Finally back to good old college and finally back to the old way of working full days after a long period of time off for Easter. Its been a really pleasant week back and I have genuinely enjoyed it, but the enjoyment has failed to hold me back from moving forward with my assignments, and if anything these two days have been much more productive than most of the Easter holiday.

Wednesday morning we were finally given our tutorial on creating the CD Packaging for our chosen albums. Its something that I couldn’t wait for and have been itching to get it started but had been told not to, simply because I would have done it wrong if I did start before, and to be honest that’s a fair comment. For a start I would have made it in CMYK and not in RGB, this to me seemed the more obvious way of going about the task and I still believe it is but apparently it is the wrong way of doing it.

There is a large amount of things that a designer needs to take into consideration when designing something for print. Most of which I was not aware of prior to Wednesday morning. When designing something for it is far too common for the designer to forget that the final product will actually need to be printed and the concentrate on making it look good on screen. Oblivious to the fact that the finished product will probably not look the same way as it was intended.

This week we were also required to bring in all our sketchbooks for a “Pre Assessment Check” and the thing that seemed to let me down mainly was not that I hadn’t done everything expected of me, but that I’d failed to evidence this. Seems a bit stupid but I bet I’m not the only one. The fact of the matter is that the course is evidence based and the examiner can’t mark what’s in my head but what I put on paper. Simple equation, No proof = No grade. Shame really because I have really now started to see my sketchbook as an important part of everyday study as well as an assessed piece of work. My second sketchbook is far superior to my first as a result of this.

The work I currently have will give me a pass grade but apparently a merit is not out of reach within the last three weeks, that’s definitely something that I will now try and rectify over the remaining period of time. There is not long left till deadline and I’m quietly confident that everything should be done and done to a reasonably high standard before the hand in date.

Finally, as part of the criteria for the “sketchblog” assignment we’re required to evidence some form of cultural reference. It seems like most of us are going for the cultural colour thing, so if anyone needs the cultural meanings of the colour green, here is a PDF so you can download and print a copy for yourself.

Colour Green - Fact sheet

Seen as the Easter holiday is rapidly coming to an end and considering my and many other peoples lack of activity on the Blog, I thought I would just write a post to update you on what I’ve been up to.

The first week really was a holiday and was great. No college work and no “work work” I was left to relax and enjoy my short bit of time off. Week two was back to work for me, Seen as I had a bit of time off college I saw it as an opportunity for me to earn some extra cash at work so that’s pretty much what week two was about, Working!

Finally the third week came along, and I knew that I had not really done as much as I could have over the holidays as far as college work was concerned. So I decided to devote the third week to college work.

I knew that there was still a lot to do and I really never knew where to start. I finished off all three of my business cards, and example of which is shown below. I’m really pleased with the final outcome of them. The letterhead and continuation sheet are also complete. I still have one or two of the corporate things to do, but I’m not too worried about that. Everything so far has a certain style and it shouldn’t be too hard to carry it over to the email signature etc...

The style guide is one of the biggest parts of the whole assignment, and I’m on the way to completing that as well. I have the template that I am going to use on all of the pages. Two of the pages are already finalised and the rest is just a case of filling in the blanks.

I’m really looking forward to starting college on Tuesday and seeing out the final part of the college year. Thanks for reading my Blog!

Hong Kong knows his Syllabus-ish

Sorry about the title, but it’s a long story to do with last weeks learning outcome problems and Marc confusion King Kong with Hong Kong. :)

Anyway, back to the matter at hand, the assignment. I have a final logo design chosen, which will now allow me to crack on with everything else, and there is a lot to crack on with. The corporate colours and probably the most important part of the entire assignment because it will determine the final look of almost every singe design piece we have to do. Bad corporate colours will ruin anything you do so the importance of them is paramount. Here is a small graphic that represents the corporate colours that I have chosen.

The logo as well will be used on almost everything so it has to be of a size and shape that can be easily adapted to any of the circumstances. Sometimes it may need to be very small and out of the way, like on the CD cover and other times it will have to act as the dominant feature like on the website or business card. Creating it as a vector graphic helped the cause a little, but all vector graphics are still not 100% visible when they are reduced to a significantly small size.

The logo I have created was designed on the theory that simplicity is the best. It’s a very simple but I think effective logo that incorporates the corporate colours well. The fact that it does not rely on small details is also very helpful for when it will be resized. Out of the many logo ideas that I had came up with and presented to the rest of the group this is the one that was most talked about, even though at the time it was not my personal favourite.

Some of the people who saw the logo thought that it was far too plan but fail to actually notice that a lot of thought had gone into its design. The alignment of the letters which cause the reflection on the ‘W’ and the ‘M’ is one consideration. Another is the specific alignment of the individual letters so that the ascender of the‘d’ joins smoothly with the letter ‘T’. The font was also thought about carefully, the fact that the letters ‘W and M’ have four lines rather that the standard three make them look almost like alien type icons, which fits in well with the whole “space and out of the world” feel. As is so often the case with real company’s logos, there is a lot more to them than “simply a font”.

The Logo!