Pocket of Resistance

A friend of mine recently started a clothing company and asked me to design some t-shirts which would be comprised of the company title and an original illustration on either a black or white T-shirt.I designed three T-shirts and illustrations altogether and I'm quite happy with how they turned out.

The deadline for this project was only a week so I really had to have solid time plan for the work and know what I was going to do each day. It actually took longer than I thought as many of the illustrations I designed were simply too detailed to work on a t-shirt so I had to start with new much cleaner bolder designs. 

In the end I spent three days creating the font and illustrations and only one adding the to t-shirts and deciding which colours worked best with each design.

The decision to make the shirts black or white was very important in making the illustration stand out and work to their full potential. I found that the more complex designs worked best on a black t-shirt white the simpler ones were far more striking on white.

Typography in Posters and Magazines

So yesterday I decided to look at a few examples of typography for use in posters and magazines to give me a few ideas for a new project I'm working on. Contemporary typography is one of my favourite design styles however it is also one of my weaknesses in Graphic Design when it comes to creating my own fonts or structuring it in interesting new ways. Hopefully by examining the work of others I can improve my abilities and create more unique work in the future. 

Above is a pretty standard use of typography, I have in fact used this style in my Ministry of Sound work and although it is a pretty modern look I feel it is used too often and I should try to advance onto a more dynamic form of typography.

Above is one of my favourite pieces of typography I've seen in a while and would work for either posters or a magazine spread. I particularly like subtle yet dramatic colours scheme and how they are layered over one another. The font is also very unique with only a few letters being altered. 

Here is another great example of an interesting font which has clearly been created for this purpose alone. 

Rooster Teeth

Recently I designed a series of posters based around the company Rooster Teeth and their online videos, I thought them might like them so I printed them off and sent them some A2 copies. 

This is a pic they emailed me of my work on display at their office which I think is pretty cool, they also made a post about it on their website http://roosterteeth.com/blog/viewEntry.php?id=2876884&sort=on&page=3 go check it out.

I recently also created a web page for my designs (I didn't really create it, it was free) I guess you should go check that out...

 http://hhhdesign.carbonmade.com/

Progress

Looking back on my work at the beginning of the year I think its safe to say my skills have improved a lot as well as the look of my work which is reaching a professional level. 

At the start of this year I only knew how to use Photoshop but through the tutorials and my own learning I am now very comfortable with both Illustrator and Indesign.

Plans for my own professional development

As I'm not particularly used to using the newest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign so using and understanding the new tools and functions is crucial to my learning. Adapting to the new software has been one of my main weaknesses in the last projects as well as using a Mac as opposed to PC and learning new shortcuts.

I think the best way to learn how to use a program it to learn as you go, so for the next few weeks I plan to attempt various tutorials and exercises on the internet to further my understanding of the programs.

Mondo

So Mondo are a Design company based in Texas, America, they use a variety of artists to design posters for movies both past and present with their own unique look, these posters are generally illustration heavy but they have help me a lot by showing me various ways to layout posters and the best way to include typography.

(above) This is easily one of the best posters I have seen in a while I love the use of the red and white.

I really like the complexity of each poster and the detail that goes into them however as my illustrations are quite simple I will try to use more aspects from the posters above.

Final Posters Evaluation

As my work on my series of posters come to an end I'm happy overall with the work I've produced however their are definitely things I could have improved upon. Overall the style I was trying to create in my posters worked well and was pretty much exactly as I had envisioned it however i think if I were to start the project again or if I had more time to develop my designs I would have tried to add more to them to make them more interesting visually, as you can see I had attempted this in two of my designs adding a scratchy background to one and a camouflage pattern to another however these didn't really add to the designs as I had hoped they would and rather just made the designs seem messy.   

While the work effect one the background looked good on a screen once printed out it had a blurred look which really ruined the poster and made it look too busy, I was really disappointed with this and I intend to try a new background before hand in.  

This design above I my favourite and I probably the best looking of my designs. It is the only one where I used a completely new font which worked great with the 8-bit illustration. The illustration itself took the longest to create out of the rest of my work and I think I made the right decision to reduce text in this poster to the minimum and keep the attention at the illustration.

What I've learned from previous projects is that there needs to be more experimentation and further development of my designs through the use of alternative colour schemes and layouts, as you can see I have tried different colours and patterns in the background to compliment my illustrations.

I think I have progresses well through out this project by meeting my own deadlines as well as having extra time to advance my designs and add whole new segments to my development work. Getting to look back on my work was very useful as I was able to see the areas that needed to be improved that I wouldn't have been able to see previously. My personal time management on this brief went amazingly well I think however I could have set myself more deadlines and more goals as I feel I overestimated how long the project would take me.

Self Branding work:

So today I decided to finalize some logo's I started designing a while back, cleaning them up and giving them a fresher style. I used a range of fonts from dafont.com which is a great website for finding unique interesting fonts (I'm sure I will use it a lot in the future). I started designing these on Illustrator and then put them on Photoshop to add some more interesting colour styles and such.

I was edging towards a futuristic look for my logo and I think I achieved this quite well through the fonts I used and perhaps the varying colours.

Looking back to my work on the bistro logo was very useful to me and I was able to correct the mistakes I had with colour and fonts. My bistro logo was well laid out however the dark blue I had chosen wasn't fit for purpose and the font was to bold and dramatic however I think this self branding logo is particularly suitable.

I used various methods and skills to create the logo which I designed on Illustrator and colourized on Photoshop I found using the pen tool particularly useful for altering individual letters, The font I found for my tag line was initially quite hard to read so I adjusted it by adding new lines.

So in some of my earlier posts I demonstrated my new skills in Illustrator by designing a Nez Zapper using an original picture. The skills I learned there were very useful to me in my previous project (Ministry of Sound posters) and gave my final pieces some more interesting aspects. for my latest project I decided to to use the image I created for one of my final pieces and I have developed it a bit further as you can see below.

Olly Moss

Recently I've been looking at the work of Olly Moss who mainly produces illustration heavy posters for movies as well as prints and stand alone illustrations. I really like the simplicity of his work as well as the ideas behind them. I think i can learn a lot about ways to structure my pieces as well as new ways to make them stand out.

Posterization

       

Added some smoke using my graphics tablet and the paint brush in Photoshop, I've also decided that a dark green back ground looks best.

       

I have then added some text using 'Impact' which I think gives a very bold look as well as using black and white for the colours. I have also added a camouflage effect to the background to reinforce a hunting style.

Finally I have added a black boarder.

Pen Tool Stuff

So last week I thought I would have a go at using the pen tool in Illustrator to make some illustrations. I used an image of an old Nintendo Zapper and using several layers created each shape individually. It was pretty straight forward seen as how the lines are mostly straight but I learnt a bit about how the colour options work differently from photoshop.

So I was pretty happy with how the final design looked and I think I'm going to continuing developing it in a poster format, probably in landscape but I'll also see how it looks in portrait and I'll make more posts as I do so. As I'm not very experienced with Illustrator I thought I would open what I've done in Photoshop and experiment by adding some lighting effects and try some background colours.

So apparently It's necessary to make sure your work fits into the canvas before transferring it onto Photoshop, who knew...

So after fixing the problem I added some lighting effects with my rather unsteady hands (I'm used to using a graphics tablet) which I wasn't very happy with in the end, I think the simpler look it had before was more what I was after.

Also had a mess around with a few colours I liked a dark green as it reminded me of hunting colours, might try and recreate a camouflage pattern to add too it. I also liked the look of a very dark red however the orange parts of the illustration were absorbed and became had to see.

Any way I'll do some more work on it and experiment with some typography and other stuff to get it looking like a poster.

Adobe Illustrator

Hey

So over the last week I've decided to try and learn how to use Illustrator. I have been using Photoshop for about five years now so I'm pretty set in my ways but I realise how much more useful Illustrator will be when it comes to creating and designing whether its for typography or illustrations.

Probably the hardest thing about learning how to use a new program is learning where everything is and also learning a whole bunch of new short cuts.

So I'll be busy designing a few illustrations and stuff and I'll post them as I go...