Portfolio Project: Outcome 4

So my posters needed to go in something but I think buying a ready made box is not very me so I decided to make one myself. Bought red card and made a design loosely based on an archive box I already have and it turned out pretty well! A lot of measuring involved here and I’ll admit it sliiiightlyyy uneven in the spine but overall looks very neat. After testing it out, opening and closing it a few times I thought it might be too flimsy so I covered a piece of thicker card that I got from the printers after printing my portfolio posters in the red leftover card bits I had (thank god I bought 2 sheets) and glued it to the front and back and now it feels more stable.

Portfolio Project: Outcome 3

So went and bought really nice 200 gsm matte paper with the intention of printing the portfolio at uni to save money. However, the printers here decided to not be friendly. Tried three different ones and using different techniques for feeding the paper but none of them worked. If I printed it double sided from the start, it would rip the black ink off the paper and create a kind of starry night effect. If I printed it on one side first it would come out fine but after feeding the paper through one more time, it would rip the ink off again. One try also came out with a ghost image printed on top of it. Super weird. 

Portfolio Project: Development 3

Besides the online portfolio, there also needs to be a physical one which I at first thought I could make by simply printing off images of my work and put in a box that I could make myself. After a tutorial though, I realised it would be more fun to do something different as a physical portfolio can basically be whatever you want it to be as long as it shows your work. 

FMP: Development 3

The biggest struggle I have had when knitting is the fact that once you have made your loops, it’s done. It’s there. The design is in the piece and there is basically no way of changing it. When I usually design something I can fiddle about with it for the longest time but now I have to make decisions and stick with them. Not used to that! So moving on to the second poster I made way more sketches for the design than I did for the first one as I was making it.

Alterations to the design, Lisa 2018

FMP: Research 2

Deciding the theme for my project would be “light” but not yet knowing what to do with that, I looked into some artists that has worked with light like Picasso and his light drawings and Cerith Wyn Evans’s huge sculptural light installations that I went to see at Tate Britain last year and really liked. Picasso’s drawings/photographs are so amazing but making something similar without it feeling like I’m just copying would be really difficult.

Picasso drawing with light, Cerith Wyn Evans sculpture at Tate Britain

Portfolio Project: Research 1

For the new portfolio brief I have been looking at different websites of graphic design and illustration to see how other people tackle this as I have no idea where to start. Surprisingly, I realised quite quickly what I liked and didn’t so that’s good. For instance one thing that makes me close a site as soon as I open it is when the designer has images of work covering the whole screen. Don’t like that at all. It feels too shouty and I can’t wrap my head around what I am looking at because I have to turn my gaze all over the screen and don’t know what to focus on. For instance:

Portfolio research 1

No.

Walk the Line: Outcome 4

Due to time being too short before the hand in, I only managed to prepare 2 screens for print and then only actually print one of them. The result came out really nice though and I am very happy with it. However, I did realise that two of my designs might need some tweaking in terms of how big or small the halftone image is (the size of the dots I mean) because I did have some difficulties washing out the emulsion from the screen with the dots being so small. I decided I am going to redo all of them for the final hand in before the summer because I would really like to see them all screenprinted, it just makes the colours so much more vibrant and alive. Something that digital print cannot do- especially if you want that electric blue and red colour I am after which I took from my “child water” gif because I think that colour combination really works and looks great on a poster. I did try some other colours as well, more pastel-y ones because I have used that quite a lot in my gifs but I couldn’t get it to have the same kind of punch that I got with the vibrant red. I also thought of inverting the red and blue elements but that made my thread poster look like blood running down from the top. So I decided to leave the red background with blue objects for all of them as that was most effective and looked best. 

Work Placement: Research 1

One of my work placements will be creating a magazine for the visual communication department at The Cass. The only criteria it has, is that it needs to be Riso printed and Riso printing opens up for being creative with layering work and stuff but it’s also kind of restricting in terms of the colours we can use, the images that will look nice and just the over all production of it. It can’t be too complicated in terms of layering to get multi coloured images because we have to keep in mind the scale of everything and the numbers of masters used in creating only one page. It is going to be a huge project anyways so we have it make it manageable but with less means I think. So first course of action was that we as a group undertaking this placement sat down and found some inspiration of publications and Riso printed material and collected everything in a shared folder to kind of figure out what we all liked. 

Match and Mismatch: Outcome 4

Final outcome for Match and Mismatch are my gifs. I initially wanted to make something based on photographs of my hand manipulating the bench so it’s different lengths or using the postcards but I don’t think I could make that look refined enough and also because of time management I had to make priorities hah. So I tried manipulating my bench image in Photoshop instead to see where that got me. Making it digitally this way it would relate to the poster as well, with the solid black background so that’s a plus! 

Match and Mismatch: Outcome 3

I worked a lot with the poster outcome of this project. After all the tests I did here I thought I might be done but after realising I wanted to use the image of the stretched bench for my publication, I didn’t want it to be visible in the poster as well. I was also starting to change my mind about the placing of the text. It clashed with the white line at the bottom too much and just didn’t sit well. Before all this though, I changed the typeface. I had started using Helvetica when making the tests just to kind of use something, but also started to like it. However, I thought I should look at other typefaces too, to see if there was something else I could use to fit better. I had recently found Gibson and thought that looked nice and kind of similar to Avenir, but when I placed it on the poster I instantly hated the way the “e” looked. It looks too evil, like someone is laughing ominously and the poster is dark enough without having a evil looking “e” in there. So Gibson had to go. But! Then I found League Spartan! And it fit perfectly. I love the roundness of the “b” and the bold strokes of the ascenders. I also tried to make the text a bit wobbly to take away some of the static-ness but didn’t like it in the end so let that go.