Design experiments, college and just-for-fun projects

SingingResources.com

SingingResources.com aims to become the number one site for singers on the web. Comprising a directory of singing related links, forums for singers to meet and help one another and classified ads, I hope to build an attractive and popular community site.

Signs and Symbols

This project was designed to engage our abilities to reduce words and ideas to graphical representations in black and white. The words here were taken from the sentence: "The dwarf was very proud of his collection of toys, tools and tropical fish".

Visual research and boiling the subject down to its essence without being too oblique were key aspects of this project.

Random Words

This project was concerned with creating a bookcover or CD from ideas generated from a list of unrelated words. The words I selected at random were"Sap green, Alfred Hitchcock, 48, horehound and Siberia".

This was a very open brief which allowed lots of room for interpretation. I tried to concentrate on making something which was visually impressive and interesting, slick and passble at a professional standard.

Experimental Type

In this project we were asked to create letterforms from our choice of typeface, using a material suggested by the origin of the typeface and or its form and shapes.

My chosen font - Gotham - was inspired by the vernacular signage in New York, which is why I decided to use apples as the basis of my work. I carved letters into them, out of them, and used nail varnish and stensils to decorate them.

Magazine Design

This project began with an analysis of the Swiss School of graphic design and centered around page layout. We were asked to use the principles we had learned from close observation of International Typographic Style in designing a range of experimental magazine spreads.

I chose to invent a ficticious magazine called "The Beachcomber" and I used my own nature photography to create backgrounds, inset images and inspire colourschemes.

Photo Booth

In this project we were asked to demonstrate proficiency in using Photoshop to create photomontages by placing ourselves into impossible or interesting scenarios.

Inspired by a drawing in Marshall McLuhan's Mechanical Bride, I developed the theme of being a "forces sweetheart". The idea was to create images which my imaginary boyfriend would carry with him into battle. I sourced photographs of women contemporary with first and second world wars, Vietnam and Iraq. Photoshopping myself into the images was a relatively fast and satisfying process. I then selected an authentic period frame for each image.

Meanings & Messages

For this piece we were asked to create some print advertising for a product of our choice, generating the whole concept from inital idea to final layout in InDesign.

I chose to create print ads for Your Accompanist, selling the benefits of their downloadable MP3 accompaniment tracks. I devised the slogan 'it's like having a pianist in your pocket', and sourcing images from stock libraries, I played with the different ways that people might choose to rehearse if they could rehearse anytime, anywhere: in the bath, on the loo, on the beach. I tried to make the advert memorable and funny, focusing on introducing the brand.