From Ideas to the Evaluation.
When we got this project my first thought was that there wouldn’t be enough time, after having like 6 weeks to do one poster for the rain brief and this being part of that same module or whatever I thought it was unfair to only give us 2 weeks to do a poster, invites, signage and whatever else we choose to do but after a comment Tim made about the rain posters and that it was nice to see a lot of nice posters but there wasn’t many actually communicating the purpose of them well which would be fair to say of mine. So given the fact we only had 2 weeks for this one I decided to make sure I had an idea that I liked and that was relevant and in some way communicated what this show was about. And I spent the whole of the first week doing that, and in truth really struggled to find a name or a theme that said something about this show…I had some awful totally useless ones like ‘penguins crossing’ that I knew I could make look decent, interesting at least and then ideas I thought would work well when it came for things like the ambient marketing but I resisted the temptation to just do one of those and luckily one came to me that I was really happy with - strangely I’d resorted to writing bits of lyrics from the music I was listening to and seeing it I could adapt them someway, there’s a song on Kanye’s/Jay’z album ‘Murder to Excellence’ and thats where my idea came from. I thought the name really reflected what this show was about, everyone in the school of art and design regardless of what subject they do has to start somewhere and though they may use different techniques/tools go through the same design process so they’d start with an idea, work with it and make it something of excellence but then I think because it’s a graduate show the name applies a different level and that excellence has finally been achieved after years of study. Anyway enough about the name and that…
As I’ve said a few times on here the poster in my mind should be matt with all the copy glossy, I could then just have a solid black background and you’d see all the steps between the idea and excellence and the light reflected of it…I think that would of looked pretty cool and thats how I would of wanted the poster but given we only had 2 weeks and it took my ages to come up with the idea, I didn’t have enough time to sort this out. The main poster printed out OK, I’d of liked to taken them to a proper printers but I only finished them last night so had to settle for Staples and I’m pretty pleased with how it printed out…all the other stuff however was rubbish, I bought a load of photo paper to make the invitations and the rest of it and I couldn’t get the colours to print out how I wanted them too also on the invite the way it’s designed you have to be able to see more of the word so it makes sense as your open it so I had to make them lighter and that made them look a little bit nasty…wondering weather I should of gone with the red so it would work better for all the elements rather than thinking just about the poster.
I’m quite pleased with the idea for the invitations, I’d seen an invite for 111 that opened up and did something really cool so I wanted to do something along those lines…mine wasn’t anywhere near the standard they produced and theres probably much better ways of doing this and even though the printing isn’t that good and the grey colour realllllly starts to look awful on a more or less plain envelope - I really like the idea and think it starts to make the branding more dynamic. The signage and that…well if Im being honest is pretty hideous…I kept the same colours form the invites and poster but if you were to see loads of grey banners like those around an exhibition it’d start to look pretty hideous! I do like how the signs could read ‘from ideas to….fashion…advertising…etc’ which continues all the branding into the event. I think after I printed the logo out on it’s own to hand in I realised that I could stray away from the grey and just have the signs black against a white wall and would look much better and still stay true to the branding….Actually I’m going do that now!
And the sketchbook…scruffy as always, but in my defence I use the sketchbook for ideas, rough, rough ideas anything worth developing is done on a computer.
If I had come up with this idea earlier, or had a couple more weeks with this I think I could have made a much better job with it..developing the brand further, I think it’s got the potential to work as like flash banners on websites, motion pieces with all the steps being animated. Also as ambient marketing I thought it would look pretty cool to put LOADS of steps in-between the idea and excellence and have it as really tall banner or walkway to really hit home how much has gone into the exhibition and the work on show, would sort of be a way of showing the designers journey as say a shopper took theres form one side of the Trafford Centre to the other.
