No News is good news Brief

This week we were given a research brief. the idea was to look through a variety of newspapers taking one interesting headline and researching the story and elements within the story. I started by looking through the Daily Mail and the Mirror. I came across a variety of healines that intrigued me and they are listed below:

The torture files must be released

What a way to treat our heroes

Twitter Twits

So why does everyone hate you Mr.President?

Leslie ash reveals MRSA painkillers plight

The superbug saved my life

Now i decided to pick the last two stories as they were the same and they had certain things in the article that intrigued me such as MRSA. I don't know much about the disease and therefore thought it would be interesting the focus on this and learn something new.

I started by taking the article apart and focusing and 3 key themes that ran throughout, which were; Alcoholism/Addiction, MRSA, and life changing experiences.

After this i then started collecting a varied amount of research under each title, below shows my notes on what i found.

(there is more research in a folder)

Once we had gathered all our research we had crits on Friday, and here we had to decide on one area to further our research and later develop into final pieces.

The area i decided to stick with was MRSA, as i found out that not a lot of people know how dangerous it actually is and therefore hopefully with the up and coming project I can raise awareness.

Visual Language

The aim of the visual language session this week was to experiment with crafting a letter form across a series of planes. Just like that channel 4 idents. We all brought in a selection of boxes in a variation of sizes and the aim was to align the boxes on different planes and then place the letter. We were also told the bigger the planes the easier the letter would be to see and the more successful it would turn out. Below are range of images that it took during the session.

Above shows the view finder that we used to take a photograph through. The alignment had to work within the 10x10 box so you could stare through and it you would see the image and if you shifted your position you wouldn't.

ally quite hard at first. We couldn't work out a letter and it was very tempting to place the boxes in the letter form which would make it easier and to a certain extent we have done that just so we can get a clear letter form. It was hard to get the alignment through the view finder and we had to keep editing little bits in order to make it work, but once it was done i thought it was quite successful.

Brief 3

With this new brief we were split into twos and i was partnered with Josh. We then both had to answer a series of questions - take something from these questions and create an alphabet about each other. I took 3 answers to questions which were:

What would your supper power be?

Power of time.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner?

Samurai, Ninja, Star trek crew.

Who would be your fancy dress costume?

Star trek - Captain Kirk.

So from the answers above I wanted to create my alphabet with a star trek theme. I then began my research looking at original type faces as full sets and whether they worked etc. I then reigned my research into look at type faces that would relate to space and star trek - for example I looked at the NASA type face

Below shows snippets of my research:

I then began creating ideas. My idea was to create each letter as a character from star trek making them as obvious as possible and cartoon like to make them fun.

I didn't want the poses to be the same so i got my friends to pose and then i created sketches to mimic these designs which could b transfered onto the designs.

After that i began drawing my alphabet so that later i could trace it.

I really enjoyed this project. It was challenging because it was hard to create each individual letter with a pose and some worked much better than others. My personal favorite 'C'. I wanted there to be a continuity and legibility with the whole alphabet which i think i have, i just wish i had more time to maybe make the designs more professional and at a higher standard.

Visual Language

Today we were looking at scale and how it helps the relationship between two different things such as format and layout (where they are placed and what the viewer can't see).

We had to use 5 different frames and the letter in each had to be different, either altered dramatically or on slightly. Once we had done ours we then had to switch and take someone else's work and create 3 visual variations of their letter so we had 4 in total. This section was then looking at visual variation being controlled and manipulated.

Below shows the most successful(in my opinion) after altering my partners letter forms.

Communicating a word over a sequence Part 2.

After we did the main task we then were told to condense the sequences we created back into one 10x10cm square and see if it still worked. As i kept my original sequence quite simple it was quite easy to make them smaller and fit into one box and still put the message across.

Below are the images I created from left to right they read: Dissect, Compress, Duplicate, Hybrid and Edit.

Communicating a word over a sequence

Today was similar to last weeks brief in Visual Language, however this time we had to visually communicate the word we were given over a sequence of 4 10x10 frames. In total we were given 5 words: Duplicate, Compress, Dissect, Hybrid and Edit. With this lesson we were also learning to appreciate the white space around the type more in order to help our message get across, space communicates as much as type does. We also had to try and pick the right type font to match the word as best we could.

Below are the images i created for each word, when we got other people to mark our work they managed to get all mine right which meant that my message was conveyed accurately which i was very pleased about.

Duplicate.

Compress.


Dissect.

Hybrid.

Edit.

Alphabet Soup - Final Images

Personally I really like what i produced. I think generally the design communicates layer and is easy enough to be replicated for the rest of the alphabet. I think its simple but effective. Although i think if i had the time to do it again i would do it all on the computer t give it a clean and crisp effect to make it look more professional and would also get rid of the grey 'smudge' background surrounding some letters.