PROJECT 7: "These Are A Few..." Photography

In this task I had to investigate personal things that mattered to myself as a person and a designer, then analysis this information and represent it through a piece of design. I began by listing six ‘things’ that I felt mattered to me most and couldn't imagine my life without. The list comprised of my favourite book series 'The Dark Tower', the Grant Museum of Zoology, the 38/19 bus route from the West End to Islington (where I live), a mug I received from a friend on my birthday, my favourite restaurant 'Le Mercury', and my frount door to represent my home.

After choosing these things I realised that next step was to step back and look at my choices and what they said about me and my basic culture and values. Comic, design, creativity, fantasy, ‘non-pretentiousness’ backed up by a respect for learning, knowledge and new information broke down into the basic themes. I decided to use photography for this project because I wanted to capture direct images of my items as cool, interesting subjects, and compiled these photos in a way that made sure the final design succeeded in further maintaining these values. The image series is minimal but also clear, creative and communicates well at the same time.

Looking at my work on this project, I think that as a designer I have an identity that comes out of my taste within culture. Upon analysing my list I believe my 'taste' can be broken down into two sections:

A) comic, literature, creativity, fantasy, sci-fi, a sub-culture of comic fantasy and literature

B) my value placed on information, history, knowledge.

PROJECT 6: "What is Graphic Design?" Photobook demo page and Content Text

The next assignment was called "What is Graphic Design?", in which we were asked what our notion of graphic design was, and how important the idea and synthesis - as well as the craftsmanship of making work - in the act of creativity. We then had to create our own product to answer those questions and defined what we considered Graphic Design to be.

In this project I once again worked with Lavinia, who came up with the idea of us designing books for young children to teach them how to read. These books would be personalised and focus on the child themselves, by having one blank for the parent to put a photo of their child on while the opposing page described the child completing a task, with another blank space for the child's name. We decided this series would consist of five photobooks, each one focusing on going to the park, the zoo, the shops, dinnertime and going to bed. Together we also researched information online about different ways children learn about speech, language and communication, with ages varying from 6 months to five years old.

The example page looks admittedly plain as I wanted to make space for Lavinia's illustrations, and had been trying to balance this project with other university work. But I was surprisingly proud of writing the content for the books because, despite it just being nine sentences per book, it took a lot of effort to write as I had to carefully think about how the routine would work for a small child as well as how to phrase it appropriately. Overall this was a very interesting assignment that helped me improve my skills in teamwork, research and writing.

PROJECT 5: "Game Play" Logo, Playmat and Box design

For the first project of our second term we had to invent or reinvent a computer-free game or sport to be played by two or more people. We had to consider what type of game it could be - whether the rules involved Strategy, Competition, Good Karma etc - the structure in which it would be played out, as well as factors related to location and age. We were supposed to work in groups of at least four people but I ended up working as a duo with Lavinia, who created the game concept while I worked on the physical design for the game itself.

'Granny Knickers' was based on a game Lavinia made up and plays with her niece, which consists of the following instructions...

1. One person rolls on the floor.
2. The others have to jump over them while shouting out "Granny's knickers!"
3. If they get knocked down, they have to join the person rolling on the floor and try to get the others down.
4. Whoever is knocked down or left standing wins.

We both decided to further the game idea by promoting it as a physical skill game similar to Twister, which I then researched along with some other Milton Bradley games in order to look at their graphics and make designs that visually resembled them. I designed various versions of the logo and the playmat, making subtle adjustments like swapping over different shades of orange to see which looked best. The playmat originally had a very plain appearance and consisted of four orange circles next to a large blue rectangle, but Lavinia suggested adding cartoon drawings of knickers on the playmat and box cover to make the game more recognisable.

This was definitely one of my favourite assignments to work on as it was creative, the research process was interesting, and I managed to complete some fun and visually appealing designs with the help of one of my friends.