Penguin brief – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
A few months ago we were given the new penguin brief as our project, and with book design being one of my favourite elements of design I was over the moon. We were asked to create a magazine of the book (as shown below), typeset the first two chapters and then create to book covers, one digital and one non digital. Straight away I was looking forward to the challenge.
For my digital cover, I wanted it to look very mysterious and intrigue the viewer with bold imagery and unfussy type.
For my Non digital, I wanted to feature two designs in one using a fold over book jacket. The cover represents a more clear version of how a character (Nurse Ratched) wants things to be and then the under layer shows how it really is.
Book jacket.
ISTD
As well as doing the D&AD brief, I also produced work to be submitted to ISTD (click here for more information on The International Society of Typographic Designers).
My brief was to re-invent a story called The Waitress by Jack Zipes.
The first time I read this story I fell in love with it and was really excited for this project so got stuck in. The story contained a lot of meaning and represnted the tale of a more self centred girl at the start turning into a very selfless person who has a chair stuck to her back. The chair and the waitress work together to help those who cant walk and bring them together at a resturant until they are no longer needed.
In the story, the chair is described as being ‘light as a feather’ so this was the angle I wanted to focus on.
Because this was a typography project I needed type to lead the design and I felt that having it flow naturally was important, so my chosen format was a concertina book. To keep everything tied together nicely, a second concertina was placed on the back to highlight colour in the design and also keep it all on one side so the reader would not have to turn the booklet over as I felt this would be a break in the story. The 2 pieces where then thread bound together within the folds.
Even though this was a typography project the images were still important to me and I needed them to stand strong so they could enhance the text and bring everything together. To create this, I photographed the feathers to bring in all of the delicate flourishes. As I mentioned earlier the story is about the chair and the waitress helping others and this is what my imagery represents, therefore the feather slowly fades out of the design showing how they were no longer needed. I did this by plucking out the feather strands inbetween each photograph.
It was printed on water colour card to give the design more life.
Here are some beauty shots of my final design.
Tea or coffee?
Recently I completed a project for D&AD to create a supplement for the typographic circle’s magazine, Circular. We had to base it around 3 designers and my chosen ones were Morag Myerscough, Graham Fink and Antony Burrill. I decided to take mine from a more personal angle so sent round some emails asking them such questions as tea or coffee. This gave them a more light hearted style.
I chose a french fold for my designs as I wanted the content to be a strong focus, this meant the imagery could be placed within the french fold to give the design another element. Each also featured their own colour scheme and font to link to their personalities and work. Here are some beauty shots of the finished booklets which I stab bound.
The 3 booklets where then packaged together in a belly band
Rubber stamps
Figured it was about time I got back to blogging after a very hectic few weeks! A couple of weeks ago we had Stephen Fowler come in and give us a workshop on stamp making. His work was beautiful to look at and very well crafted, I couldn’t believe how much detail he could get onto a rubber stamp.
The process included carving out our chosen image onto the stamp, which after getting the hang of it I found it to be quite enjoyable! I decided to start with quite a simple image so decided to do a moustache.
Stephen demonstrating 
Examples of different work
Me and Sunjay looking cheesy!
Busy busy busy… :)
Recently I have been so busy with competition briefs I haven’t had the chance to post anything but I will be posting new work up shortly (although this will be restricted due to competition entry)
In the mean time please read my friend Natasha’s blog to find out about our recent trip to Nottingham, where we visited A14 a lovely print finishing company.
Poster exhibition
Recently I posted up work from my limited edition brief so this is a post dedicated to the exhibition that my tutors, Philippa and Barrie very kindly set up for us to showcase some of the work from the brief. Because this project was non digital it was a great opportunity to really experiment with different print making styles. So here is a selection of some of the great work featured
Mine is featured on the left with Tasha’s on the right
Design day in London
Following the recent picture I put up, I felt it was finally time I blogged about it. To really get started with our 2nd term and to inspire us me and few friends (Amber, Emma and Tash) decided to take a very spontaneous trip to London. When I say spontaneous I mean, we literally booked the night before which to me is the best way to to it as it made it an even more exciting day out with just enough time to plan!
This whole trip came from our two new briefs of both ISTD and D&AD so we were excited to go along and get excited and visit all the design areas. Our first stop was the design museum.
A very excitable Tasha!
It was great looking around the shop and seeing all kinds of different styles of books and publications from pop-outs to postcard style books. Not always the best idea for my budget though!
After mastering the tube and map system our next stop was Magma books.
Of course I couldn’t leave with buying anything, It was great looking round the shop and seeing how things were design and how the different formats worked. A big help for our latest D&AD project!
Luckily they were nice enough to let us take pictures around the shop.
I was really interested in the fold out style books and Slanted Magazine which was varnished & pearlescent…definitely inspired me to look at print techniques for my briefs! And of course it would be rude not to buy.
Heres a picture of Emma holding the gold one, this also came in 3 different colour-ways.
Our next stop was the YCN shop and it was great to have an Artwords near by.
The YCN shop, opposite was great to look around and explore, myself and Amber loved the folding out poster books of the locations around the world.
I was excited to finally get my hands on the latest edition of IDN magazine and loved the varnished cover. I also treated myself to an issue of Elephant magazine.
After a great day in London we couldn’t leave without a visit to the Hard Rock Cafe, a very pricey visit!
We all left to a very sleepy train ride home back to lincoln.
London
Design trip to London!
Limited edition
For one of my recent projects, we were given a newspaper article and asked to form an opinion on it. Mine was a piece taken from the independent about how Royal Mail are dealing with christmas post and overcoming the issues that they had last year. We then had to design 6 limited edition posters to state are opinion with one limitation, that they had to be hand made and non digital. I was really excited for this project as it meant heading down to the print room and testing out all different methods from embossing to wood cut.
Final design.
I felt that the money spent to fix the issue was a positive thing so this is what i wanted to reflect in my poster. Although hard to see in the photograph i used a reflective metallic card to represent quality and luxury which i felt linked to the money. I also looked into forms of stamp marks, and got a personalised stamp made up from the lincoln stamp company stating 15,000,000 well spent to place in the corner with a christmas stamp to link everything together. I then spray painted the words as i felt screen printing did not look right on the design and was the best way to get my desired look.
Penguin brief – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Taken down due to competition requirements. Will be back up shortly
