Week 3: Welcome aboard the (love) train

Now entering my fourth week at Shillington it's hard to believe that I'm already a quarter of the way through the course. Since I neglected the blog last week I thought I'd give an update of week 3. Last week we began working in colour, which was exciting, but surprisingly hard to get in to full rhythm having worked solely in (shades of) black and white for two weeks.

More importantly we learnt how to customise paragraph styles in InDesign. This means that you can set fonts, size, type etc. to allocated types of text (e.g. to headings, sub headings, body copy) allowing you to amend fragmented groups of text in an entire document simultaneously and immediately: not only is this good practice but as you can imagine it saves publishers a hell of a lot of time when they're formatting large documents.

We made  use of these paragraph styles in our brief last week. The objective here was to make a DL brochure (A4 folded in to thirds) to help boost membership for the London Transport Museum. A bold type lock up would be the focus of the brochure, making use of simple graphic elements to compliment the typography.

Sketching out ideas

The work in progress

The brief required the text 'All aboard the new museum!' to be incorporated in to the type lock up. I wanted to use the typography to show movement towards the new museum.
Eureka!
Lurking deep in my subconscious, distant memories of GCSE biology delivered the perfect visual analogy to embody the text. You guessed it....sperm. Yes -what better way to symbolise a coming-of-togetherness as well as the pro-creation of new membership. Sadly, after having spent the best part of my day generating sperm, my teacher scathingly attacked my concept. "I'm not having sperm" he said. "It's not a sex museum" ... He wouldn't understand - I'm an artist, man. But that was that and indignantly I returned to the drawing board.

Thankfully hindsight is a wonderful thing. I'm glad I listened to my teacher with his many years of industry experience and disdain for sperm... Here's my final piece taken with my new and most excellent prime lens:

Less is More

It's no coincidence that in my two weeks at Shillington I've heard these three words intermittently passed around in conversation. In the early years of the discipline this belief was championed by the striking (yet simple) flair of the 1920s Bauhaus movement, which perfectly demonstrates why less is more in the realm of design.

I love the beautiful simplicity and the geometry in the work of graphic designer/ illustrator, Simon C Page, which is nostalgically reminiscent of the old penguin classics. I've plonked some of my favourites below, but his website is definitely worth checking out. 

London Underground

Alfred Leete, 1915

Having just moved out of London again, I'm genuinely relieved that I no longer have to use the overpriced, dirty, inefficient (etc.) transport hub that is the infamous tube. But let's not be too cynical; London's underground railway system is the oldest in the world, dating back to 1863... Wowzers. Eighteen Sixty Three. Man, that's really old.

Everything is relative, and you can probably imagine that the space-time compressing network of colourful, squiggly lines around London was nothing short of a marvel back in its heyday. 

To illustrate this great feat of engineering, the London Underground released this poster in 1915. This was designed by Alfred Leete (the dude that made the 'your country needs you' posters of Lord Kitchener). I love the bold modernist and simple design here - good alignment, balance and repetition.

I don't know what's more surprising: that anyone would bother investing in a motor vehicle that only reached 12 mph or that the tube reaches a whopping 24mph... which I might find easier to believe on the completion of the £10bn upgrade.

WWF Advertising

The other day in college we were given a brief to create a newspaper job listing for WWF. As we're still going over fundamental layouts and grid concepts it wasn't anything too sophisticated, but it did remind me of some WWF advertising I saw in my AIGA 2008 book a while back (Eric Cai Design & Co.).

(Copy text: If we could turn back the clock, what would you do for them?)

 

I'm all for advertising that carries a social or environmental message (and slightly less so for the type that makes you nag your mum for the disgusting banana flavoured cereal with the cool packaging and toy, only to hate the cereal and to be told you have to eat it all as a punishment for being a spoilt brat). The message here is so effective and largely because of the clock's temporal element, the piece tells a story.

Browsing the internet I also came across this WWF Billboard, that plays with the use of shadows... Without any intention these two pieces I found share concepts with those exhibited in the Whitworth Gallery (see yesterday's post). 

To that end, I've decided museums are a great place to find future inspiration.

The Whitworth Art Gallery

I now live about a 5 minute walk to the Whitworth Art Gallery. Quite shockingly, in all my time at university here I never once stepped in to the building; so on that note I thought that this would be a good opportunity to update my blog with some inspiration...

My time at Shillington College has already made me more attuned to good design, and so here it is - today's inspiration. Not in an exhibition, although it does look like a modernist oil panting, but in the museum's cafe.

Thinking about some core design principles I picked up this week I think the overall layout of the photo could just as easily have been composed using InDesign - there's strong contrast, alignment, and it's well balanced.

I don't think it's fair to say that the cafe was the most inspirational part of my visit to the Whitworth. This particular wall was littered with these butterflies, made complete by the shadows created by the wings jutting out of the wall. I like the playful use of the shadow.

And here we have... a framed pencil. If you look carefully you can see that the artist shaded in the length of the pencil in the various stages of its life. I like that. It tells a story.

Serious Jedi Tricks

I wonder if it's now too late in my life to become a Star Wars enthusiast... Most probably. That said, I came across these brilliant illustrative graphic design posters by Olly Moss, which I'd be happy to frame on my living room wall.

The silhouettes work well to frame the ethereal landscapes. I love the way the landscapes subtly accentuate the characters' features.