, I haphazardly threw the three ideas together and made them into digital prototypes.

If you’re wondering why they’re so dull both in terms of colour choice and general form, we’ve been restricted to using only the assigned font to create the design, and a colour palette of black and white with one shade of grey. Hopefully I’ve been inventive enough with the composition and use of glyphs as structural elements that they don’t look like complete tat.

In other news, I went down to Apple today with the intention of buying a new phone, only to be told that they had none in stock and had no clue when the next shipment of them would arrive. They’ve told me to go and order one offline – but a quick look reveals that there’s still a 2-3 week wait before they even ship. Not happy. Maybe they’ll inspire me at their iPad event on Tuesday…

The Uni Room Blitz

18.10.13 — Leeds

Okay – so I missed another day again (for which you can blame Rhea for chatting away with me until the early hours of the morning) but I do promise that I will improve. I must do better. Anyway…

In between catching up on uni lecture notes and the sorts, today’s task has been to rewire my LED-heavy and poster-ridden university bedroom. First up – my desk. It used to have a couple of spotlights over it, but I wanted a more natural ‘daylight’ glow, so I’ve wired up some warm white and some blue LED strips over it and now it basks in a nice cool ambience.

Also, my walls of posters got a bit of TLC – I’ve put all the ones back up which fell down and now I’ve a collection that looks something like this. The posters are a random mix of work I’ve done, work I’m currently doing and work that I wish I had done.

I know you might be wondering why there’s so many LED lights around – it’s because I really hate the fluorescent tube lights that we all have in our rooms. They’re noisy, they take ages to turn on and the light they give off makes the whole place feel like it’s about 100 years old.

You may also question why this uni room is so chaotic when my room at home is clearly minimal through and through – and it’s because I like to swing from one extreme to the other. Sometimes I want to be living in a pure white box and sometimes I want to be living in a Salvador Dalí painting – it just so happens that I’ve decided my uni room should be the latter.

The LED lighting is what makes my uni room feel my own, and it’s only temporary so I can shift it all around – I used IKEA’s Dioder sets and a lot of extension leads to create the setup. Being the control freak that I readily acknowledge that I am, I had to have all the switches and controls in one place – next to my bed (so that I don’t have to get up to turn it all off), so I mounted them all on the side of my bedside drawers.

And so to conclude, I’m afraid to say that because I’ve been so enthralled in this little spot of amateur electronics that I have nothing else really to report back on. Today all graphics work has had to take a back seat whilst I channel my creativity into designing lighting systems – but I’m now happy with my little creative hovel and I’m ready to tackle the mountain of work that I’ve collected for the weekend…