More Kayak Apparel Designs

Kayak Club Proposals…

As a nice side project to my current Uni work. The Falmouth Students Kayak Club, of which I am a part of, has asked me to design some new hoodies for the members..

Here are some hoodie and shirt ideas…

A Post for Jimbo

A loyal companion, Senor James Phillips has requested that he acquire a copy of my trigonometric colour wheel iPhone wallpaper.

Well here it is buddy, and here’s to not getting beaten up in Rem’s..

Tut Yea!

Unit 1: Graphic Design on Steroids

Apologies for the sheer length of this post, but i felt it would be more appropriate to show all the Unit 1 projects as a whole, rather than in their separate (weekly based) entities.

So here we are, 6 weeks in and were already onto Unit 2. Bring it on!
The first five weeks has seen everyone been set weekly briefs of varied and substantial nature. From typography to infography. The lecturers here at falmouth also felt the need to set us two separate briefs on top of the weekly ones to really ‘get the creative blood pumping’ before we hit up the bigger briefs later in the year.

Now, to keep things simple. I’m going to pitch each brief and then describe and display my ideas for every one.

Week 1: Mnemonic (Design Process)

The baptism of fire for our 3 years at Falmouth was a project on mnemonics.
For those of you who don’t know what mnemonics are, in short, they are techniques or methods used to aid memory, whether it be through pictures or tongue-twisting rhymes. From this we were to create a mnemonic to help us remember the design process given to us by the lecturers which went a little like this;

1. Identifying Needs
2. Information Gathering
3. Analysis
4. Idea Generation
5. Design Proposal
6. Evaluation

This was interesting as the outcomes everyone created were always going to be very personal with each person preferring different methods to aid there memory. My main idea was to work with the initials of each step to create words to then use in memorable phrases, for example; Identifying Needs becomes ‘IN’ which i then implemented in the phrase ‘IN god we trust’ or Information Gathering becomes ‘IG’ which was used in ‘IGnorance is bliss’.

I found i was having a lot of success with philosophical phrases or sayings of a similar nature so then decided to put my mnemonics into a bible format, due to the sayings religious/philosophical context.

I was also fortunate to have my bible placed into the aptly named, ‘tut glass wardrobe’.

Week 2/Hangover Week: Alphabet & Numbers (Research Process)

If your wondering why this week has also been called hangover week, the mention of it being the week after the last weekend of freshers’, will do the explaining for me…

Nevertheless, moving onto our second brief, we had now been set the challenge to create a final outcome working from a letter or number that we had been given by our lecturers. Fortunately for me, I’d been gifted the number 3 (god must’ve helped those with horrible choices). With the emphasis of this project meant to be on research, i.e, how much we looked into the letters/numbers to create an interesting and abstract outcome. researching into the the number three, I found the obvious things. the three amigos/bears/wishes. but also found more interesting things like, how white light is made up of three colours, Red, Green & Blue. Just for the record it turns out is a very un-magic number in some countries (just think ‘threes a crowd’ with more fatal consequences). However with the idea of three colours making white, i blended this idea with the theme of trigonometry i.e, triangles (3 sided if you didn’t notice), and created this trigonometric colour wheel with cool results…

Week 3: Typography/Grids

Third brief in and now we’re onto the very painful and difficult subject of grids. I’ve always had an understanding of the importance of grids in design, but never before have i fully predicted just how unbelievably complex it is to master. And so our mission for this project was to take a block of an article on Josef Müller-Brockmann (a famous swiss graphic designer) and present it in an interesting legible way using our own created grid in Indesign. Below is my result;

Week 4: Thinking Visually

The idea of this is last project of the unit was to get us creating idea that communicated what we wanted visually, without using any text to aid us. We had three choices of brief;

1. Describing our route from desk to home (halls)
2. Explain a cake recipe
3. Exhibit what we have in our wardrobes

Obviously we had to make our ideas interesting in some way rather than taking them too literally. After small experiments into each brief I concluded that option 1 was best! I experimented with several ideas, including a audial map of my route home, digitizing important steps of the journey i.e sound of bedroom door being unlocked or the hiss of the busses breaks. Also with the idea of homing pigeon tagging, applying a small coloured ring around a finger and photographing it in various stage of the journey like handing the bus ticket over to the driver. However, I eventually decided upon the idea of star mapping, using the stars to guide my way home like the navy vessels of old. This felt poignant having lived in Portsmouth and now Falmouth, two famous british docklands. After tracking my route back one night with the help from an iphone app I had all the information I needed and produced my poster. I was then struck upon some genius from one of my lecturers who suggested I replaced the words winter, spring, summer, autumn, which I’d placed to help show how the stars would appear differently in the sky in different seasons, with symbols to represent them, to match the cryptic methods I had used to suggest taking ‘so-many’ steps towards whatever star constellation to get home. I solved this by replacing the words with symbols that represented the earth and the suns positions during each season. Here is the finished item.

Feel free to leave any comments/feedback on any of these designs in the blog comments below…

And so it begins…

Here i am… Uni life! Three weeks in and I’m already two projects down on my graphic design course and poisoned from several nights of heavy drinking. Did i mention i also had an ear infection at some point in there as well?..

But enough! i created this blog for the purpose of exhibiting my university projects and also as a means of some kind of online portfolio and memory bank where i can go back and revisit ideas for my own benefit.

So welcome! and enjoy what i have to show and say…