Thursday 27 December 2012

The Birth of a Font: OUGD404

Poplar


Georgia

Zaphino

Helvetica Neue

Using the four typefaces shown above I started to experiment with creating new letterforms. I did this by dissecting each individual letter and swapping these around with each typeface. By doing this I began to discover new and interesting letter styles. Some outcomes were more successful than others. I documented this process and began to generate ideas for my five favourite outcomes/ own new fonts:





After carrying out a various range of experimentation I began to define my favourite new styles. I aimed to concentrate on a variety of different outcomes in order to show a clear differentiation between each style.

Script&Block
Zaphlar

Gothic&Block
Popetica

Gothic&Script
Helvetino

Roman&Gothic
Georgica

Script&Roman
Zaphigia


Variations of my new, hand-rendered letterforms on tracing paper: 
Experimenting with layers.


















Tuesday 11 December 2012

OUGD405 - The Importance of Research

10 reasons for research and why they are important
- Increases the quality and depth of an outcome
- Opens new pathways of ideas that may not have originally been considered
- Gets you in the mind frame of your subject, causing you to be more focused
- Time to engage and reflect on current ideas to help and develop new ones
- Improves and develops your own opinions and perspective on the topic
- Research is ongoing - there are endless things to discover
- Allows for experimentation and a broad perspective of the subject
- Documents your thought process, so it is easy to look back on/ re-visit previous research
- Gives an order/structure to a vast amount of information
- Process of elimination - enabling you to find the most successful outcome

10 methods you could use to generate a breadth of information:
- Questionnaires - collect qualitative and quantitative data
- Mind-maps/ spider-diagrams of own knowledge
- Mood boards - to create a visual representation of knowledge examples related to the subject
- Taking photographs to influence your individual design development
- Outside medias/ method of production
- Talk to a variety of people/ experts/ the general public to get a more valid, reliable, first-hand response
- Interviewing specific people related to the subject
- Creating prototypes to test ideas
- Visiting an exhibition to explore things such as trends and influences

Outcomes of carrying out these research methods:
- Statistics, opinions, comparisons, visual representations
- Documentation of process, aids to research, allows presentation, supports primary and secondary ideas
- Can aid primary, secondary and direct research to help visualise and justify work
- Visual research and ideas, research influences and inspiration
- Expands knowledge, creates broader ideas

Factors which can sometimes prevent effective research:
- Time - sometimes it can be difficult to find the time to carry out extensive research.
- Cost - This can be an issue due to not having enough money to carry out various idea tasks.

OUGD405 - Collect Categiorise, Communicate: Product

How to.. Get more people to recycle.



Our group was given the topic of recycling.We began by discussing the different existing menthods of recycling which we wee already aware of. As recycling is already a subject matter which most people are familiar with, we tried to think more specifically about areas of research which were less commonly taken into consideration. Our initial notes consisted of:

Charity shops
Vintage shops
Online recycling -  eg. Ebay, Freecycle
Online information resources - e.g. Recyclenow
Compost
Greenware Clothing
Recyclyable material
Non-recyclable material

From this list we were all given individual topics to extensively research. We were asked to produce three research boards: primary research, secondary research and a third showing the research which we found most interesting/effective.

My topic was online recycling.

As primary research I wanted to discover on average in a group of 32 students aged 18-21 how many people used ebay and if so why?.. The results showed that three quarters of this group used ebay because they were able to find good second-hand items at a low price. From this research I was able to get an idea of how popular online recycling methods such as ebay are.

As secondary research I moved away from ebay and began looking into online information resources such as recyclenow. This was useful for my research development as it gave a me a greater knowledge of how much information is accessible to the public and how easy this information is to find. Generally there were a vast amount of websites informing, advising and encouraging a variety of ways to recycle. However, one of the main things I began to notice was the repetitive manners in which the information was delivered/displayed. Each website followed the same, safe and predictable structure, causing my engagement and interest to fade quickly.

As further secondary research I began looking at various images on Pinterest and Tumblr. This was to see how other people have approached recycling in a more unusual manner. One of the main images that caught my attention was the imaginative uses of info graphics:












On friday we presented our research boards to the rest of the group. We then generated a new set of ideas based on what schemes we thought would be most interesting, unusual and beneficial to our target audience. During her research, Anisha looked into big brand recycling and discovered that although many companies were supporting recycling and making attempts to tackle this, they did not advertise this particularly well.

We found this topic most interesting and therefore began discussing various well-known brands who either already recycle and do not advertise well or do not approach recycle as much as they could do.

We decided to al focus on different brands and research specifically into they're recycling methods and advertising. I was given Coca-cola.


I placed a collection of different bottles and cans in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle and then took a series of photographs shown below: 


I then experimented with different adjustments of each layer in Photoshop.


Here I wanted to discover how effective it would be to combine my work with the existing Coca-Cola glass bottle.

Using the original bottle as a template, I deleted my image to fit within this exact shape. Although I was pleased with this outcome, I found the logo distracting. As I was aiming to achieve the resemblance of the bottle shape without the logo I decided to keep the shape of the glass bottle but remove this layer. 

Below is a screenshot of four of our final poster designs: left to right: Adidas, Nike, Apple & Coca-Cola

As an information source explaining the intentions of our products we generated a concertina-stlye leaflet. On one side was the five original logos and a short description explaining their involvement. On the other was our own recreated versions of these brands.






Final Concertina Front

Final Concertina Back