graphic design portfolio uni

STUDIO PRACTICE GD2

CONTENTS

PAGES 4-9 SHOOTING STARSPAGES 10-17 PAPER CO PAGES 18-25 A SPIKE LEE JOINTPAGES 26-35 INDEPENDENT PAGES 36-37 L.A.BPAGES 38-38 EVALUATIONPAGES 39-39 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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This is the shooting stars brief, I chose to do my project on the London riots that hap-pened in August. This seemed to be perfect because me and my housemate actually went to experience the riots first hand, we did not go to cause trou-ble but to have the first person experience that you would not get anywhere else. At first my idea was that I would aqquire footage from the internet and edit it with interesting info-graphics over the top, but I felt like this was missing the point slightly, moreover I felt because it was such an in-tense situation I would need to produce something to do our experience justice. I had a few ideas floating around but one that seemed to stick out was to produce a short interview with me and Jack. I would cut up the audio and pick out all the descriptive words that rel-

-ated to our feelings of how the riots effected us. we shot footage outside Alio’s shop in Epsom which was really good fun, but also quite hard to pro-duce a real conversation with a camera pointed towards you. when we had finished the shot I discovered that the video was at least 8 minutes long. I felt really passionate about the project as a whole so I didnt really want to try and cut out 7 minutes of qual-ity footage. I felt really inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s film Cof-fee and Cigarettes, I wanted my film to be that exact style, it was’nt just to capture and record what we were saying but to also record the art of conversation and how people communicate with each other about real life issues. The first video is the response to the brief because I have to, but the second is the real one.

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This is the 8 minute video that is unedited, I see this as the directors cut, how it should be. I dont know why I am so passionate about this, it just seems like it was such a once in a life time opportu-nity that will probably not happen again. This video Is hopefully something that will last forever as a reminder of my experience.

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In conclusion to this project, I think that I am actually quite happy with one of my out-comes, thats not to say that I hate the edited version, afterall it does answer the brief. How-ever I do feel like the project could go so much further, Its possibly too late now as the memories of the riot were so fresh in our heads then. The picture above was taken on my blackberry at the furniture shop in croyden, you could feel the heat from where I

stood on the bridge, the whole event was such a mind blow-ing experience that I am so glad that I had the opportu-nity to record and document my experience. I really like the style that I made the film and would like to carry on produc-ing films like this and maybe eventually shoot onto real film stock.

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PAPER COX

FIRE SAFETYThis has been one of the hard-est briefs to be motivated about, at first I had my heart set on doing the Virgin Media brief. When It got to the Virgin presentation however, I com-pletely changed my mind, to do the Virgin brief would be to go against everything that I be-lieve in as a person. I kept on thinking about a book called ‘How not to lose your soul as a graphic designer’ and so I continued to choose the gov-ernment fire safety brief as it didnt contain any paricular rules or bounderies, simply just redesign a fire safety poster. At first I was actually lacking any good ideas atall, I attended a meeting that was meant for the Virgin brief and that was really good for creating new ideas and concepts, I even had a few good Ideas for The virgin brief. Some Ideas that popped up were; double sid-ed, enviornmental, transpar-ancey, cut out shapes, pull out paper design, embossed and my favourite for the virgin brief a blow out balloon that forms a hot air balloon wit helium. The

session was hugely helpful in bringing up the creative flow, one of my ideas that came from that session, was to have a poster that fitted around a light switch so that when ever people turned on a light they would be aware of the ‘new fire safety rules’. I chose to fol-low up that idea with the post-er you see on the next page, the design of the poster a sort of swiss design that is intuitve for the users. I didnt want to create another government print out that has been poorly designed because that doesnt grab anyones attention atall. The text had to be clear so I opted for Helvetica Neue LT std in 45 light, at this stage I hadnt thought about colours much so there was still quite far to go. The big circles I feel are very important in grabbing peoples attention, so I was keen to use them through out the design process. The idea of the poster is really that it is a peice of eye capturing art rather than just another safety poster that im sure everyone has seen a million times.

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PAPER COX

FIRE SAFETY

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These are the rough paper models that I wanted to base my fire safety poster onto, the light switch hole is placed in the center so that there is information above and below, this is purely for aesthetic reasons. The whole poster folds up neatly into a small booklet that can be conveniently sent out in the post, I have de-signed a section of the mailout that can be filled out with names and addresses that also looks clean and professional.

HOW COULD A FIRE START?

WHAT COULD BURN?

PEOPLE AT RISK

equipment, hot processes such as welding or grinding, cigarettes, matches and anything else that gets very hot or causes sparks.

Packing, rubbish and furniture could all burn, just like the more obvious fuels such as petro, paint, varnish and white spirit. Think about wood, paper, rubber and foam. Do the walls or ceilings have hardboard or chipboard?

greater for some because of where or when they work, such as night staff, or because they’re not familiar with the premises, such as visitors or customers. children, the elderly or disabled people are especially vulnerable.

Have you found anything that could burn?

Who could be at risk?

Who could be especially at risk?

PEOPLEAT

RISK

FIRE HAZARD

EVALUATE

REMOVE AND REDUCE RISK

PROTECT

First, think about what you have found in steps 1 and 2:

to people in the building nearby?

or sparks fal, be knocked or pushed into something that would burn? could it happen the other way round?

You must take immediate action to protect your premises

Have you assessed the risk to staff and visitors?

Have you kept any source of fuel and heat/sparks apart?

anything around they could use?

Have you removed or secured any fuel an arsonist could use?

their way out, even at night if necessary?

EVALUATE&

ACT

FIRESAFETYRISKASSESSMENT

Press out the square and place around a lightswitch

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RECORD

PLAN

TRAIN

Keep a record of any �re hazards and what you have done to reduce or remove them. if your premises are small, a record is a good idea. If you have �ve or more staff or have a licence then you must keep a record of what you have found and what you have done.

You must have a clear plan of how to prevent �re and how you will keep people safe in case of �re. If you share a building with others, you need to coordinate your plan with them.

You need to make sure your staff know what to do in case of �re, and if necessary, are trained for their roles.

Have you made a record of what you have found, and action you have taken?

Have you planned what everyone will do if there is a �re?

Have you discussed the plan with all staff?

Consulted others who share a building with you, and included them in your plan?

RECORDPLAN

&TRAIN

REVIEWKeep you risk assessment under regular review. Over time, the risks may change. If you identify signi�cant changes in risk or make any signi�cant changes to your plan, you must tell others who share the premises and where appropiate re-train staff.

Made any changes to the building inside or out?

Had a �re or near miss?

Changed work practices?

Begun to store chemicals or dangerous substances?

Signi�cantly changed your stock, or stock levels?

Have you planned your next �re drill?

CONTACT www.communities.gov.uk/�reON THE WEBSITE YOU CAN:

Remember to keep a record of your plan and keep your �re risk assessment under regular review.

REVIEW

This is my final design for the mailout, I am really happy with the way it looks, I think the clean lines and the red circles are a really strong feature. I think The colour scheme is really suited to the actual rhetoric of the poster, people will immediately as-sosciate the poster with Important information about fire safety and hopefully the design will keep them from ignoring it straight away.

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CONTACT

ON THE WEBSITE YOU CAN:

risk assessment under regular review.• Find out more about the new fire safety law.• Find out which is the right guide for you.• order a guide at a cost of £12 or download a copy

ACT NOW TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE SAFE AND WITHIN THE LAW

WHAT WILL I HAVE

TO DO? premises. The aim is to help you keep people,

HOW DO I

DO THIS?produced an easy-to-use checklist(see other side) to help you.

inspecting your premises to make sure you comply.

WHOWILL

CHECK?


Press out the square and place around a lightswitch

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DID YOU KNOW THE FIRE SAFETY RULES

ARE CHANGING?

There is a hidden threat that can destroy lives and could close your business over night.Fire causes death, injury and destroys businesses.

IF YOU ARE:• Responsible for business premises

• An employer

• A voluntary organisation or charity

Then you must act now!


Mr. L Edom 38 Miles RoadEpsomSurreyKT19 9AD

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The final result is that of a dou-ble sided long mailout, that can be folded up neatly and sent to multiple companies.The fact that it encourages people to place it around a light switch is a really important factor in it’s design. Not only is it important that people can see it when it is placed around a switch, but it is part of the key concept to get people to place it up in the first place; afterall everyone likes mail that is tangible and actually interesting. Another key part is the colour scheme, I really like the back part of the poster with the solid blocks of bright colours, this is sure to attract interest! One part of the process that needs more thought on is how the reciev-ers of the mailout will deal with placing it around light switches , first of all theres the issue of the square hole, I think that somewhow the mailout will need to be perforated before it is sent out. Otherwise I think that if people need to make an effort to find scissors and cut out a fiddely square, they might be slighly discouraged from really using and appreci-ating the poster to its full po-tential. In conclusion to this project I feel that there is still a few last things to do here and there, I would like to of seen an actual physical final prod-uct to really feel how it would perform in real life rather than just digitally.

I did this project in two sec-tions, at first I made the black and white first design followed by a second A3 design featur-ing the red and yellow colour scheme which you can see on the final outcome. The client said he liked the light switch idea however he did not like the one sided poster that I had shown him. It was not what he had specified as it could not be sent out well and was also a waste of pa-per with not having print on both sides.I was totally unpre-pared and so a very impor-tant lesson was learnt. Time mangement over the next few weeks was not handled well atall until a deadline appeared for the hand in, I spent a day making the ‘long poster’ design which is on the previ-ous pages. Even Though I was late in handing a product to the client I feel like it has been a success of sorts. The design is feasable and I can almost see it working, an-other plus point is in the way it folds up, I did not think that there was a way of making it universally fit around all light switches until a friend men-tioned that it could be long and thin. So a few lessons for the future are that theres always a way to fold paper to work to your needs, you must always do your research and work before going to a client otherwise you will look stupid!

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A SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINT

A SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINTA SPIKE LEE JOINT

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Names were selected from a hat at random for this pro-ject, my friend got rosa parks and others got various other names that I recognised, I managed to pull Spike Lee out of the hat which I though was a stroke of luck because I have always loved watching his films and infact only knew a few of his projects. Ever since I have been watching movies the ones that drew me in the most were social realisim

films that represented real so-ciety in all walks of life in all ages. So the aim of this project was to research spike lee in al-ternative methods. I thought to myself immediately that I will familiariase myself with spike lee’s rich and wonderful film portfolio, what better way to find out about a person than to watch the films they have created, written and directed themsleves.

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CROOKLYN 1994A vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school-teacher, her stubborn jazz-musician husband and their five kids living in ‘70s Brooklyn.

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DO THE RIGHT THING 1989On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone’s hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence.

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JUNGLE FEVER 1991Friends and family of a married black architect react in differ-ent ways to his affair with an Italian secretary.

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MALCOM X 1992The biopic of the controversial and influential Black Nationalist leader.

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SHES GOTTA HAVE IT 1986The story of Nola Darling’s simultaneous sexual relationships with three different men is told by her and by her partners and other friends. All three men wanted her to commit solely to them; Nola resists being “owned” by a single partner.

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For this project I have done what I love doing the most and that is watching films, I feel that by watching the majority of Spike Lee’s films I have gained a great knowl-edge of what he represents as a person. His films con-tain great political messages, alongside African Ameri-can themes. His trade mark name for his movie style is ‘a Spike Lee Joint’ one of my favourite quotes from him is: “What’s the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.”I did ask him via twitter if he would take part in a small interview either by direct messages or over skype, I am still awaiting a reply. He did however reply to a tweet of mine which Im quite pleased about. I’m not too both-ered that he didn’t reply to my interview tweet seeing as he’s probably recieving much better offers from other people . I will continue to watch his inspiring films and I am very thankful for the opportunity to research him as a project.

A SPIKE LEE JOINT!

INDEPENDENT STUDIESGD2

INDEPENDENT STUDIESGD2

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The previous set of photos are what form the majority of my independent studies sec-tions. I have always been very interested in film photography, in particularly the black and white film process. My dad passed down to me a Lubitel 166 twin lense reflex medium format camera which I believe he used when he was my age, ever since he gave it to me I have been slowly taking vari-ous photographs with it. Quite often the photos do not come out the way I thought, or hoped they would turn out but at the same time I never really seem to mind the rough aged look most of the pictures seem to possess. Some images come out crisp and clear depending on lighting conditions and if a tripod is used, Some come out very misty and rather dark but all in all it all adds character. I suppose that I never really set out to create a certain feel when shooting a roll of film, I just find certain things that might make a good well balanced photo-graph and shoot it. Through following this process I feel like I am always learning and go-ing through experimentation phases. I like to always include my latest photographs in my portfolios as I see them as

my hobby, I do not like to class them as strictly work only be-cause that might ruin the fun nature of photography as an art form. Recently I attended a sort of field trip with Brian, Melissa and some other stu-dents from our class, we went to visit a man called Terry Gill-ingham who is a British master of alternative film processing. He is a fascinating man who has such a deep knowledge in his subject that he is regarded as ‘the best’ in his field of work. We sat down and had a Q&A session for the first half of the day and for the second half he demonstrated how he prac-tices his art of alternative film processing. This for me was such a huge inspiration and boost of ideas, that all I wanted to do was go straight out and take more photos to experi-ment with! I think this would be a really interesting route to go down for independent stud-ies next term; as for this term it was a bit late to get things started however there a few more routes that I would quite like to follow aswell. The art of documentary film making has really caught my attention re-cently, I have been watching films and documentarys for as long as I can remember and

since making the London riot video of me and my friends experiences of the riot, I have been itching to make some sort of fly on the wall docu-mentary, or short film. A few weeks ago I happened to be walking through the East End around the Shoreditch area at about 6-7am, It was the oddest experience ive ever had of London because I had stumbled upon the black market. This is where poor and homeless people make a living, they sell all sorts of jum-ble on the streets alongside other market stall containing antiques and items of curios-ity, I purchased a medium for-mat camera for a fiver of an old antique expert. The sheer amount of character, nostal-gia and utter weirdness of all the people that occupy the markets in the twilight hour is literally something special. So I have made it my mission to try and capture the essence and peculiarity of this in a short or long fly on the wall documentary over the next few weeks and next term. I might have to film some of it in a secret fashion because this is the black market after-all and some of the charac-ters are really really sketchy.

L.A.BI attended all the lab sessions apart from one which I missed by accident, I think the lab is a really good way to motivate people even if they may not be interested in the speaker at first. That did happen to me infact, by the end of the talks I initially wasnt interested in, I was actually very inspired by the end.

The Hellicar & Lewis day was one of my best days in Uni for a long time, I really enjoyed the whole day and came away from it fully inspired. The sort of projects they work on seemed really cool and is something that I would love to get into perhaps when I finish UNI. I seem to be in a video made by Dan Jarvis which is cool which also featured on H&L’s web-site.

L.A.B

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This semester has been ex-tremely difficult, my motivation has been lacking somewhat since the very start of term. Its hard to say in words but I feel like the briefs have not been getting me excited, I am well aware that keeping up to date with work is totally upto myself and that of course this is meant to be like the real world where you may not like the brief you are working on. However I do think that having a testing, in-teresting brief would surely motivate me much more. I can not however just sit here and blame the briefs atall because I have found out the amount of work That can be achieved in just a few days can be quite substantial. At the very start of the semeseter we were set the shooting stars brief which I actually really liked, I en-joyed seeing everyone elses response to the brief too. The one thing I wasnt pleased with was having to show my one minute clip, but thats my own fault really, nonetheless looking back on the project as a whole I thoroughly enjoyed it. The making of the short film has really inspired me to carry on down that path of documenta-ry and fly on the wall style film making; as I mentioned before in my independent section, I intend to capture on video the amazing spectacle of the morning market in London. The next brief after that was The paper co task in which I initially wanted to choose vir-gin, but later switched to the government firesafety brief. For some reason my Motiva-tion had completely run out at this point and I was seriously lacking any urgency to get stuff done. I eventually sorted a fairley respectable design in aswer to the brief, unfortu-nately I was too late to actually

submit anything to the client in question. He did see my first design and to be hon-est I wouldnt blame him if he never wanted to see my de-signs again. I and shaq were difeinately not prepared and it showed, so that was a valua-ble lesson learnt. I would quite like to see what he thinks of my new design now though, I remember that he was drawn to the light switch idea. The one thing I would quite like to do now is to make a physical version of it and test it around the uni just to get some sort of closure on the project. Unfor-tunately I have left the chinese whispers brief as I completely forgot about trying to tackle it in my rush to complete every-thing, to me the brief didnt re-ally see captivating enough for me to follow up with a huge response and thats where I left it. One idea I did have for it was just to simply record my phone conversations with a few friends and see what mes-sage I ended up with, for some reason the brief didnt reall click with me, I thought it was slightly misplaced in the grand scheme of things. That was one thing that I would try and change for the following years of the course and that would be to design certain briefs that physically and conceptually link together with some sort of real sustinance behind it. I get annoyed and lose motivation easily when swapping arround between lots of little briefs that we seem to have eternity to do. The Lab was an intersting event for me, I thought that the whole week would kind of just sift along as a spur of the mo-ment guest speaker olympics,

In which we were the judges? The whole thing seemed a bit sudden and very untime-ly however I did still go to all the talks bar one which was le gun . Towards the end of the week Hellicar and Lewis came in to do a talk which completely threw me because I really loved the whole day, I thought that the talk they gave was interesting and kept me hooked onto their every story. The following workshop really worked aswell, it was gener-ally a great success with me and I had nothing bad to say about it atall. Perhaps in the future I might get work expe-rience with them as I seemed to be clicking into their way of thinking and providing them with good feasable ideas?! The next brief I remember was to research the name that you picked out of a hat, I thought that I was extremely lucky in picking Spike Lee as I was al-ready familair with most of his work however if I had picked someone totally unfamiliar and perhaps ‘boring’ then the whole brief would of been for-gotten completely. I didnt and still cant see where that fitted in conjunction with any of the other briefs but nonetheless I enjoyed my section of the brief and am now extremely familiar with alot of his work. Independent studies is miss-ing rather alot of work, I have no excuse for that atall and I know now that its actually very easy to just get up and do it! Ideas that are in circulation are the documentary making, alot more photography that I reallly enjoy and also a large format series of posters relating the 7 chakras to the different zones of London, that is however work in progress and I have nothing to show at this sec-ond .

There is one idea that has been floating around for quite a while now and that is to start a big independent practice project about the rise of tech-nology and how it seems to of trapped everyone into being quitely addicted to its warm radience. I myself am guilty of looking at my smartphone too much and off course staring at the internet until my eyes bleed , everyone is effected by tech-nology as it is all relativley new to the human kind. I would re-ally like to do a whole range of things such as 3d sculptures, manifestos, and a short film. For next semesters CS I would like to do technoculture as my next essay. In conclusion I feel like I definately need to get up and do alot more work, and also I need to find ways to be more motivated about work. I am happy with the bits of work I have produced but of course there is far more to be achieved.

EVALUATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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