Archive for the ‘Work Exp’ Category
Final Show Booklet
Posted on: May 17, 2009
Over the last week a few of us from the Foundation course have been creating a booklet of the courses work to give away/show at the final show.
Here are a preview of the individual photographs of the designers and a sample of the front cover. i will post some more info and the other pages after we send it off to get printed, Adam has also asked me if i would be interested in creating something to advertise for the course next year and will learn some more about that soon.
Starting up our own business
Posted on: May 10, 2009
For awhile now me and Chris Palmer have been thinking of starting up our own business, we started thinking about it while we were both in the same college course and it has slowly developed as we have gone through university, since we have both decided to do the extra year on top of the Foundation degree.
Since we have both had a hard time getting people to get back in touch with us for work experience we decided to start up the business now so we can get some experience in setting it up and we also plan to get office space in the building next door to the university for the next year and have a proper go at it, see if it works as it is alot safer to start this up with the safety net of the university than without. We have both been working together for virtualyl all of the projects this year and it has been a largely good experience, both of us prefer doing different things but also have alot in common aswell design wise, running a business together might be a completely different experience so we are glad to be able to get a year ‘Danger free’ to make sure it can work between us.
We have just recently started to think about a good name, in the past we have not been able to generate a good enough name that makes us want to be named it, the first ones we ever thought of was “project orange”, “Reflex designs” “design made easy” (the first two being when we were in college and just brainstorming the idea), we just didnt feel any of the names were good enough for us, so this time we really wanted to spend some time getting our name and branding right.
Drum beat
Posted on: April 21, 2009
Hi Joe and Chris, Sorry in late reply, busy times at the moment. How about we first arrange to meet you guys in person and then take it from there? Cheers, Tim
Tim Makin Drumbeat Creative
3 Jordan Street Manchester M15 4PY
Tim got in touch with us today, we did send him an e-mail with our PDF in a week or two ago but we know he already had some people in work experience for the easter break, we might not be able to get it all sorted in time to get it done for my presentation but hopefully we can set something up anyway.
Drum Beat
Posted on: April 10, 2009
It appears our freelance client for Chelsea Frames has not got back to us for some time about the job he wanted doing, so me and Chris have both been looking out for other Work Experience opportunitys, we started by creating PDF versions of our portfolio work. This process proved to be a little more challenging than we had first thought but after a few hours we decided on the look/feel
One of the companys we have contacted is DrumBeat in manchester but have not yet got back to us, and neither have a couple of the other companies we tried, so we think we might just get on with some freelance work or Chris and I might take further steps to take up our own company for next year.
http://viewcreative.co.uk/
Posted on: March 25, 2009
View Creative specialises in brand communication projects. Our award winning design has earned us an enviable reputation for highly creative and inspiring work. We create brands and explore possibilities across print and web that gets results. Our goal is to help you communicate your vision and personality.
View creative take a somewhat creative but minimal view on design and create some very interesting peices of work, the simplicity is what makes me excited to look at it, less is more.
The feel of the SM OAK ERY packaging is beautiful, i took some inspiration from the classy dark feel when i created my donatoes packaging, im not sure about the big window cut out of the big peices, i much pefer the thin version of the packaging.
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Written a 2 weeks ago: (had it in drafts)
Me and Chris pamler today an e-Mail from liz and Adam, who thought we would be good at a job someone else had going on but didnt really have time to do the project justice, we got a rough outline of what is needed and decided to take on the work for our professional practice, the next day we met with Joss who was the original person that had the work, she gave us her notes and a general idea of what the client wanted, which was not very clear becuase the client didnt really have much of an idea. This was a a day befor a prescedualed meeting with the client who was expecting some ideas and rough concepts, Both of us panicked a bit and just tried to get as many digital mock ups done as we could in such a short time scale (We tend to work alot faster stright to screen, if we had more time we would of supported that by doing adaquet paperwork.)
We did get around 4-5 nice looking concepts with different styles in the end and were very happy with 1-2 of them thinking that they would be perfect for what the client would want.
On the friday we were set to meet with Patrick Lomax (the Client) around 1 o’clock, it took us a little while to find the place even with a GPS, we got there on time though, we were aimlessly walking around for awhile as no one was answering the door, after about 5 minuets of waiting we rang him up and found out he was just upstairs, we entered a very dirty and clustered workspace but there were so many beautifully crafted frames and other art around that the clutter didn’t matter too much, however we were asked to wait around a lot while he answered calls, in between introducing us to the company and what he does, what started to alarm us was when he started talking about how many different bits of art he wants on his website. “We have hundreds of pieces of art here and thousands more in warehouses” he also made it sound like we’d be the ones having to get them scanned re sized ect. which would be very time consuming on our end, making us thing we should charge by the hour and not a flat rate for the whole project.
The later half of the meeting we went up to his office to look at some of his inspiration of what he would like on the website and what it would contain, He didnt really like the sites we had made for him but after our convosations we did have a much better idea of what he wanted for his website.
He told us that he would meet us in a couple of weeks because he was going on holiday for a little while.
D&AD – What we learnt
Posted on: March 22, 2009
Both Chris and I learnt alot from this tight deadline and the experience in general with the biggest one being that if your in a hurry nothing will go right.
- Start early, ok we started thinking and doing really rough roughs early but then we kind of went on a break doing other projects that needed to be done and it went on the back burner, we wernt entirly sure we would do it for the competition deadline and just for our negoticated study, but thankyfully we decided to work togeahter to achive a competition entry.
- Get other peoples/staff opinions earlier at first we went on our own think showing people little bits of what we were doing but when we started to pull things togeather we went out own direction and were just focused in getting it done as fast as possible to the best standard we could achive, This kind of undone us a little when we had to change things around after showing what we had to others.
- Never change versions of programs, We both use the newest version of illustrator but the Macs in the hub only have CS3 the one before the current one, apart from the obvious font problems (that we knew about and could handle) there were also group problems that resulted into random clipping masks that made selecting the things we wanted on the final day a real pain, it took us almost 3x as long to select something to move then it would of normally and that really started to get annoying when the dealine was approaching and things needed to be done as fast as possible.
- Print early and always allow twice the time you think printing should take, this is where we had some major problems not just others needing to use it because we wernt really ready untill last anyway but then having the printer messing up your paper with ink residue and the printer not wanting to accept your paper for no good reason 4 times really ate away time, even the technician had some problems getting it to work properly again this really set us back in time as we still had to get them mounted and sent off. Luckly we were the last ones so the staff had the time to help us out and get things mounted the same time as we were printing
D&AD Entry – what we did
Posted on: March 22, 2009
Chris Palmer and i decided a few months ago to work on a D&AD together, but it ended up taking a back seat to our other work until only two weeks ago, but we knew we had the skill and the know how to get it done in such a tight deadline, luckily we had been thinking about it for awhile so already had some good concepts in place.
At first we had a pretty hard time deciding which brief we wanted to do, there were quite a few we were interested in such as Blyk, Hp, PJ smoothies, you tube channel. After some team meetings both online and in real life we got them down to either the Blyk or HP ones. We had mind mapped out a few good ideas for each of these and in the end chose to follow Blyk because we thought it would be a good challenge for both of us to do something pretty different.
The deadline for this was Wednesday the 18th of march, we began serious work on the one brief around the Thursday or Friday of the previous week, Our idea for Blyk was to create a location based game that uses the new functionality’s of the phone such as RFID readers, GPS, 3D bar codes (QR), Wi Fi ect.
The trouble we first had was how to demonstrate such a game to the creative advertisers so we decided in the end to do it via a story board walking people through the different stages. During the last 3 days we had we spent most of it in the hub (computer room) working out the style and feel of our illustrations while making sure we were getting the story and reasoning across.
The whole style and feel of the boards changed dramatically throughout the final 2 days after taking opinions from members of the staff and support staff one big problem we had was conflicting opinions so we did learn to take out what we wanted from there advice and not do what they wanted but compromise with taking there opinion on board compared to the others and of course our own personal views on what we had done. Another thing we added during these sessions was a characterization that would be on your phone, later to be named Blykie we decided that there needed to be something to attach you to the game to make you want to do it, offering a cheap deal somewhere wasn’t enough, we needed it to feel a bit more of an experience.
We lost out way on the start of the final day for a few hours, just panicing a bit and not really thinking things through, and had to go under the most dramatic change yet after we decided that our new layout was not working in the slightest. We had to go full speed after that to get it done in time to send it off in the post to make sure it was there on the friday.
Thankfully we did make it in time, however later discovered a few minor grammer/spelling mistakes that we wish we had noticed and rectified.
heavenly
Posted on: February 25, 2009
I first got intordouced to heavenly when they created the branding for my university and was lucky enough to be able to sit in a meeting with them when they were creating it, but after the branding they eventually applyed to the univeristy i was a little dissapointed with there work as i expected much more from them, specially with how many good ideas where generated from the inital meeting from locals.
I feel that alot of their work is hit or miss and lacks consistancy but overall they are a good design firm and one i would like to look further into in the future and possibly get some work experiance with them as i feel working in a large london based company would be perfect experiance.
Design firms
Posted on: February 4, 2009
These are two more companies that i send some e-mails off to, seeing if they could possibly provide me with dome work experiance. (local companies)
The blog of Joseph Eshmade 