EVALUATION

Bellavista Evaluation //4

Firstly, I started this brief really exited as I had never done a branding brief before and I wanted to really experiment with print and layout. I knew I wanted to base the restaurant on architecture and have it modern and stylized so I started off researching into modern architecture and sketching out tall buildings to get a feel of how I was going to design the deliverables. I came across Spanish architecture pretty much straight away and was very inspired by its form and simplicity and I knew that is how I wanted Bellavista to be like. I came across the Chapel in … It is designed by Spanish architecture firm S.M.A.O. Studio. Many people believe that these conditions are not compatible, but I really think that the Catholic Church is very forward looking and managed to combine tradition and modernity.

This unique and modern building located in Spain, in a place called Almaden. I was surprised by the uniqueness of the buildings shape; it is the result of folding paper.  So I started folding paper and used that as a key for my deliverables. I spent a lot of time choosing the colour of the restaurant, probably too much time actually and I firstly made the decision of having it red, green and white for an Italian quinine. However after my crit it was clear to me that have the Italian colours is a bit cliché and also it looked inelegant and shabby so I decided to change it more dignified colours which I am much happier with.

The layout of the menus took me a very long time as I wanted to get everything perfectly in line and at the start of doing this I wasn’t all that familiar with Indesign so I did things the long way like having the dish names all in separate type boxes and also having the prices in separate type box and lining them up by eye, however after a few sessions with print induction this helped me lay things out much better as I learned to use tabs and made sure all the text was same font and size ect. I knew from the start that I wanted the menu to be long and thin but I changed the design of it opening a few times. At first I wanted it to open up all complicated and delicate but I realised It was better to keep it simple as a menu needs to be very legible and straight forward so I just made it open like a book. I was really happy with the printing as I laminated the menus and I printed the inside on sugar paper, which I was happy with. Although I kept printing it wrong as I did so many moc ups and every one was either wrong size or double sided was upside down so I ended up just printing it on 2 separate sheets and sticking them together back to back.

I was also really happy with the prints of my business cards in the shape of logo and on high gloss stock, I think they look very elegant

After my crit with Amber she opened my mind into making interior for the restaurant and not just paper based deliverables, or even just moc them up so I found a really good website about a high class restaurant in Canada and all the photos were really big files so I used them for my context and fortunately it was very modern and stylised to match my interpretation of Bellavista. So I photoshped a lamp shade the same as my logo and also I made a door handle from Oak. This was the first time I was introduced to laser cutting and I really enjoyed it even though it took me along time to grasp it.

EVALUATION

Pluto music //2

Pluto music brief I started in work experience the summer just gone. It was supposed to be a really quick 1 day brief of designing a homepage for their website and I was a little worried as I had never designed a website before but I remembered from my web sessions with Simon, the easiest and best way to make a website is simply by finding an existing one that you like and copying the layout. So I stumbled on inthebasement.com which was a website showing music videos, it was very bold and stood out to me as it was black and red with white text so I worked on this. Pluto music had sent my placement a bunch of photographs from the studio and they were very nice photos I thought so I wanted to make them the main focus. The photos however were very bright and so much going on in them that I had to tone them down in Photoshop by desaturating some of the colours and making them a little subtler. After I had finished designing the home page, Design by Day were very pleased with it and they went on to design a short animation to it.

One of the things I wanted to do was to collaborate with someone and design our own ident video to put on it but I never did so that is one thing I regret. However I decided to make it into a bigger brief by designing promotional material like a booklet and business cards. I then made it bigger by designing a CD cover and flyer to make it a more established brief. I didn’t really experiment too much with ideas as I only decided to make it a bigger brief right near the end of submission so I didn’t get much chance to play around with ideas, I just thought of one and then stuck with it and this is an area where I can improve in the majority of my design.

As this was my final brief that I was working on, I noticed I became much more confident with layout and I started working a little more openly using grids and so not making everything be in a straight line that you read from left end of page to right. I think the reason for this is that Hierarchy became key and I started looking how to make the reader see things in order on a page without having it read top to bottom.

I was very unorganized with time management and at one point I had to do some printing on the laser printers and the quality of the colours made my design look very ugly and dirty with streaky lines and blurred letters so I decided to go to morning drop in and I could not have been happier with the colours. The orange was very bright and vivid and on gloss stock it looked very professional. However, I wanted to print the front of the magazine on thin gloss but I found out it isn’t possible to print double sided on gloss so I refrained to matt and the black went really scratchy. So if I had more time I would print it on much finer matt paper or perhaps it laminated so it wouldn’t wear and tear. However it is a free magazine so keeping the cost of print down was vital.

EVALUATION

Not just fleurons //5

This brief I started out knowing I wanted to design a typeface but it took me along time to actually think about it as at first I had no inspiration but after looking in tons of books and websights at different designs I found a website which is on my blog on a girl who designed the front cover of arts magazine and I really liked it as it was all hand rendered and was very detailed. So with this in mind I decided I want to makek a hand rendered type face, I had never done this before so it was something new as I don’t normally draw things by hand these days. So I started out by just drawing plants and features of flowers and I was going to design a typeface with lots of little plants making up the letters but I didn’t really like the design, thought it was a little too obvious designing a typeface for plants, using plants. So I started looking at petals ans started freely drawing spirals and petals and wavy lines and then I making all the shapes fit, and this is when I came up with what my typeface would look like.

I decided to use a serif font because I knew I wanted to keep the typeface simple and with a sans serif the legibility would be lowered, so I decided on Impact as it was bold and big and easy to read when covered with spirals.

At this point, I had a laser cutting induction so I knew I wanted to experiment with different materials and not just print onto paper. My original thought was to lut the letters out of acrylic but I wanted to keep it as environmentally friendly as possible.

Drawing out the letters was extremely time consuming however very theraputic. The first time I drew ut the whole alphabet I used a green fineliner but it wasn’t a very good pen and left a lot of bleed so when I scaned it in it wouldn’t live trace very well and I could not of gone over it as it would take far too long so I just drew each letter out again using the finest black fine liner I had, and I did a few tests and that appeared to scan a lot clearer.

After my crit with Fred he told me to add this brief with the typeface brief and produce another typeface so I had a set of 3. However, it was much easier said then done. I did make this into a book with the French fold but when it came to designing another typeface I just couldn’t think of anything new and I felt as though the typeface I was doing was rushed and ineffective, so I srapped that idea and made the ‘not just fleurons’ brief a separate brief again.

EVALUATION

Typeface //3

This brief has changed so many times. I firstly only started designing a typeface in the summer just for the fun of it, but it took so long and I carried it on when I started back in level 6 so I thought it would be a shame not to make it into a brief.  For this reason I haven’t documented it from the beginning so I am a little annoyed that I didn’t do this however I could have made this type much quicker as I did a lot of variations which I foolishly didn’t save and also it took so long as I re-legthened each line.

The letter I most struggled with were ‘S’ I could not make it look good, I tried so many different variations but it so curvy and awkward but I finally made a version I was happy with and stuck with it.

I was very happy with the resolution of the prints however when it came to binding the pages were too thick to put a pin through so I did the book in sections. I had 4 sets of 4 pages and sewed them together and then tied the ends of each bit of string to bind all the pages together. This all went well until it came to binding on the front and back cover. In my crit they told me to just sew it with the rest of the book so I did and the string snapped and a lot of pages came loose so it was all coming apart and I started knotting them all together so the end resolution was a bit of a disaster. However, I have learned from this and I know next time I am just going to drill a small hole through everything and use better string.

So I was quite disappointed with my final book. Also, if I were to make it again I would use thinner stock so you could turn the pages easier and it would look more professional while using the French fold technique.

My time management on this brief was very scattered as I kept leaving it for weeks and then coming back to it with new ideas. I would of like to of screen printed on the bags rather than just proposed it and same with posters but in the end the truth was I ran out of time and money. I learned organization is key.