Just because I like to repeat myself....

...thought I'd re-post the entries that I had on my other "blog"...

Saturday, 4 October 2008

I've told you a million times not to exaggerate....

This week we had fun looking at the alphabet. Each of us picked a word out of "the randomizer" which determined our fate for the next few days. I was pretty chuffed with my word to begin with...exaggerate...thinking that it fitted my personality quite well. However, after sitting down for 10 minutes and thinking about it I felt like hurting somebody, and seriously resented that box. After speaking to my friend about the brief I decided to do one of the things I do best - lie. I took a pen and a piece of paper and started to write about the letter "E"...needless to say everything I wrote down was either a complete lie altogether or a blatant exaggeration. I began to incorporate the text within some of the images I had been putting together and suddenly started enjoying the brief a lot more.

I think one of the most important th ings I have discovered this week is that the better results come from when I am actually enjoying myself, and the more I put off work the more I hate it. So I have come to the decision that if I just kick myself into gear I'm going to get a lot more out of everything. This theory applies to this "blogging" malarkey as well...and so instead of spending ages worrying about what I'm going to write I'm just going to write it. No doubt this will result in a lot of rubbish...but I'm not the one that's going to be reading it...
Anyway...as well as the "exaggerate" brief we were given a task which involved hunting shapes down around the college. The shapes were decid ed by picking them out of my new best friend "the randomizer"...and I ended up with hexagons and squares. Cheers for that! After a mad hunt everyone came back and displayed their treasure on the wall...it was a pretty impressive sight seeing all the shapes up on the wall together and everyone seemed surprised how good it looked.

We also had some fun with stamps that day...and experimented with making type using the two shapes that were given to us. I don't think I am the only one who can say they still have ink in between all their nails but it's probably worth it for what we got out of the exercise.

One thing I will say about the briefs we've been given this week is that they've made me realize how much people's responses to them vary - it's mental! I've become a bit of a wanderer over the last few day's looking at everyone's work and getting very distracted! Some of it is shown below...
All in all - despite the long hours slaving away and averaging about 3 hours a sleep a night - I've had a pretty good week...so thanks everyone!

Sunday, 28 September 2008

Looking at type...

I've been looking through some of the work from some of the designers we were shown on Friday hoping for some inspiration...
Two of the examples in particular really stood out. One of which is the series of images produced by Jack Featherstone called "Play with type".

It's obvious from the series of images that are shown on his blog - playwithtype.blogspot.com - that experimenting with type in this way was genuinely enjoyable.
For some reason this seems to make the work a lot more interesting. Perhaps because the images reflect the designers enthusiasm.
The other example was an image from Apeloig, called "The P.O.S.T.E.R.".

Again, what makes this image interesting for me is sense of playfulness within the piece. I like the idea
of using paper and text to create type, which is something I haven't seen very often. It seems like a very simple idea but I think that it's the simplicity of it which makes it work so well.
(I will include more images to this soon but at the moment am having trouble with formatting...)

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Getting started...

Unfortunately for whoever is reading this, this is the first "blog" I've ever written. No doubt it will be pretty tedious and so - unless falling asleep at your computer is part of your plans for today - you might want to give this one a miss. In fact...I think I might too.