Christmas Card Launch Workshop

We firstly looked at the first christmas card that was ever sent, which was in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole, which was designed and sold for a shilling. The service of delivery expanded so more and more christmas card were able to be sent, which made the christmas card more popular than it was than ever before. We then looked at an infographic that was created my the moon pig card service, which displays facts and figures about the history and the anatomy of the christmas card. Our generation would rather send a message through social media rather than a physical christmas card, however people that are more elderly like Grandparents would more likely send a physical card to say with the tradition of the Christmas Cards that people send to each other. We then looked at different designs that companies send, they said that they didn't want digital to be in one place but more across the whole social media platform to get the christmas card design and message across.

Another example that we looked at was the Christmas Card that was created by a company called the Nice Agency for critical mass, I found that this example was very different as it was a digital message. I thought that this was very interesting, as I could look into this design even further when it comes to design my own christmas card. This christmas card digital message was used to advertise the Critical Mass to new Clients. This advertisement was originally a still, however were it tells you to place your phone, the animation that they created would then appear on your mobile screen, which you will then be able to watch.

Our Christmas card has got to advertise to several different target audiences, which will be a very important factor to consider when designing our Christmas Cards. We were told that we needed to show our personality through the designs that we were going to be creating. We then looked at other christmas cards that were created by Graphic Illustrators, I found that some of these pieces were very creative, bright, bold and stood out to me well.

The Brief that we were given was: 

"The brief is about great but simple ideas. The festive season is saturated with traditional and contemporary imagery and sentiment. Your challenge is to develop an innovative approach to Christmas 2016 - communicate a compelling christmas vision to surprise, inspire and delight. Anticipate how audiences will view The School of Art & Design, be imaginative in generating a festive feel for the University of Huddersfield to unleash your collective creativity and make it memorable." 

What do we need to consider:

• Collaborate - Graphics Illustration, Photography, Animation and Art.
• Look from a personal point of view, what was your best christmas that you had or what do you think of when it comes to christmas time. 
• Brainstorm some of your ideas.
• Who's your audience? - What's the message?
• Develop some new ideas.
• Pitch it to others - what's the response?
• Evaluate and refine those ideas
• Revisit the brief and refine 
• Pitch to the Panel at 3pm (Tracy)

After this we looked at Mixed Media design, which I thought were very different to designs that we had seen before in this workshop. Would produce a gif for our christmas, don't be original be experimental and take your ideas further. The design that you create can either be still or it could be move me 3D be Illustrative, but we need to make sure that it stands out to people.

My Ideas

I had to consider what I associate with Christmas:

• Gingerbread
• Reindeers
• Snow/Snowflakes
• Travel
• Trees
• Food and Drink
• Baubles
• Tinsel
• Holly
• Family
• Pinecones
• Candycanes

The first idea I had was that you like to travel the world at Christmas time, to see all the different countries and cultures at Christmas and New Year. For this I was going to create an animation using the sleigh to go around the world that then leaves the words behind which appear and say "Travel the world this Christmas" once this has happened snowflakes will fall and cover the screen completely white and words would then appear and then say Happy Holidays. However feel that this wouldn't work. My next idea was to create a typography Christmas Card using a symbol and the words that you associate with Christmas. Below are my final designs that I created for this Christmas Card workshop.

Process and Production Aidan - Lesson 2

Within this process and production lesson we were given the task of creating four different design briefs, which were various posters. Out of the four we were told that we should design three, using the techniques that we had learnt in the previous lecture. For the third brief were given a list of designer that we could take inspiration from. To start with we looked at some examples of typographic design and communication. We were told that this lesson was important due to it being linked to the next process and production lesson with Aidan. Firstly to start off with I decided to look at the four different briefs and sketch out my ideas of what I wanted to produce for this lesson.

Brief One - A3 Poster for an acoustic night. The rules that we were given were that you could only use typography on the poster design. We weren't allowed to use images or pictures at all, however you may use any numerous typefaces that were found in the document to help you with the design direction. You could also only use THREE type sizes one large, one medium and one small. Don't worry about colour we are trying to work with the type scale and hierarchy. So we were told that we should just use only the colours Red, Black and White, however we could also use tints too. I found that this brief was quite tricky to go and work with. Although I did keep powering through until I had an idea of what I wanted to produce do this brief.

The next brief that I looked at was for the Craft Beer Expo 2017 event, where we were told to create an A3 Poster. Again the rules from the previous brief again applied to this one. I found this brief quite interesting and hard to think about because I wasn't sure what to produce for this poster design. So I felt that this brief was the one brief that I shouldn't consider for this task. This then left me with the final two briefs, from looking at the briefs I found it exciting because these other two briefs that we were given look quite fun. As I had lots of different ideas that I could use to produce a final poster design for the last two briefs.

The first being an A3 sized poster for a brief called Interpret, the  rules that we should consider for this task were that we should quickly research into the designer of our choice that we wanted to talk about and take inspiration from for our own design work. From the research we should find out key information that we need and call out the characteristics that make up the visual language of our chosen designer. Do they use a particular colour palette, so if they do we could use this to match the design style. Does the designer structure there work in a particular way? Is it hand drawn or is it physically made?

The designer that I decided to look into was Paula Scher below are some of the facts that I found and researched about her that I could use within the design that I was going to create.

She is an American Graphic Designer, Painter and Art Educator who attended the Tyler School of Art. Paula was born in 1948 in Washington DC. Where she has worked for companies like CBS Records, Russian Constructivism, Koppel and Scher. She was also the first female principal in Pentagram. Paula is now a Typographer and Print Layout Artist in New York City. I chose to look at Paula Scher, as I found her work very professional and modern. As the layouts, she uses are very
skilled and efficient. I wanted to look at Paula’s work in more depth because of the style and profession of her work. I think it’s Bold and stands out, which makes a Statement throughout her work. I have noticed that her work is very consistent. I thought that my poster design that I am going to create will represent the style of her work.

The final brief was again to create an A3 sized poster Design for a design meeting, which is known as Wilson's Republic 6. The rules for this poster design needs to include the WR logotype and Pipe Marque. You need to use the WR colours, only use the colours Red, White and Black. You could use tints and half tone patterns of those colours. The first part that I had to do for this brief was to research the word "Resilience" which is the ability of a substance or object to spring back into Shape like Elasticity. This got me to think about an Elastic Band, Slinky, Springs and Stretchy Tights, or Pants.

Overall I liked this process and production lesson because it was very different, where I had to think a lot about how I had to create these poster designs without breaking any of the rules that we were given to follow for each brief. 

Claiming Expanded Practice (2): Animation

Following on from the previous lecture of Claiming Expanded Practice in design, Spencer this week covered the animation side which I was really interested to find out about, as I am doing both Graphic Design and Animation I thought that this maybe an interesting topic to look at. We firstly started out by talking and recapping on the previous lecture with the author, writer called Alice Twemlow. Within this session we looked at a handful of different animations that explored the way in which contemporary animation is shown through expanded practice.

We started out by looking at a conference that had been organised by Suzanne Buchan that was themed around the idea of the animated kind implicating everything. Where invited speakers from all around the world, people who landmark thinkers and practitioners within animation expanded territory. We then talked about one of the speeches by Johnny Hardstaff that was about the use of CGI in advertising, who runs a cgi based design company that deal with lucrative design contracts, but he has a double edged take on what he is actually doing which become quite interesting. Looking into his speech even further will looked at several different types of campaigns that he is involved with that are:

• Sony Orange 
• 'In the mouth of advertising' - fascinating
• Global carousel of meetings - pattern of meetings

The first video that we were shown in this lecture was called Honda the COG. I found that it looked real, but it was created using CGI, the seams are so close together that you can't see them which makes the film very effective. I think that the advertisement is well put together and was surprising that the company like Honda used CGI, but they used it professionally and perfectly to make sure that the advertisement stood out.

We then moved on to look at Sony Bravia advert which also made using CGI. People once again thought that the releasing of thousands of balls down a street was a real life event, so Sony took advantage of their advertising and said that this was a real life event but in fact it wasn't a it was made using CGI.  

I found that this lecture was very interesting and I feel that I am going to look into this topic even further. 

Seminar #4: Assessment Preparation - Polina Zioga

The first thing that we did was look at the assessment preparation checklist that we need to use to see about our presentation that we have to produce about my chosen subject. We also looked at Design + Content + Delivery, and recapped on the previous lecture that we had done with Polina and talked about we were should be with our presentation. Polina then talked about what we should include in our presentation, which is to have:

• 1 Slide with your Title, URL, Name / Surname and Course
• 2-7 Slides which will depend on your visual communication design, this will include the Background and relevant examples either text or/and images, however you need to avoid videos as these take too long to present. 
• 1 Slide for my main Research Question
• 1 Slide for my References and Bibliography

The most important fact that we need to consider for this presentation is to REHEARSE, because you need to know what you talking about and presenting in your assessment. Something else that is important is make notes about what you would like to say in your presentation, as this may help you throughout the assessment, but an important is to not read from your notes so rehearsing is very important. 

Since the previous lecture I have been working on my presentation by researching into my chosen subject, which is Title Sequence Designs between the 1960's to Now and how they have changed? For the past week I have been looking at Title Designs that have been produced in the 60's by the designer known as Saul Bass and title sequence that have been created in the present day by the company called Elastic. I also had to research into the background behind Title Designs and how they established, I found out that they started off in the early 1900's. 

I found that this seminar helped me because it allowed me to speak to Polina and receive feedback on how I could improve my presentation. To receive my feedback I sat with and talked through my rough draft of the presentation that I had produced. The feed back which I received was very helpful because she told me that I had quite a bit of writing and I need to summarise and be brief on the background of the title design, as I had a lot information on this which she thought was too much. She also said that I should pick example of 1 design from each era, which is 60's and now, because she thought that I wouldn't have a lot of time to present all of the examples that I had picked. The examples that I have chosen to work with is Saul Bass's The fact of Life and the new James Bond film Spectre.

Furthermore into this I have thought about what I am going to research for each of my pages and work with this plan to research into my chosen subject this will be:

• Slide 1 - Title, URL, Name / Surname and Course
• Slide 2 - Brief Summary of the Background and Literature review of Title Design
• Slide 3 - Research into the Saul Bass (Title Designer from the Past)
• Slide 4 - An example of his work (A Fact Of Life)
• Slide 5 - Research into a Title Designer or Company in the Now
• Slide 6 - An example of their work (James Bond Spectre)
• Slide 7 - A Timeline of how technology has changed throughout Film and Title designs
• Slide 8 - My Main Research Question
• Slide 9 - References and the Bibliography

I am also going think about any additional pages that I could add to my presentation. 

Process and Production Sara - Lesson 2

This was my second process and production lesson with Sara, for this process and production lesson we need to bring along with us a piece of footage that we wanted to work with. For this I decided to bring a piece of footage that I had taken whilst I was at Athletics of my friend running, I found that this footage would be very interesting to work with.

The first part that we did in this process and production lesson was to open up the programme called adobe After Effects that we were going to work with throughout this lesson. The next part that we had to do was to open up the system preferences and make sure that the Preserve option was off. I then select the file menu > interpret footage and make sure that the frame rate that we were going to be working at was at 25. I then looked at the option known as separate fields, where I had to select the option upper field first and then select ok. I had to rescale the size of the composition, that I was going to be working at, which was 1240 x 1080. For this lesson we had to select a piece of footage from our chosen video that we wanted to work with because within this lesson we learnt how to loop a video.

The next thing that we worked with was the pen tool, to cut around the Video/Animation that we wanted to use in our first frame at the beginning of the timeline. To skip to the frames that I wanted I used a keyboard short cut, which was to hold down the command button and select either the left or right arrows. This would then move the line on the timeline to next frame along. I then had to open the clip in the bottom menu located at the side of the timeline and select Masks > Masks 1 > then select Mask Path stopwatch, which then create a Key frame on my timeline for the mask.

We then watched a short animation that was the introduction which was created for the British Athletics Grand Prix that was featured on BBC2, this advert used roto scoping. I found that the style that had been used for this advert was very interesting and creative. I like watching athletics, so I found that this animation interested me a lot. The use of colours that were used in this design were very bright, bold and very vibrant so that it would catch the attention and stand out to the target audience well.

                  

In addition to this we then watched another advertisement for Athletics, however this was for the IAAF World Championships in Daegu 2011. I found that this animation was very colourful and used a loop on the long jump to make it look like someone was jumping over and over. I thought that this was a nice piece and I am going to take inspiration from this for my own designs. 

I then selected on the composition, then choose the option layer > time > enable time remapping. This puts the keyframe at the front and the end of the timeline automatically which you don't have to do yourself, however I was told that we needed to a new key frame point just before the end of the timeline which is the frame before. After I had done this I then had to delete the key frame that was at the end of the timeline. 

We then had to create a final composition that was 10 seconds long, this was so my animation on a loop would work. I had to make sure that the shape that I had drawn around was the same shape as the person running in each frame, where I had to add pen point or remove a few and move them around so that they would fit and match the figure in the video. We were then told that we needed to create a simple shapes in Illustrator or find a copyright free texture that we could work with. Once I had chosen a texture I was then able to import my texture into the animation, however I had to add the previous composition that I had created into the main comp and create a solid layer that I could place behind the animation. To add the texture to the animation I had to place the texture layer below the footage layer, I feel like this could be experimented with and looked at further, I have also thought about in the future adding other pieces of footage to use and add to the design.

The next part that I had to do to the animation was to select the property tool and loop out the duration, so that the design would loop, select alt and the stopwatch which drops down the code menu, where we can then add the code to the loop out duration. The final part that we did was render out my animation as an Apple Res 4444, which will render my video out at the best quality.

Here is my final design, I found that this lesson was very different quite fun but stressful because I did have a few problems when creating my design work.

                                               Roto Loop from Rebecca Thorp on Vimeo.

Studio Lecture - Tuesday 18th October 2016

This lecture is about Placement Year and placement are where you can start your career. Linda firstly introduced the team that help us to find and finalise a placement. They would recommend doing a placement year, as it will give you more opportunities. The placement will last up to 48 weeks long, from June 2017 - September 2018, as you need to do a total of 11 months. You will need to complete a 1500 word essay about your placement. It is a pass or fail year, but failing would not effect your overall grade.

http:///www.hud.ac.uk/schools/artdesignandarchitecture/placements 
This shows where people have worked throughout the world.

You need to know where you are going after uni, and target your work to that field of design. You also need to be confident when writing your CV and going to an interview. A placement could possibly allow you to achieve a higher degree award. The placement fee for the year is £500.

What type of Placement Interests you?

This could be a freelance designer, where you could open and set up your own business and company. Who would you like to work for? This is another important factor is it a small company or is it a big company. If you take your travel costs to the office if you are travelling 30 miles or more, they will refund you half of your fare. There is also lots of overseas opportunities, have a look at places or companies that you want to work for. Get your CV, Letter and Applications checked by one of the team members. They told us to have a look at eplacements and unilearn, another tool that they told us to look at was placement preparation tool.

When talked about what we needed to do this week, for our project and where we needed to be. We then watched a film about Print v Digital, which I found was very interesting. This was because it was very factual. After this we then watched a film trailer for a film called Anomalisa, it was animated trailer, however i found that this trailer was very creative and interesting, also very different to some of the film trailers that I have watched. I found this lecture helpful.

Business Lecture Number 4 - Buyer Behaviour and Business Issues

Discovery Website – Starting offer out Internships and Placements for Graphic Designers.
Sports Company in Manchester.  Sports Creative Ltd.
Chocolate Company

The first thing that we did in this lecture was to look at a timeline about the American presidents. A timeline is used to show what has happened as is quite useful to to see what is going off at the time.

Buyer and Behaviour

Within this subject we will be looking at how Buyers need to behave. The Buyer Behaviour Process is that they need Recognition, they then need to search and to do a Pre-Purchase Evaluation. The need to start to evaluate the product. So that this evaluation will determine whether the product is right for you. If it is we will then be able to Purchase the product, then consumption. The last thing you need to do is a post-purchase Evaluation, to evaluate whether it is good, bad or an okay product.

We were then shown a diagram that showed us about the process of the marketing and the process that you need to take as a buyer so that the behaviour needs to be good.
(Draw out the diagram)

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

5. Self-Actualisation – Personal and Values
4. Esteem and Status – Power, Respect and Worth
3. Belongingness – Relationships, Family, Home and Sex
2. Safety – Shelter and Defence
1. Psychological – Food and Water

Which product am I going to buy – Memory is it good/bad/indifferent, is it also long term/short term.
What are its aesthetics? – it reflects who you are.
Emotion – Hedonism – live with guilt? Conscience, Love? Genetics – Man vs Women
Logic – people have different logic
Range of Choice
Attitude to Risk – are you prepared to take a risk, are you willing to buy it.
Nature of Problem – How it works, it goes straight over ours heads. – The routine, simple vs complex, is a low or high involvement.
Religion/Belief Structures. – will it effect how you think.
Legal Issues. – what can you show what can you get away with. This interacts with religious beliefs. Having a look at what is acceptable and what is not.
Other Views – Peers, Family and Friends.
And finally the financial Issues.

We then looked at a Chart of major companies that own several other companies, so you maybe working for more companies than you expect.

Business
- Looking at the behaviour process.
- Design – Targeted Design
- Market Issues – Market Segment Real Market Issues. End user aspects
- Research – Macro Environment. Social/ Ethical Issues. How are you going to go around the ethics? This could cause you a lot of problems.

(Draw out the Diagram)
Sender -  Message – Encode – transmit – Decode – Receive

Transmit – Noise and Interference.
Message -  Is it simple, complex, long or short
Sender – Reason for the message