Evaluation

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.

Design for print workshop

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.

Lights

Here i experimented using shutter speeds and exposure with F numbers. This was fun times. I hope to use some of my experimental images in my graphics work in the future.

Puddles

I thought the reflections in the puddles made quiet a cool effect.

Experimental photography

I have a big interest in photography. As i was laying out my jewellery for my style brief i decided to take a few shots of my pieces of jewellery and experimented with depth of field.

NEW BLOGS

I have created a set of new blogs to focus on each brief and keep them all seperate.

Coffee Island
jaimini-coffeeisland.blogspot.com

Nero
jaimini-nero.blogspot.com

Typeface Design
jaimini-typefaces.blogspot.com

Don't Panic
jaimini-dontpanic.blogspot.com

Style
jaimini-style.blogspot.com

Discussion

After having a chat with Lauren today, she described what the design jobs we had to research into were and told me what her mum had told her she wanted for her salon were. So this is the list:

>A fresh new corporate identity to compliment the interior of the salon. So..
1.Business Card
2.Letterheads
3.Compliment Slip

>Pricelist

and..

>A booklet to show what the salon sells and client feedback

Chosen Briefs

1> COFFEE ISLAND: Collaborative: Myself and Lauren O’Neill

Coffee Island is a coffee shop in Salford. It is situated right opposite Salford train station and situated around the shops are big buildings where business people work. Our main target is to design promotional print based material, which can be used around the space complementing the logo design, which I created over the summer. The graphics need to be eye-catching and draw customers into Coffee Island. Things which need designing are:

>Menus

>Menu Boards

>Sandwich stickers

>Cup Holders

>Advertising posters for windows and tables

We need our designs to give coffee island an identity, in such a way that people will recognise.

2> NERO HAIR SALON

I will be working collaboratively with Lauren O'Neill on this brief.
This is a live brief for my Mum’s hair salon. We will both be focusing on the advertising and promotional aspect of design using type and layout as its both a strong focus of design for both of us that we understand and will also help us further our practice.

Our target audience is the general public and existing clients.

We will be looking at existing promotional material that the salon uses and create something that is more up to date and creative for today and the future.

The products that we wish to re create are the letter head, business card, pricing and offers list, and also a small booklet of salon photos, client feedback and products that the salon offer.

These products we will be taking right through to the printers where we will have to research into the best printers possible to use. We will look at ways of how we could create this effectively to target our audience undertaking research into the correct products and processes.

3> DESIGN 10 TYPEFACES

Design 10 typefaces using stationary. As a graphic designer we use many things on a day to day basis, so why create typefaces out of them. Try create Serif and Sans Serif fonts.

4> STYLE-YCN

Re-establish style as the definitive women’s Sunday supliment. Doing this kind of brief will allow me research into what I have to do and also help me to concentrate on a specific target audience. This will definitely challenge me and make me contastantly question myself and evaluate whether my design is going to draw my target into reading this every Sunday.

5> DON'T PANIC

Create 10 typographic words do express words in past dont panic poster competitions.