DESIGN PRACTICE

My intentions of the briefs I chose was to design promotional material communicating through type and layout. When doing work for the Coffee Island and Nero Brief I found my strengths were being able to work to clients requirements and learning to negotiate where I felt my professionalism within design was needed.

I know everyone always says ‘clients/customers are always right’ but if I really wanted to make my own personal impact to a brief, I felt that I needed to really stand my ground and say something. This is very apparent in the Coffee Island brief. Luckily my client was very easy and friendly to work with and as a result I really enjoyed designing for him.

Although the Nero brief started off on bumpy grounds, me and Lauren both worked very well together. We were able to prepare pitches off to the client in a professional way so the client could see and as a result, all our promotional material we designed came together as a set really well. Whilst doing the Nero brief I also learnt on a few other methods of foiling on the heat press, spot glossing (which I had seen but never tried in my work) and also strengthening my skills in inDesign to get documents ready for print and double side printing which I wasn’t sure of.

From the two live briefs I have learnt that a logo does take time to design and develop. After this is done it is easy to apply this onto other stuff to make an effective ‘set’.

Although I really like working for a client, I really enjoyed my one week Style brief for YCN. As soon as a I read the brief I knew I wanted to do something with typography, but I never thought I would do what I did for it. I really enjoyed spending a day to plan and the rest of the days to get hands on and get stuck into the brief. I couldn’t believe how fast the typeface had developed and as a result I feel like style was my strongest and most effective brief I have done in such little time. I am going to carry on doing 1 week briefs in future to keep my designing.

I really wasn’t happy with my Don’t Panic posters. I know I spent a half a day researching into poster styles and also looking at work, which really influenced me, but I failed to show this in my poster designs. I found myself getting too much into the other briefs that I pushed this brief to one side. I think when I re-do some past don’t panic poster competitions I need to stay focussed and make quicker decisions in order to enjoy it rather than pushing it to one side.

But as an up, I really enjoyed working on the briefs. I am confident that branding and promotional design is something I am definitely interested in and is something, which would interest me to look further into for my FMP. I don’t want to jus have my mind set on these to areas of professionalism because I know there is other stuff which could spiral off from these so im keeping my mind open in that sense.

How to set up documents and layouts in InDesign for print.

How to prepare documents in photoshop, what to check:
1> COLOUR MODE-CMYK/GREYSCALE
2>RESOLUTION-300dpi
3>SIZE-ACTUAL SIZE OF IMAGE
4>SAVE AS .psd/.tiff [for saving a trasparent background save as .psd]

ALWAYS FILE>PLACE WHEN PLACING FILES INTO INDESIGN

How to prepare document in Illustrator:
Some of the rules in photoshop stay the same when working on files in Illustrator:
1> COLOUR MODE-CMYK/GREYSCALE
2>ILLUSTRATOR FILES ARE VECTORE BASED SO RESOLUTION ISN'T A PROBLEM
3>SAVE AS .ai/.eps
4>YOU CAN COPY AND PASTE FILES FROM ILLUSTRATOR

Setting up a documet in inDesign:

Width and Height is always the size of finished product
BLEED is usually 3mm.