Front and back covers again

I redesigned the sticker at the front so that it could be printed on the back in case the front sticker is removed. I've come up with several layouts for the back cover but I'm not sure which one is best just yet so I'll come back to these a bit later.

Second box mock up

I've made a net with accurate dimensions and want to do another mock up in which I figure out how to wrap the cockroach around successfully. I realised it's actually a lot simpler than I thought it would be, involving simple rotation of the limbs around the corner point onto the relevant top/bottom flaps:

I then printed it out at 75% scale and assembled it:

I think it's looking good; once I finalise the artwork/layout and find out what stock it needs to be printed on, I'm confident that it will turn out well. I also discovered when making this that I seem to have somehow accidentally made the top and bottom flaps unequal lengths. I will fix this for the next test.

Front and back covers

First quick design for a uniform back cover. I've also included a 5mm bleed all around this image as I think that's a sensible bleed to work with.

There's a lot of empty space which I'm not sure how to fill, but most of the time in small boxed set books there isn't usually a whole lot of information on their back, even a blurb may be pushing it (especially as the stories are so short).

I want to see if I can make a simpler version of the sticker to use as a logo for the back, so that if the sticker is removed from the front, people will still know it's from a 100th anniversary collection

The Stoker cover

Ideas for cover motif: 

-3 ship windows which illustrate the setting of the story, and mentioned once again at the end to remind the reader where the action took place

-The suitcase and umbrella, which are the catalyst for the protagonist's actions and events of the story.

I think using the suitcase and umbrella may be more suitable as it is similar to what I have done with "The Judgement" - featured an object that is key to the events taking place within the story. This will help unify the set.

I played around with several different shading options considering different light sources and no explicit light sources, and then decided to go with the scratchy gradient. I then realised that the image looked planted in the middle of nowhere, so gave it some context by adding a cast shadow. This is the final version:

OUIL503 Responsive Summative Evaluation

I think that Responsive has been a very interesting module to complete. Looking back at the initial thoughts we had towards the module as a group, such as completing briefs out of your comfort zone, making more finished, professional pieces of work and producing work for a variety of different formats, the module seems to have done just that for me.

I think that in terms of the development of skills, Responsive has been the most significant module I have completed thus far on the course. Thanks to the varied nature of the briefs I chose to enter, I was forced to adapt my methods of working to fit different purposes, and doing this came with its own set of skills I was required to refine. Most significant of the briefs which I found this with was the animated Vice ident, in which I had to prepare various assets for animation, use both After Effects' and Photoshop's key frame capabilities, and use sound editing software such as Adobe Audition to put it all together into a 15 second animation. I feel that throughout this brief I had a very professional workflow, completing it as fast and efficiently as I possible could have. The Syfy brief, despite giving me grief as I battled with my initial concept, was similarly useful as it introduced me to using key frames in Photoshop before importing anything into After Effects. It's a shame that my final resolutions for that brief were haphazardly put together in desperation to finally get it out of the way. This is made even more unfortunate by the fact that the Syfy brief was one of the few YCN briefs that was more open and not simply a dull re-branding/campaign brief.

With briefs like Secret 7" and "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit", I tried to develop skills in conceptual illustration which would be highly transferrable. My unsuccessfulness with Secret 7" is indicative of a lack of skill in that department, which I came to understand when I finally went to see the exhibition and saw the punchy and memorable nature that my designs lacked compared to the others. With "Oranges", I've created a front cover that I'm pleased with. What I enjoyed about this brief was the requirement of a Penguin template - when applied to your artwork it makes it look a lot more professional and your end resolution more rewarding to behold. Type also played a large part in the development of my final resolution and I feel like I developed some basic graphic design skills during my time with the brief.
Although it was only for one half of the brief, I explored conceptual illustration with the Filmdoo poster competition. I'm pleased with my design for "Waking Life" both conceptually and visually. As the last image I made for the module, I think it would be wise for me to take some of the visual approaches to image making I employed and use them in the future.

The collaborative brief was also enjoyable - brainstorming ideas and concepts with a partner was something I really enjoyed doing. I feel as though both me and Astrid influenced each other through our own illustrative styles and this pushed the work we made forward. Having both attended the photography re-induction workshop, we both developed skills in photographing any potential products we may need to in future.

Quick briefs such as the Hyde Park Picture House poster and Qwertee have also made me more confident in my ability to make work quickly, which is an invaluable skill to have when working professionally with multiple clients.

On the whole, I think that this module has been great for my learning as an image maker more than anything else. This was unexpected as I thought this module will yield experience more specific to dealing with live briefs and competitions; but I think that this may have come from the fact that at the end of the day, all the live briefs and competitions are just about making illustration, and that's what I placed focus on. I'm looking forward to taking everything I've learned from responsive this year and applying it to all work I produce from here on out.

Responsive Project Report

Responsive Studio Brief 2 - Collaborative Practice

The boards of my individual contributions to the collaborative practice brief fulfilled with Astrid.

Here are the final boards that were actually submitted

Responsive Studio Brief 1 - Individual Practice Brief

The YCN brief I fulfilled as part of the first part of Responsive

Here are the final boards that were actually submitted

Responsive Studio Brief 1 - Individual practice briefs

All other briefs fulfilled as part of Studio Brief 1:

21/04 Group tutorial

Main points from group tutorial for 505:

• Creating both book cover illustrations and inner illustrations doesn't particularly display any unique understanding of applied book illustrations. With this in mind and given the time remaining, there's no point in making inner illustrations
• Also I've been designing cover illustrations with paperback books in mind, yet I've been making full-colour inner illustrations. These two types of illustrations wouldn't really exist with each other unless I started to consider deluxe editions.
• Focus on the box set as the main product and begin to design other things around it - shop window displays, purchase bags, bookmarks, point of sale. A lot of these can just be mocked up.
• I forgot to make the spines and backs of the book covers, so start designing the covers with those in mind from the get-go.

Filmdoo part 2

For the second Filmdoo entry, I've chosen to make a poster for the film "Waking Life":

I'm thumbnailing this poster this time as I want to make a more conceptually driven image appropriate for the surreal nature of the film. 

Initially, I wanted to try and incorporate the title of the film into the design a bit more by having text that was on the pillow, wrinkled:

But I felt that as a whole this didn't look good and felt a bit awkward when placed with the rest of the composition. Therefore I settled on somewhat goofy handwritten type to match the weird art style of the film (which I also tried to capture somewhat with my colouring/shading/job)

I'm more pleased with this poster as an illustration than I am with the last one due to the more interesting concept and approach to image making I took. Not using outlines is also not something I usually do, so it's interesting to see how my work turned out given this restriction I placed on myself. One thing I'm not so pleased with is the arm - I'm not sure it looks like it's floating up and reaching for the bed. I figure if someone has seen the film, they'll be able to guess what's going on, but otherwise the hand probably could've been more carefully drawn.

Box set mock up

This is a rough mock up of the box set I plan to make. I've got the basic features in place, such as the title/author and cockroach illustration. I really like the idea of the cockroach's limbs wrapping around, but in reality, cockroach limbs aren't that long:

So I'll either have to exaggerate it a bit, or come up with a slightly different image of the cockroach. I'm also considering going with coloured pencil rather than entirely digital, as I really like the right cockroach in the above scan. If it doesn't look too out of place with the digital covers, then I'll go for it.

Another Qwertee

I made another design for Qwertee because seeing how fast I churned out the last one I thought I may as well.

This time I decided to base the design on the video game character Mega Man X. Fan art seems to do pretty well on Qwertee so I wonder if this will be more successful than my last.

https://www.qwertee.com/product/super-fighting-robot

Book box set

The idea is to compile all the books into a box set - it will be Metamorphosis-themed as that is the standout story in the collection.

The last few pics are ones that I took myself of a box set of manga that I own which I think looks nice and also a little slip that came with a DVD box set that I own. I think the slip is a nice idea but is mostly a Japanese thing as I've never seen it in any western DVD releases. If I can come up with something to put on it, it might be a nice thing to make. Perhaps it could include another blurb.

Cover design breakthrough

I wrote Kafka's name down cool so I decided I had to use it. I'm ditching the alternating colours idea and going for this standardized layout and visual style. I think these look good, especially when I apply the sticker to the corner. They feel a lot more symbolic and appropriate of being on the covers rather than just looking like the inner illustrations.

I'm going to stick with Gill Sans as it is a neutral font but I think can work in a serious tone for these images.
I still need to design spines and backs but I think that they will be mostly empty as the books will come in a box set and a lot of information can be put there.

Qwertee submission

I decided I wanted to do a Qwertee submission - since most of the successful submissions are fanart/pop culture, I decided to do a picture of fan favourite character Abed from the TV Series Community:

This was a really fun image to churn out and complete as it didn't take long but looks alright - at least good enough to be printed on a t-shirt in my opinion. Hopefully I can get better at making relatively nice looking images at similar speeds.

Hopefully it will get a few votes

https://www.qwertee.com/product/abed-nadir

The Judgement - inner illustration

I tweaked a few more colours and cropped it appropriately and it seems to look alright now - I think I was actually sticking too rigidly to the colour scheme I had picked out. I think a couple subtle differences and additions between the colours here and there might be a good thing in order to differentiate one object from another. This is what I am noticing in the illustration for "Children on the Road"

Also while copying over the illustration to another document I accidentally only copied the shading layer and this is what it looked like. I'm thinking this is a good visual style to go for for the cover illustrations as what I have done so far didn't really look punchy enough to be suited for a cover, as I mentioned in my last post as well

I re-did a cover drawing it with just shading and think it looks a lot more appropriate - I still need to tweak with layouts and such though. I also inverted the colours from before thinking maybe if I get every other book cover in inverted colours it might look cool to have the spines lined up in alternating colours.

Contemplation cover developments

Straight on handshake created too much space top and bottom of the composition - wasn't really suited to the cover format so I slanted it. Potentially changes the context of what is going on but I don't think it matters at this point. 

Third image includes sticker and a handwritten Kafka which I did by accident but would like to use throughout the covers.

However I feel that this image is too similar to the inner illustrations and wouldn't really go well as a cover - needs to be a visual distinction between the two.

Contemplation

Although I haven't finished "The Judgement", "Contemplation" actually comes first in the collection of short stories so I made a late start on it.

Since "Contemplation" is actually a collection of even shorter stories, I decided that I would pick one story to illustrate to represent the whole collection. Two stories that stuck out to me were "Children the Road" and "Plight of the Bachelor".

I started thumbnailing Plight of the Bachelor based on the final quote of the story: "And so it will be, save that it will be onself ... with a veritable head, and therefore a brow to smite with the flat of one's hand".
Then I read Children on the Road again which is a lot more rich in terms of  imagery of kids and their sense of adventure. I feel like it has the potential to stand out compared to the other illustrations if I tackle it instead.

Since I haven't heard back from Bill Bragg, I'm just deciding to design the illustrations at the same dimensions as my copy of the book, plus a 1.5cm border that could also act as a bleed. 

Additionally, having looked at Folio Society books, there appears to be no restrictions on the amount of colours permitted, which is handy. I've used another modified colour palette that I picked from the collection I posted earlier:

I need to re-draw the foreground boy using reference as he is proving troublesome to draw

Bill Bragg

I e-mailed Bill Bragg asking a couple questions that would help with my 505 module work. He hasn't replied yet but hopefully he will at some point.

Filmdoo movie poster competition

 

This is my entry for Filmdoo's movie poster competition. I decided to approach this brief in a very straightforward fashion - re-watch the film and come up with a simple image that sums up the film quickly. The film itself is very simple, focusing on the relationship between the father character and his daughter, so I decided to illustrate what I considered to be quite a touching moment that shows this.

Visually, I was experimenting with hard shading mixed with gradients and applying texture so the image wasn't too flat. I'm not sure how successful this was for the purpose of this poster, but it's a technique which I think creates some interesting effects, so I'm happy I tried it out.

Conceptually, maybe I didn't push the image far enough? If I had thumbnailed more before jumping right into it, I may have been able to whip up something more interesting. The lack of concept has me wanting to do another poster if I have time

100th anniversary sticker

As mentioned on my project proposal, 2015 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis". I think it would be a good idea to apply this celebration to my products.

If you google "100 year anniversary" then you find a lot of different labels, but most of the most successful ones in terms of design seem to be circular. I also think that the Pan MacMillan Alice sticker:

is well worth taking inspiration from since it's contemporary and looks good. (It's also a good guide in terms of dimensions - 40mm x 40mm

The early ideas mimicked the same sort of cockroach image I used for the cover I did a while ago, but I realized it would be silly to have that as a sticker on the cover on which it already exists so I developed the "100" type as cockroach legs before moving on to the circular design which was inspired by looking at reference imagery for cockroach legs for the previous design.

I noticed the MacMillan sticker had little juts coming out of the side and thought it might be more interesting to have the leg extending out of the sticker. It is so I've decided to use that as the final one.