introduction:melissa hill

introduction

pleased to meetyou!

Once upon a time, Melissa Hill was rushing to meet a print deadline: 12,000 inserts

needed to be delivered to IPC Media sharpish.

A £10,000 ad deal also hung in the balance. She rang her usual graphic designer.

Curses!

He was on holiday. Again.

Furious, Melissa picked up the phone again, dialled The CASS Design School at London Metropolitan University and asked about enrolling on their graphic design degree course.

The deadline was missed. The ad deal was cancelled.

The graphic designer in question has not been hired again.

Educated at Sarah Lawerence College in New York, Melissa cut her career teeth on Wall Street, first supporting award-winning equity analysts covering the food and FMCG industries. She later became an award-winning analyst in London, specialising in nutraceuticals and functional foods.

Today, she owns Stone Bridge Hair Accessories, designing and retailing premium quality hair accessories and hair care products.

Melissa hates missing deadlines and overspending budgets.

This is a selection of work from her Second Year portfolio from The CASS.

industry practice

industry practice

thought of theweek

Every week we were asked to reflect on an assigned design practitioner.

Following are my responses to three of these assignments.

“I don’t use many more than threeor four typefaces in my life.”

This sort of refined, reductionistthinking is very Italian, really.

Massimo Vignalli

Kate Moross

Alan Fletcher

industry practice

under the influenceof Jim Jarmusch

Under the Influence was a short video project where we had to profile an artist or practitioner who has had an influence on our own work. The video could be no more than 15 seconds, then formatted to load to Instagram.

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has had a profound influence on me ever since I saw Stranger Than Paradise as a teenager in the 1980s.

I strongly identified at that time with the characters, the stark aesthetic Jarmusch created and with his languid pacing. I was also a crazy mad Screamin’ Jay Hawkins fan. I’m not gunna lie.

I watched a number of his early films again, which was a pleasure, along with some new works.

Themes of alienation, the focus on character and context over narrative, along with beautifully framed shots more like tableaus were picked as core elements.

For the first film, I honed in on a common Jarmusch theme: the road trip. Two female voices discuss borrowing a car without asking the owner, confident that “he won’t mind.”

The car is a rebuilt GTI.

Music by The Fall.

I was interested in the idea of the sense of timelessness within 15 seconds, so made two more attempts titled “Nothing”. A child is playing aimlessly, until an adult voice interrupts: “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” is the guilty reply.

industry practice

group work:Nespresso

I was project manager for the Nespresso project, which was to create a pitch presentation for an immersive event to launch a new flavour called Cubania.

Our event theme was “Quest” where guests would accompany the dapper Mr Nespresso on a journey to several countries, with wacky adventures along the way, in search of the world’s strongest and most flavoursome coffee.

Our group decided to be video projection specialists, integrating dance and “flash mob” style performance.

Critical to our research were interviews with Westerners who had lived or spent significant time in Cuba, trying to understand what they felt was “essentially” Cuban.

Friendliness, interactivity and collaboration, and music became the core themes.

We wanted to maximise the social media and word-of-mouth potential.

Our strategy aimed at developing a number of gift elements at key stages: pre-event, during the event, and post-event.

After studying the structure of popular TED talks, I whittled our presentation down to 20 minutes, allowing the slides to represent visually the complexity of all the elements of our event, rather than trying to explain what would happen “in real time.”

studio:tales of the

uncanny

tales of the uncanny

studio theme

Sigmund Freud defined uncanny as the familiar becoming unfamiliar, causing a feeling of unease.

Examining themes and techniques used in the horror genre, we became familiar with how to trigger discomfort in our audience.

These ideas were then applied to the commercial arena, exploring how the AIDA formula relates to emotional impact of design, and how the sense of the uncanny might be used in novel ways.

tales of the uncanny

workshops

Life drawing formed an important part of the studio, studying lighting to create drama, body positions to convey emotion and intensive sessions on difficult-to-draw body parts such as feet and heads at awkward angles.

Many psychological ideas were explored, with pareidolia as one theme featured in a snap exhibition. Works, curation and exhibition had to be completed in just one hour.

tales of the uncanny

outcomes

de Fabrica was a journal project about creative obsession.

My subject, Grief, was about what is considered “correct” forms of mourning following the death of a child.

Travel Journal was, for me, a video project journaling my experience at the Surrealist exhibit “Beyond Dreams” at the Tate Museum in London.

This involved animating a series of images from the exhibit to further explore the themes embodied in each piece.

ethics:case study

ethics

clarence court mabel pearman’s burford browns free range eggs

What is free range when it comes to egg farming? Is there a qualitative

distinction between a rare breed of chicken and a propriatary one? Who is Mabel Pearman?

These gripping questions and many more, including an exploration of the complicity of the package designer in marketing the dream about ethical farming to an eager audience were covered in my ethics

case study on (take a deep breath) Clarence Court Mabel Pearman’s Burford Browns Free Range Eggs.

Among my repertoire of topics with which I am able to, but try to refrain from, boring people at dinner parties is sustainable food production.

Clarence Court, owned by the UK’s second largest contract egg packer, Stonegate, underwent a rebranding in 2010. It is currently one of the fastest growing brands in the Stonegate stable.

This case study examined DEFRA’s definition of farming practices that

qualify as free range; they aren’t as heavenly as you might imagine. It also picked apart the marketing language used on CCMPBBFR eggs, exposing the lifestyle implied versus husbandry that is truly chicken-friendly, such as the fact that chickens fed corn are done so only to enhance the yellow colour of the yolk.

This may not seem particularly scandalous, except that corn for chickens is like crack cocaine: addictive and completely lacking in the nutrition these birds actually need to stay healthy. But extolling the virtues of a daily diet of slugs, frogs and spiders is unlikely to please the premium-priced customer who is wholly unfamiliar with the preferences of even a purportedly rare breed chicken. Yes, much better to feed chickens the Turkey Twizzler equivalent and let the upper-middle classes repose in their farm fantasy.

exhibitions

exhibitions

inspiration

The British Museum Egyptian Collection.

I visited this exhibit as part of my research for my studio project Grief, exploring how mummification was part of the grieving process for surviving family members.

Beyond Dreams at the Tate Modern Museum.

This visit was the springboard for my animated Travel Journal project about surrealism.

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