FMP (BA): Today's Thoughts

After today's session I wanted to take a step back from the designing process and look back at my inspirational mood board that I had produced on Pinterest of everything I had collected for this project, and on the typography board from my last project. 

While I was looking through I began to realise a pattern and that was that I tend to collect pieces that had some sort of structure. There were a few that didn't have them but the typography was mainly within a square, surrounding a shape or within a shape. Another reoccurring aspect was the fact the background or the type had a grungy texture to them. 

To make it easier to explain I picked out the designs I've found most inspirational.

Images sources: Steve Simpson; Bryan Patrick Todd; Franklin Mill; Jon Contino; Tobias Saul; We Are Yawn; Mary Kate McDevitt; Unicorn Empire Prints

Reoccurring aspects:

• Textured background
• Chalk-lettering style
• Strict composition (well, structured)
• No more than three-colour combination
• Simple illustrations
• Mixture of type styles - unusual typefaces - all hand-lettered 

Hopefully this brief "exercise" will help me to gain some inspiration and move forward with my Oscar Wilde design. I think from now on I shall stop restricting myself from looking for inspiration because even though James Franco mentioned how we should stop looking for inspiration and do it, I'm still in the learning process so right now I'm at the stage where he mentioned "to learn everything" which I should then "forget" before designing. 

FMP (BA): Today's Thoughts

Now that I have four complete designs I thought it was time to do some brief research on printing techniques because it would be ideal to get this professionally printed. I went to blurb.com to look at their pricing and that's when I realised that not only do they use different dimensions but they also require a minimum of 20 pages.

This means that I would have to produce at least twenty designs or ten double-paged spreads, and so I am going to aim to do at least ten DPS because it is slightly more achievable as I would just need to do around six more designs.

My thoughts are that for the DPS I'll do one side with the illustration/typography and the other side blank with a little icon and the author's name. For example, for Dr. Seuss I could have my quote and the icon of the hat and his name beneath it on the other page.

For my dimensions I think I'm going to carry on doing 125x154mm until I get to at least two more designs, and then I'll convert them all to 200x200mm. Or I might just start doing them at 200mmx200mm...

I'm just a bit clueless on how to do my book unless I do it through blurb as all of the tutorials I had looked at used folded pages in their designs, and my dimensions will be too large to fit on A4 so once again I might have to change the dimensions.

I'll be changing them no matter what so the most ideal option is to carry on designing until I have at least two more ideas and then figure out if I have enough time to produce more and think about the designs for the covers and inside pages.


Learning Outcomes:
[6] Developed skills of critical thinking, analysis and evaluation.

FMP (BA): Thoughts, Again

This project has been really confusing to me as it involves creating a series, and it wasn't until ten minutes ago that I came up with a solution; I'm going to tackle each page, each quote, as if it was an individual project so that I would first choose a quote and then do some research on inspirational pieces that "relates" to that quote, and go on from there.

I can't believe I hadn't thought of this earlier but I guess it's because it would be a new process to me. I've done something similar for my last FMP when I created some wedding stationary and treated the invitations and save the date cards etc as separate thing, and it worked pretty well.

The process will thus be as follows:

1. Choose a quote 
2. Find it's "voice" - perhaps do a mini mindmap or conjure a list of things related to it?
3. Gather inspiration and analyse it
4. Start sketching
5. Design
6. Done!

Hopefully this will work out! It'll provide me with some sort of timetable anyway.

Learning Outcomes:

[5] Developed skills of independent study, resource utilisation, problem-solving and decision-taking.

FMP (BA): Reflections

I've noticed that I work best when I have a whole mood board of inspirational pieces and just sit there with my list of quotes, pick one, and just draw. This has allowed me to work to a pretty tight schedule, and reflects what would be like in industry as I manage to do a piece in no more than a day. It has shown me that I can work under pressure and to a deadline. However my lack of research does leave my designs a bit stunted (in my opinion), meaning that I'm not developing my ideas as much as I hoped.

I'm going to upload one last piece I have done recently of a book quote and then I'll start researching again. I need to gather more pieces of information and analyse more hand-lettering so that I could understand the reasons why the designer/typographer/illustrator had done something a certain way. I need to research more into the Oxford Literary Festival as well, even though they attract a wide range of people of all ages.

Learning Outcome:
[6] Developed skills of critical thinking, analysis and evaluation.

FMP: My Thoughts

I had a little chat to my lecturer today because I've been stressing so much with this project; every design that I do doesn't "feel" right to me, and I'm getting more and more worried about it because I've only got just over a month to complete this. It sounds a lot, but by the time I've actually finished the design I need to look at paper stock and then printing companies... And the list goes on.

She made me realise the reason why I've been so stressed, and it's because I'm not using the methods that I love the most. It's good that I've been experimenting and tapping into digital design but what I really love is traditional illustration. I can't believe I didn't think about it before! It does explain why I've become more and more annoyed at myself that I can't produce the perfect design that I have in my head; it's because I'm not using the "right" methods.

Even though I have learnt a lot from my experiments and my designing I have decided to base my wedding invitation around traditional media, although I might use digital typefaces to it. I want my invitation to have that "organic" feel to it, to have character, and what better way than to do it by hand? 

Because of this I have decided to start doing some more research into illustration. I had briefly looked at two inspirational artists (Amy Brown and Jan Pienkowski) and the illustrations featured in the Grimm Fairytale's book, but I'm going to look into book illustration and illustrations portrayed in fairy tales a bit more to get that fairy tale feel.

Thinking about it makes me feel a lot better about my product, although I'm secretly annoyed with myself that I hadn't thought about it sooner. At least I've learnt how to use Illustrator a bit more!