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CSAD Summer Exhibition 2009

It's so crazy thinking how fast this has come along. All the third year courses at CSAD will be opening their doors to show their students off, from 13th-19th June.

If you're interested in coming along, the shows are open all week, but there's a special late-night opening on Thursday 18th June, from 5-8pm. 

Graphic Communication will be doing our own little invite for the show as well, which I'll post up soon. 

Designing authority

We presented our final pieces of work yesterday, for a module titled 'The Big Idea'. We were given a random word and asked to explore the word or concept visually, offering an interesting interpretation, a reactionary statement, or whatever. 

There was a really interesting range of work, a real testament to the diversity of interests and working methods of students on the course. I want to post a few other people's projects up over the weekend, but I'm having issues with my camera, which means that I'm not able to do justice to their work right now. 

My own work has suffered too, but I'm really proud of the actual work so I want to share it here regardless of my inability to take good indoor shots with the Nikon Coolpix S6.

My word was 'Authority'. 

We had to write a short rationale to accompany our work, so here's mine:

"Within this project I have aimed to explore the relationship between the visual and verbal languages of authority, and their development over the last 150 years. The question of the origins of authority were also important to my outcome: How is the right to dictate authoratively earned? How is credibility given to the signs I have studied?

"Showing modern signage in a historical context, words that seem familiar are made to appear more austere and commanding. But there is a humour in the juxtaposition of the subject and its display. Thus, the work encourages viewers to question their attitudes to the authority that imposes itself into their every day lives: Is it to be welcomed, for bringing a sense of safety and order to our environments, or is there a more sinister aspect that should be challenged?"

Here are the posters a little larger (again, apologies for image quality. Workman and tools, etc.)

You might recognise the layout style of the middle poster from a blog post a week or two ago about an Ink Posters playbill. Their mix of humour and typography was a definite influence for me when working out how I would convey my idea.

I did a fair bit of typographic and stylistic research to work from, to make the posters appear as authentic to the late 19th century as possible. I also did quite a bit of work on the crest in the 'dog control' one, which was really interesting. Studying engraving, letterpress (although I didn't get to actually do any) and language really made this project stand out for me and I'm really proud of my outcomes, even though they're not much like any of my other work to date.

Nice to see this

My current project is taking me on a journey into typography and poster design from the late 19th Century. Partly inspired by the taxi meter talk at St Brides (which I will be quiet about soon!), and also because I wanted a nice poster for my portfolio, I've been asked to explore and represent the word 'authority' in a piece of graphic communication. 

It's ongoing, with the deadline next week, but I've come across this lovely print which is available from Ink Posters . The layout is quite severe, but the typographic play and the subject matter make a really interesting print. 

For my project, I'm trying to compare how authority has been enacted visually, and how this has developed over time. Results next week!

Step Up!

The more I think about the last project we completed at uni, the more unsure I become about it. 

Another final-year project where the 2 week marking response deadline has come and gone, I've had plenty of time to mull over whether the work I did was even worthy of the bottom grade, let alone the fairly high one I need to pull my average up to where I'd like it to be.

We have to submit extra evaluations of two of our completed projects in our final 'reflective journal', and that's meant to then give you the opportunity to raise the grade that you initially received. It's meant to be in light of the feedback you received, but seeing as we haven't received it yet, and the reflective journal deadline is drawing near, I thought I'd get started.

If you're thinking of jumping out now let me assist by saying that the rest of this post is about community involvement, the internet, and my ineptitude in design.

So…

You can't move on the internet these days without hearing of the demise of the newspaper, regional, and even national television. And often this is coupled with a sense that there's going to be a gap in local community news and interaction, with no real vision at the moment as to how that would be filled (except for something that I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about that I saw in a presentation on Thursday.)

So when we were given the opportunity to set our own briefs for our penultimate project at the end of last term, I decided to try to do something about it. I briefed myself to 'encourage people aged 16-30 to engage with their local community' and based my project in the Canton and Riverside areas of Cardiff, where I've spent most of my life so far.

Another reason for doing this was this great quote from Richard Millington 

"if you want to clean up the litter in your street, don't grab a broom, build the bonds between members so they won't drop litter on your street. It serves to reason, if you want to improve the value of your home, you should increase the social capital of your street. You can do this easier than ever with online tools."

A massive part of what we were asked to do was research, which was fine for a project like mine. It was actually the first time I've really done a substantial sketchbook, which probably held me back a bit but was a lot of fun. I'm not sure, though, if having the work schedule weighted two thirds research and one third development was really appropriate for a web-based outcome. Anyway.

I knew a proportion of my efforts would need to be online, but how much, and where, and why and how would people interact with whatever was there? Ruby Pseudo was super helpful at this point in reminding me that, essentially, there is no online - younger people see their online activities as an intrinsic part of their overall lives, and not an end in themselves. 

Bearing that in mind, I chose to style an online presence that was more of a hub of existing content and activity, as opposed to a completely new, facebook-style utility site that would require new sign-in and content from users. I figured that the APIs of the services that are already out there could be used in such a way that my site could be a collection of everything the community is doing, simply with a new mechanism overlaid for people to get involved and make new connections.

My main problem at this point, however, was still how would I get people to use the site and populate it with the interactions that would begin to meet my brief. Before I even started web ideas, I was still a long way off the question of 'how do you design that interaction'.

I needed to make my project remarkable, i.e make it able to be remarked upon, so it needed to be visible in the streets it was representing. That's why I thought about the idea of hanging shoes telegraph wires. 

I like the ambiguity. I thought that if done enough and effectively, and followed up with good press and outdoor to add a name to it, I thought it could be pretty effective. The fact that I had so many twitter responses proved how good it might be in conversation on the street when people saw some. 

The twist would be that instead of manky trainers, I would be throwing high heels, fluffy slippers, brogues, shoes from all parts of the community.

So my next challenge was to think up names that would link an ongoing online presence with this initial promotional activity. I messed around with lots of shoe-related names until settling on 'step up' which I thought crossed the youth-street-community-footwear divide quite nicely.

I deliberately stayed away from graffiti styled 'yoof' logos, I think they're a bit patronising and also not so appropriate to the top end of my target market. I ended up with this:

This is such a small part of my project but I spent far too long on it, probably a few days, without really getting anywhere. As you can see. I'm wondering now if I should have just done something even worse and got on with the website.

So anyway, after the initial shoes go up, the plan was that a week or two later there would be press releases to local media to start answering a few of the questions that people on the street would hopefully have started asking. So I wrote some press releases.

I don't know if they'll be considered as part of the outcome.

The next part was to get posters out into the area just to finally link the telegraph wire shoes and the website. I tried a few approaches.

An early idea. That's my friend Mr. Pinder. What was good about this one was that I could have used the models more on the website, with features and banners to make the site seem more personal. But I couldn't make it look exciting and engaging enough with the time that I had and the weather and season at the time. Long term, if this project went ahead, pictures of locals would definitely have been the way to go.

But this particular example was slammed in crits and I didn't then have the resources to improve upon it, so had to go a different route:

Yep.

All that's left to show you is my web interface. I'm a bit ashamed of it to be honest. I spent far too long doing things to actually get it ready for launch, which was never going to happen, instead of spending the time mocking up a better layout. So the CSS and coding was all there, but not so much the answer to the question of designing interaction. 

Now that all the groundwork is done in terms of the surrounding campaign, I would definitely re-visit the actual site and try to get that to work. I would de-clutter the columns, change the header, use better photography, and include more encouraging language and calls to action. I think buttons like 'do something' and 'news and conversation' were definitely in the right direction, but that whole empowerment idea could definitely have been developed a lot more. It would be good to actually work with a developer to get all the twitter and flickr feeds working how they should.

But apparently, there's now an almost identical site somewhere within walesonline.co.uk , but I haven't been able to find it yet. Knowing that has made me feel a bit better about setting myself the task, but not so sure that I'll try to take it live over the summer, as I was originally planning.

I still think it was a noble ambition, I'm just a bit concerned that I've made an absolute pig's ear of it.

We'll have to see what the final grade is, but that won't really prove much more about whether this project is actually any good, just what my tutors thought of it. I felt pretty much out on my own in terms of support and guidance when I was putting this together, getting the distinct impression that it was an area that very few of the staff knew anything about. That's probably why my work time was so weighted towards pointless things like the logo when I now realise that it should have been on the content and interaction design. I could have done with another crit session with a tutor when I'd got the interface to how you see it above, to seek more guidance then. But after they'd asked us to spend 4 weeks just coming up with ideas, it didn't really work out that way.

But anyway, as one speaker from Friday at St Brides would say, 'there it is'. 

Blowing my own Trombone

This is me blowing my own trombone. Like a trumpet, but, um, bendy.

A few weeks ago I noticed a few hits were coming my way from a mysterious place on the internet called blogs.com, which seems like an obvious website to look at but I'd never spent time there before. 

It turned out that I'd been listed as 'one of the 10 blogs you should check out that aren't about design' or a similar title. This was awesome in itself, but I was chuffed/humbled/surprised/amazed/terrified/happy/mystified to see that the recommendations had come from none other than Mr. Ben Terrett, the words of whom I have been a follower since he gave a lecture at UWIC during my first year.

It's terribly bad form to boast, and I've said before how grateful I am for people even taking the time to stop by and read, let alone link to me like people like Ben, David, and Grant have. So I'm going to use this opportunity to point you in the direction of some of the other bloggers in my class, who you should definitely check out. The list is in no particular order:

Matthew Hilde - Matt has a strong interest in photography and also in urban environments. He is also doing some really exciting work with Kruger Magazine at the moment, so you can read all about all of those things.

Emma Holton - Emma produces a lot of very pretty work and her blog tends to show things that she finds inspiring.

Caffineabuse - I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say who this is, even though I think most people know. I guess that's up for him to tell you once you've clicked through.

Becky Cooke - Becky is farily new to the blogging game and I hope she sticks with it, because the things she's posted on her tumblr so far have been really interesting and fuelled many chats in the pub. Go Becky!

Lloyd Bailey - You can read all about BAGC3's resident rap icon and how he keeps it gangsta, everyday.

Rachel Daniels - Rachel's just recently posted up a lot of her uni projects, so you can have a look through and see the kind of work we've been getting up to.

Stacey Jenkins - Stacey is definitely one of the most enthusiastic members of our year group and that comes across on her tumblr, where she collects beautiful visuals, tutorials and general observations on the design world.

Those are all the ones I know about.. I might add more later though. I've just noticed that all of those bloggers are from my side of the alphabet. Our class were split down the middle on day one of our first year and we've never really recovered, so there may well be a whole other list of blogs I don't even know about.

So thanks for coming and having a look, really. Really really. I hope that if you subscribe, I'll be able to keep writing things that will mean that you don't unsubscribe. 

Good Question

We're working on quite a big module at uni at the moment, the 'student set project'. It's six weeks of fun where we get to set our own briefs and then work to them to produce a lovely piece of work that represents us well in our portfolio. That's the idea anyway. Today is the start of week 5.

 

The project has not been without its setbacks. There was the curfuffle last week of getting our feedback from our previous project when it was too late to act on for this one; being made to submit detailed personal scheduling plans and then being directed at a completely different pace through scheduled classes; cats walking on sketch books, and so on.

Seeing as this module is 20% of our degree classification, these things upset me a little bit, but this week I rise above it and get on with my head down on my own project.

Williamsburg Installation by LoisInWonderland on Flickr

My brief is "Inspire young people aged 16-30 to engage with their local communities." I've decided to do this by building a community website, and launching then an ambient campaign in the community based around the tradition of throwing trainers over telegraph wires. Except I'm twisting it and throwing all sorts of shoes over, because they're from the whole community! 

Anyway. I was at a lovely coffee morning in Friday arranged by the fabulous Will Humphrey, and got talking to Collyn Ahart. We had a nice chat about magazines and so on (including her fascinating sounding Wallpaper article that I am yet to read) but then started on my project. I said I was hoping to get people in the community interacting a little more in their daily lives. To which she replied

"How do you design that interaction?"

It's flummoxed me ever since. 

But I think it's a question worth answering. 

This is what I'll be working on this week.

What next, and how?

As our final year show and graduation draws nearer, me and a lot of my course mates are starting to finally think about what we're going to do when the blanket of safety and mediocrity that comes with the student experience at UWIC is pulled from over us.

Picture rudely borrowed from Either Madness or Brilliance.

We had two talks at the beginning of last week that might have started this awakening. The first, from one of our external examiners David Worthington, was as inspiring as last year and posed the question  "if it's raining, why go outside?" in relation to the reduced number of graduate posts available. He suggested staying in education and waiting out the current economic uncertainty until things hit rock bottom and start to recover again.

Mr Dave Cuvelot looking to a brighter future, or something.

The second, which was also post-graduate related, was from the fantastic Emily Wilkinson, an ex UWIC student who is now on the MA Design Futures programme at Goldsmiths. Unlike what we're being encouraged to do, she actually did go straight into work, for 6721 (who went bust when they lost loads of government contracts) and then for Futerra who work on sustainable communications (and who are coming to talk to us soon, I think). She reinforced a very convincing case for me, that the few years in industry really help you realise what it is you're actually passionate about, and what you'd like to keep studying and making a life out of. Her particular programme sounded awesome, although I don't think it's for me, but she may have not found that course if she'd gone straight from an undergrad programme. 

That's kind of the position I'm finding myself in now, at the end of a BA, with little hints and clues of ideas of what I'd like to do, but really, no idea.

So with this in mind I've started redeveloping my portfolio site. I had one in the first year, and did get a little bit of paid work from it, but, well, it was rubbish. Really. So I took it down, and since then I've done all sorts of fun things, which I'd like to reflect in my new site.

I posted the question - "what do you think is most important / what do you look for in a graduate website?" - and a few people came back with responses, which was awesome. I thought they'd be useful if anyone else was looking for similar advice...

"variety of clients with consistent results. show you can do anything and do it well"

"not just solutions. briefs as well"

"short and sweet. simple. nice photos. no flash. I'd just make it a section of your blog."

What do you think? 

What would you look for, what do you think is important? What did you do when you came out of University? Are you still in uni now, in a similar situation? There are tons of websites dedicated to this, but if you leave a comment below I'll try and collate them and post them up here anyway.

Students, graphic design, and blogs

Part of what we’re doing between now and graduating is being introduced more thoroughly to the idea of ‘Professional Practice’. We’ve had quite a few live briefs previously, but these new weekly sessions are focussed on things like portfolio presentation, CV, and so on. We’ve been given a practical group brief as part of the module, but it’s a bit controversial. I’ll save that for another day!

Today, we had a talk on digital portfolios. The aim of the session was to instil in us the need to have a portfolio ready soon, so we can flop it about before we graduate. We were then encouraged to make a digital version, either a pdf or website. We looked at a mixed bag of case studies and different possibilities.

a reconstruction of this afternoon's lecture

The reason I’m thinking of this post (and I apologise for leaving this till paragraph three), is because of what our tutor had to say about blogs, and also because of what I’ve been thinking more generally about student blogs.

Why should students blog?

The first part. Paraphrasing slightly, our tutor said “Blogs are a little self indulgent. I would probably focus more on a portfolio site, and not really worry about a blog for the moment.”

I’m not disputing the self-indulgence; you only have to look through previous posts here to see that. But I couldn’t help thinking (and I hope you’ll agree) that he was missing the point. This is well-travelled ground in PR world, but I'm not so sure about whether it's been covered for design. 

Is this enough?

Sure, if you’re hoping to go into graphic design, you need an awesome portfolio. It needs to show you are inventive, skilled, committed; everything that a studio with a junior vacancy needs. But when we’re being told to not even bother and to leave the jobs for previous graduates, one feels that one needs more than a flawless portfolio and impeccable tea skills. We’re constantly being told to ‘get a life’ and to be critically aware of the world around us. In my opinion, that’s what blogs can do.

And it’s so easy to set up! The hours, weeks (years!), and months spent building my own portfolio site haven’t stopped me from getting out through this blog and talking to people all over the internet, and making some really good connections along the way. If I fancy talking about my latest project, that’s fine, otherwise I can talk about an awesome song, a bit of architecture, politics – whatever. All that ‘get a life’ stuff starts to make me new friends in those areas, and new connections start to form. 

Crucially, job-wise, who isn't going to be asked at some point to work on a project that needs a knowledge of social media. It might work for college tutors, but "blogs are self indulgent" isn't going to impress many clients. 

I really don't understand why any student wouldn’t blog.

How should students blog?

So how should ‘any student’ behave once they’re here? That was the second part of my recent musing.

Since being online in this bloggy guise, I’ve been extremely lucky to have linked with awesome people over good projects, and had some help with all kinds of sticky situations along the way. I’ve been to some amazing events, and I’m planning to go to more. I’m averaging around 30 visits here a day now, which is both humbling and nice.  

I say it’s been lucky, because I didn’t really start out with any agenda or intention, for example, to ‘connect with advertising people in the hopes of getting a job’. I just gravitated towards people whose blogs seemed interesting, and started talking. So brand me hopefully became just a keen student with a naive opinion on things, politely accepted by those higher up the chain, who really had better things to get on with.

I think, as students, we ignore that last sentence at our peril. Just because we’re on the same blogging platform, or we’re mutual followers on twitter doesn’t mean that people want to hear our misguided opinions on things that, frankly, we know very little about. Also, blogging, although I think it's pretty rad, it's not everything.

People in the industry are happy to hear about new bloggers and up-and-coming practitioners, whatever field they’re in. Everyone was in our position once. But they worked long and hard to get where they are.

This post is more of a reminder to myself really, but I’d love to know what other people’s opinions are?

I think we have to remember that we should be here to listen and to learn, and hopefully to meet like-minded people, sharing ideas and experiences.

That is all.

 

 

 

re: What is a brand?

A school colleague of mine, Stacey Jenkins, posted a little blog tonight about brands, as a result of the work she's doing for our latest project. You can read it here.

I'm sure a lot of readers here will be pretty bored with the 'what is a brand' question, but, as a student, I think it's important that my peers and I get to grips with them in our own minds so that we know what's being asked of us when we go and work in the big world. As Stacey rightly points out, "It's not just the logo".

I would have posted what I'm about to say as a comment on her blog, but for some reason the captcha wasn't working, so I couldn't post. I'm sure she'd love to hear your thoughts too, if you can get it to work. Otherwise, I'd love to have comments here, it's all good fun.

So, once you've read Stacey's post, here's my response:

"I don't really understand what conclusions you are making, but an interesting and fulfilling read none-the-less, good work.

"For me, I'd probably take it one step further and argue that brands are really just delivery mechanisms for a much bigger set of meanings and messages. They're like a little package of goodies shared between a company or their product, and the end consumer. The company can try once in a while to put new goodies of meaning into the package, and the consumer will take out what they feel is appropriate to the product or service in question.

"That's when examples like First Great Western, who you mentioned, get interesting for me. They're a service that relies so much on staff and other companies. For example, a key brand attribute, punctuality (or lack of!) is more reliant on Network Rail. And their on board staff have so much power in brand-making. That's probably why the brand is so bland and generic! At least nothing can go wrong that way.

"I don't see your other examples as particularly strong brands, maybe not even brands at all. They're an interesting choice to use. It's semantics I guess. But there you go...

"I think the confusion of logo/brand probably stems in large part from the FMCG landscape, where a lot of meaning-making has to go on through television campaigns, or outdoor, or whatever. But the companies want people to remember all that when they come to make a decision in store, so the logo becomes the unifier, the big label on the 'package' saying "remember all this extra amazing stuff!". Or maybe the logo will utilise specific design conventions to give instant stand-out for specific demographics, i.e minimalism, greenwash, budget, or what ever. So people start to see the logo as 'the brand' when in fact it is merely the signifier for the brand.

"The Innocent 'dude', for example, really has very little to do with healthyness, tastyness, being welcoming, friendly or approachable. But through considerable effort from everything from labelling, advertising, quality of product, and social good work, Innocent have built this amazing brand. And it's all packaged up in the dude.

"What really excites me is the opportunity to use all this cut-throat marketing and design practice to inspire wider social change. I think people respond to little else these days. We've seen it in Obama and Make Poverty History, I hope it happens more often from here on in! 

Being cynical, I'd say that the 'Product (Red)' is just an opportunity for existing and weakening brands or product lines to add someone else's meaning and ethics. It saves the brand time and commitment, by not having to do any build-up or development work themselves, and it doesn't really give the kinds of consumer pay-off that an initiative like that should. By that, I mean that it's not really encouraging anyone to engage with the issue of Aids, or really change their consumption behaviour. But that's just my opinion.

"You should try to get hold of 'Lovemarks' by Kevin Roberts, if you haven't already, it's a really good read.

Apologies for the slight rant. You'll understand now why I was a bit gutted to not be able to submit my comment on Stacey's blog! 

Modernogion

In more hand-in related news, we also had to submit our responses to the Design Wales brief this week. Essentially, the brief was to design a series of book covers for contemporary re-tellings of Welsh folk stories, 'The Mabinogion'.

For many of us at UWIC, we felt that the brief was really rich with starting points, whilst at the same time giving almost nothing to go on at all. The new versions have not been written yet, so although we knew the plots and themes from the originals, we new very little about how much of those themes would be carried through. 

We were told which contemporary authors were working on which book, but were then left to assume that this work would be stylistically exactly the same to their other works, which included poetry and travel writing. 

So there were little hints of directions to go in. But I felt personally that there was a danger, if I related to the plot or characters too much, that my visualisations wouldn't fit with the new texts when they eventually materialised.

My starting point, then, became just 'Wales'. The stories are more Celtic folk stories really, stretching to Cornwall and Ireland, but they seem to have been adopted by Wales. 

I looked at contemporary ways of portraying the Country. 

One route led me to Cowbois, a screen printing company specialising in patriotic slogan hoodies. If I'd known more about the eventual characters that would appear in the new versions, I would definitely have followed this route some more, I thought it would be nice to just have simple portraits like this on the covers. They even do a print based on the name of one of the books. I don't really like the shirts, but I can definitely feel the 'welshness' of these models. If shot more 'artistically', it could be a nice idea.

I also felt that this approach would tie in nicely stylistically with the publisher's existing range (below), but as I said, It would fall apart if the characters imagined in the book didn't look like the models. So that's where I left that idea.

The other approach I really like is Visit Wales, by Wieden + Kennedy. 

What I really like is the way negatives were turned into positives at the start of this campaign. I remember lines like 'area of outstandingly bad mobile reception', 'we'll be honest, the weather is unpredictable, but that's why our grass is so green' and so on.

The one that really stuck with me was the TV Spot, 'you can't have our mud, it's good mud', and that's where I went with my other (and preferred) route.

I started looking at the landscape, up close and personal. The stories themselves are actually quite violent, and a lot of the imagery is of bogs, mud, straw, blood. I chose a particularly cold and cloudy day and went exploring the local park.

For me, this was a Wales that would translate to modern or medieval times, often a damp, cold place defined peacefully by its nature. Even if the stories became 'Welsh Trainspotting', as had been hinted at us, I thought it would kind of work. 

I eventually came up with these:

Some are more successful than others, but I'm pretty pleased with my outcomes. In the end, I couldn't submit them to the competition, but they'll still be used towards my degree, portfolio etc.

The text treatment was quite ambitious for me, it's not really something I've worked on before. You may remember I talked about some typographic inspiration a few weeks ago. I'll hopefully find cause to play with type in other exciting ways before I graduate, it took ages, but it was a lot of fun!

What do you think?