Reading Week - Summary

Through out reading week I have been appointed with a task which evolves around music. Firstly I was required to listen to the CD Steve gave us last week. The Music on the CD created by a fellow called Russell Mills and the album name is called Undark. Initially the music is of an ambient nature, containing 8 tracks of chilled out, urban street listening. Along side listening to the CD I set out to gain a number of company logos. The result of this is a collection of 40 well known company logo’s just itching for a place in my sketchbook.

Another task was to write a review of the CD I have been listening to. The main intention of the review is to invite the public in with a warm welcoming introduction to the music in review. I feel that I did jus that. With a few lines of overestimated opinions and personal thoughts of the music in motion, I feel that my review drops in to the category of needs for the reviewing world.

This morning arrived with another task for reading week. Firstly, I needed to gain more company logos. But this time I was required to gain logos of a music nature that suites the genre of the artist I was listening to. Unfortunately a mistake was made and I confused my music with electronic, only to realise after collecting 20 logo’s that is was in fact ambient. Because of this I am going to keep all electronic logos and search for another 20 in the ambient genre. Just a small price to pay for an hour wasted.

During the creation of the mood board I took it up on my self to listen to the music, and then look for image on the internet that crawled in to my head. This was created on an A4 spread in Photoshop. The spread took quite some time doing with its insertion in to Photoshop, inserting only a single image at a time. If I were to have done it on paper I think it will have taken me a lot less time then it did do and I would have been able to get more done. Over all I feel that the productivity of this reading week has been slightly poorer then that done during the college term time, as at home there are too many distractions. (Below is an image of the mood board created for the above task).

The final reading week task has been taken down on paper, as explained before, I feel that a lot more can be done in sort of scene. For the last task I have created a brainstorm and a mood board on how the word emit can visually represented. Unfortunately I do not have access to a scanner at this moment in time so I will post it as another journal entry when accessibility is in reach.

Things to stand by over the remainder of reading week and the further two weeks break are:

- Continue to collect logo examples and inspirational images to put in my sketchbook.
- Work on A1 - Sketchbook assignment.
- Think about how I can develop my mind maps and mood bored in productive terms towards the new assignment task of creating a CD design.
- Keep in touch with fellow students.

Personal Goals:
- Become more developed in using software applications.

Reading Week Task - Music Review!

Russell Mills & Undark Review

The astounding sounds of the pair will knock your socks of and drop you right in the centre of Suburbia, were the streets are cold and the action is hot. This all time chilled out action compilation is enough to invite the mean streets of the movies for some fun time swinging on your earlobes. But don’t be fooled! This is a mixture that will send your emotions soaring in every direction with the sole intention of drowning in the real world.

From a very dominant start of vibrant pulses and light subdominant vocals. The work of the artists builds in to a steady moving stroll of the streets, manoeuvring over progression, in motion, failure and completion of a mission. Or so it seems, the mutual bond between listeners and sound, falls in with a different aspect as it moves down the line.

As I sit and listen, I feel the objective of the artists production was intended to hit the box office in some form of action thriller. The way that it is produced and organised, gives an impression of preparation, action, loss, more preparation and a victorious/dominant ending. Another theory is that it was created intentionally to give out the street wise impression or produce a glimpse overlay of the hardcore working life of the real labourers.

A6 Evaluation...

Finally the long, gruelling wait is over. The presentation has been performed and the assignment has been handed in. I’m not 100% sure my presentation went as brilliant as planned, from the self notification of cotton mouth and fiddly hands.

Over the last 6 weeks I have been researching in to the life and work of Stanley Morison. Stanley is a famous Typographer who changed the world to how we see it today. Not only did he resurrect a few past fonts but he also created and supervised font we still use today, like Times New Roman. This is one of the standard fonts used in Microsoft applications such as word.

During the first few weeks I fell behind a little bit when dealing with referral work from the previous assignments Back to Basics, and Image Rights. When I finally got them out of the way, I set of to producing my presentation with the handout placed with 2nd priority. The first presentation design was all about Stanley’s life and the work he did. This was ok for the start, but not enough was mentioned in the typography side. Another issue was that the 1st presentation apparently looked similar to another student’s who was researching the same character, so that design had to be scrapped and a new idea was formed. The new idea was to place a hot metal machine in the bottom right corner and have a 3 pixel width line under the heading of every page.

With the handout having 2nd priority it seemed to lack in context on the seminar date it was due. Only the draft of it was required, but I had created only a black and white design with Lorem Ipsum counting up to 500 words. The final idea that I handed in today, had a completely grey background, information on Stanley’s life, work and it even held a few useful links in which to look information on the named character. The first hand out I printed of to take in to the presentation with me, had a different colour grey compared to the back ground colour grey. At 1st I thought it was a design fault, but when I printed it of again in class, it looked perfect. Which means the printer in the library doesn’t like the colours I created for the handout.

Other elements of the assignment were the timed tasks. During the first timed task everything was going riot. We had to make a book cover for font styles I believe it was. For this I created a hugely contrasted design, with a black background and yellow text. Although, it didn’t count too much because mine was one of the designs that didn’t make it to the desk in time for hand in. In fact there were quite a few students that didn’t get there in time. Luckily this was just a practise run to get us in the swing of things, so it wasn’t too disappointing to realise I’d not completed the task correctly.

The Second timed task was to create a paint label for a company called Hokai. This task went a lot better compared to the font book task. From reading through my journal entries, it appears I finished the task with 20 minutes to spare. But with the design been complete to a satisfactory finish, I decided to use the remainder of the time working on the research for my presentation.

The third timed task was to design and create a Vodafone job advertisement. For this I made a vast improvement on my hand in time, completing the task 35 minutes before I was required to. The finished design consisted of a 1 column advert, containing the Vodafone logo at the very bottom, a line to break the headed away from the body text and large style header set to bold for more impact.

In the fourth timed task we had to create a tabloid entry posted about Jonathan Gee and his band on there tours around the UK (including Wakefield). This task was harder than the earlier ones, making the completed state and hand in just minutes before the headline. Lining up the text was the hardest part, as I did not fully understand all of the relevant tools in Indesign. If I understood exactly where the leading button was located, I feel that the task much have been completed a little earlier. Along side this I difficulty with the location of the text, with out providing a huge amount of white space. This caused me to create a pull out feature in which you enlarge a section of the story above the paragraph it lies in to catch the reader's attention and remove white space.

Moving on with the progression of the timed tasks. It was today that we received our final one for this assignment. Today’s timed task came in two parts. There was the page design, and the insertion of its content and image. During the first part of the task I was finding it pretty difficult to provide a suitable layout, not knowing what was going to be in it. At first I designed a combination of two rows and 6 columns. During the on screen build I was advised that two rows wasn’t the correct way to do this task. From this I amended the design to have three full length columns right down the page. Along side this was a black and white banner arrangement in order to give a bold statement about the design. Also I used a white text on a black background appearance on the footer to show the production name, issue date and the issue number.

The second part of this task was to insert the information and place an image, while sticking with a typographic design. From the implementations in the first part of the task I was able to shrink and crop the image to make it cover 2 columns width and about half a column length. Next was the tricky part. I needed to line up the text in every column to show consistency. After much effort of trying to implement this, I came up with a solution. By changing the font size to 9pt, inserting a pull out, and using the leading option I was able to line all three columns up with out any white space. This task was finished 5 minutes before the hand in time.

Over all in this assignment I have learnt a great deal about typography. Sure I got around 3 questions wrong at the end of the presentation, but I feel confident when it comes to talking about most aspects found with in a font style and design. My first thought about the assignment were very bland, as researching a typographer didn’t seem that relevant. But through out the unit it came clear to how much a font can be used to aid design, and how design can be used to aid font. Before I would look at a computer screen and chose a preferred font style not even thinking about how the readability will affect the viewers. I wouldn’t even think about the design and work put in to creating the fonts. And I definitely didn’t know that nearly all fonts have different appearances, even those that look the same.