WIG? - Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett.

As I'm going to be attending the talk I thought I'd do a bit of research on the speakers. Both designers work heavily influenced the look and feel of the music industry in the north. Peter work with such names Factory records and Joy division and produced these highly memorable and innovative designs.

http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=166

http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/peter-saville-on-his-album-art

Whilst searching the internet for information on Saville I came across this interesting website. Not too sure if it has anything to do with him but I thought it was a really cool way of interacting with the website.

http://www.btinternet.com/~comme6/saville/

Malcolm Garrett was the first of the two designers to produce a published piece of design and it was a record sleeve for the band The Buzzcocks second hit Orgasm Addict. He later went on to work with the likes of Magazine, Simple Minds, Duran Duran and Peter Gabriel.

http://invizuals.com/post/4803527525/malcolmgarrett

Both of these designers have played a big part in the music industry and for me I prefer the works of Saville. I enjoy the composition of his work more and how contemporary it is even now 30 years later.

WIG? - Place.

DAY 8

Today I went back to working on the collages of the Memphis and Liverpool images which i had a look at early on the my first week here. They already had one collage for the header of a webpage for the project but they need 2 more. I've been looking through the images I'm allowed to use an been carefully removing the backgrounds from some of the and picking out bits that would be great for the collages.


Cutting them out was the hardest part, creating the collages afterwards was more straight forward. The project is about the two cities being almost twins and it's about the music scene focusing primarily on the Beatles. The collages wont be using any Beatles imagery but instead are focussed on the similarities of the cities for example architecture and travel.


I've had the idea of using a 'mirror' aesthetic apposed to the tidy mess collages that are more typical. When I say mirror i mean that one side would be images of Memphis and the other of Liverpool to create the idea that the cities are reflecting off each other. This gives the compositions a good structure of symmetry and provides a good consistency in the visuals as a set despite the fact that they will be use separately across three webpages.


Here's what i have so far. I'm not very keen on the first three but they were made before I had the mirrored idea.

These are vectored sunburst shapes that I made which was a suggestion from Rob. I've only applied them to one of the collages so far but I'm going to make more compositions to see what works best but I think its safe to say that the three above are far better than the first three.

Later in the evening Rob and I went to The Short Project where the talk would be given by Peter Saville and Macolm Garrett was going to be held, the project was quite secretive and it was difficult to understand was it was all about. When we arrived they gave us different coloured wristbands which allowed you into different areas which seemed quite restrictive. After being confused and restricted for about 40 minutes we left as it would be another 2 hours before the talk. 

Although it was shame to miss the talk we did however go to an old pub in Manchester and saw some people do some stand up poetry readings which was interesting. The event was run and organised by Bad Language which is a small sort of company project which has published 3 books of poetry and short stories which get submitted to them through a website. The books had some interesting illustrations on the cover so it was nice to see how this low key company was getting people involved and who did the artwork.

WIG? - Object.

1. Sketchbook.

2. Mobile phone.

3. Thermal Flask.

4. Bicycle.

5. Roller blades/quads.

6. Stationary.
7.Ukulele.

WIG? - Concept.

1. Travelling.

2. Awkward moments.

3. The Contents of something e.g. your pockets.

WIG? - Place.

DAY 7

Today I continued to research into the electrical car campaigns and adverts to help stimulate and pool topics for people to draw ideas from and get started with the designing.

I found these two really useful adverts for different vehicles which both seem to play on the idea that the world will be better off with the switch over from fuel powered to electric cars. I took screen shots of parts that I thought would be inspiring for people looking for ideas.

Rob has invited me to go to a talk tomorrow evening by Peter Saville and Malcolm Garrett on a project that they have been collaborating on. This should be really interesting as both designers went to St Ambrose high school in Altrincham where I live and they also attending Manchester Polytechnic like I did for my foundation degree.

Rob emailed me a few links to some articles on the talk.

http://www.thesharpproject.co.uk/events/

http://www.thesharpproject.co.uk/sharp-news/full-circles-square-containers-garrett-saville-sharp/

Should be exciting and inspiring.

WiG? - Opinion.

Cats are awesome!

WIG? - Place.

DAY 6

After a nice weekend, it's back to work today and it was just a day to get your head down it seemed. Everybody was working away and it was far quieter than the previous week. The heat didn't really help however and I must have drank my weight in water.

I continued to play around with the BBC designs but was soon asked to do some research on different electric cars and car advertising campaigns as Creative Concern will be working on some designs for a new wave of electric cars and charge stations that will be put into effect this year.

I spent a long time looking a videos and websites all about different car makes and their campaigns trying to pick out stills and screen shots for some visuals to show what sort of things the companies that make the cars are already doing to promote them and sell them to the audience.

I researched specifically the new models of cars that will be released as they would be likely to focus on the pros of having an electric car. Which in turn is what CC would be trying to do with their work but as a collective.

WiG? - Place.

DAY 5

Today was really nice as I got stuck in with some design work and continued to develop my ideas and designs for the BBC icon.

Firstly I just developed the icon that I had previously designed. Rob treats me just as any other employee and gives me direction and asks vital questions to help me progress and address different aspects of the task at hand.

After I done these I applied them the the web heading format to see how they would work.

Rob particularly liked this one below.

After this I continued my development of the cog idea as a web heading. It was suggested to me to try simplifying it and just having the seven cogs to represent the seven aspects of the Finance & Business department.

At first I tried this one to use the space in a visually engaging way.

Then I tried it so the text and image worked next to each other and didn't affect each other from overlaying.

Then I was suggested that I try it with just one colour coming through to make it seem like the Finance & Business is the key cog that links up all the rest. I'm not too keen on this idea as I find it less engaging and it could undermine the other departments of the BBC.

Whats more, Niel found a clip of a BBC opening credits which actually uses cogs in the motion graphics which makes the idea much more relevant than I first anticipated.

I picked up the fact that a lot of effort goes into selling an idea to the client through the presentation. Rob showed me some pictures of the wall spaces we looked at at the Whitworth where he had simple added text into them to imitate what the printed vinyls would look like on the walls. Using the visuals is a good way of really showing the client what you mean when your talking about your work. It reminded me of some of the group briefs that we did as others in the year had used this technique in there presentations.

Furthermore, I noticed that Neil was making a presentation for the concept of his ideas for the BBC branding and using the artwork in a presentation for artwork was a really clever idea as the designs are meant to be for presentations and web headings. These are things to consider for future presentations.

WiG? - Place.

DAY 4

No field trips today, instead I just got on with some personal research. One thing that has been really beneficial is the time between the tasks that I get given, I use this to search for useful and interesting things to blog and draw inspiration from. So far I've found two competition briefs which would result in my work being shown in a bar and on a street pack across Leeds and other major cities.

Soon though I was sitting in on the equivalent of a progress crit on the BBC project, where Neil (designer) showed his designs and ideas so far. I took notes on the things they address and noted how Neil had been working and his concepts behind the work produced. The crit was really casual and was just at his desk next to mine so it was quick and to the point.

The crit really opened my eyes to what can be done with just one piece of artwork. The initial design produce had been replicated and reused in different compositions but across a range of media that would commonly be used by this particular client. This seems to cut the work load down severely as they as for multiple deliverables all on different formats and doing this keeps a consistent aesthetic and works well. 

Neil presented 3 of the strongest ideas all of which differed from each other so we could get a good variation in response and see different angles of the brief. They discussed in detail what the client is most likely to go for and what works well and what doesn't or what could be improved or used in different ways. I noticed that Rob had an inquisitive role in the crit, asking questions that would lead to more compositions and ways in which the designs could be applied.

They had pretty much decided on which idea to go forward which but they wanted to see what i had come up with. I talked them through my initial ideas and imagery that i had designed which compared to Neil's wasn't as extensive however they didn't dismiss any of the ideas entirely and gave me some guidance to go forward and develop them.

For the rest of the afternoon I worked on my designs and came up with numerous variations.

This one above is probably my favourite although it is moving away from the original cog idea that the others went for when I presented my work to them.

Today I stayed behind for an extra hour and joined Rob (Creative Director) and Chris (Co-Founder of Creative Concern) at the Lowry for the opening night of the 'Warhol & The Diva' exhibition.

It was a good collection of Warhol's work and some had never or rarely been seen before. I particularly appreciated a set of polaroid portraits that Warhol used to take before make his large screen prints. I also learnt that Warhol set up a magazine called 'Interview' which would feature a different person ever month. Prints of the covers were exhibited and the majority had a similar aesthetic to the screen prints that he made.