Monthly Archives: July 2011

27/07/2011 · 9:25 pm

Time Out

So I’ve been a bit quiet recently, mainly because I don’t want to just blog for the sake of it. I haven’t been up to anything super exciting really, but I just did my last day at Accessorize today and then next week I move into my new Uni house so things are going to pick up hopefully. Just can’t wait to get back to Uni really!

So I’ve had some ‘time out’. By this I mean time away from technology. As a graphic design student & blogger I find myself spending a lot of time online because I’ll be tweeting, looking for inspiration, researching artists and just generally browsing to keep up with the design world. I get a bit carried away sometimes so I decided it was time to have a break from technology.

Monday & Tuesday were technology free for me. I went to Norwich with my Mum & sister and we enjoyed a lot of shopping(9 hours in total!) and also a trip to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. I visited SCVA for the first time when researching for my FMP at college. Then, I was mainly interested in the building itself as I theoretically planned to house my FMP European Design Festival at SCVA. This time it was all about the art though, with my sister taking particular interest in the work by Francis Bacon(something to do with her A-Level).

I was more interested in the gift shop to be honest. At the moment the SCVA is holding 2 photography focused exhibitions (John Hedgecoe and Dorothy Bohm) which I didn’t view but it meant that there were some photography and also typewriter (don’t understand why but not complaining!) themed goodies:

‘Your just my type’ – Cute little greetings card…

…and some typewriter print gift wrap which I almost bought but then remembered I am a student and £2 is not within my budget :(

Also, after a bit of a discussion with course mates earlier this week about our new reading list (How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul by Adrian Shaughnessy is my recommendation btw), I had a little flick through some design books…

Flicking through ‘Design: GPO Posters’ by Dr Paul Rennie reminded me of how great the likes of Edward McKnight Kauffer and Tom Eckersley really were without today’s Photoshop technology (coincidentally relating to my technology free time)! I loved looking at the GPO posters which were used by the General Post Office (GPO) from 1930-1970.

At the end of our visit I found a (set up) mini photography studio complete with a light box and  coloured acetate and newspaper images. A great way to get some really weird but interesting imagery:

I really miss being creative – Don’t know if I mentioned this before… I can’t wait to get back to Uni! I have been doing something else creative but I can’t reveal that just yet so watch this space!

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22/07/2011 · 9:07 pm

J’adore… Jessica Hische

If given the chance to be someone else for the day, without a doubt I would definitely choose to be Jessica Hische – I can’t begin to imagine the great things I could learn from being her for only one day!

If you don’t know who Jessica Hische is – shame on you and feast your eyes on these…

She has been the typographer of the moment since graduating, going on to work for Louise Fili and freelance from 2009 with an amazing portfolio and several side projects under her arm, appropriately decorated with this beautiful tattoo…

Jessica’s lettering is beautifully crafted, elegant, tasty and unique. The reason for her exploration, experiments and creation of typography she explains simply; none of the free fonts available online gave her the effects she wanted in her designs so she started drawing her own. It just makes so much sense – the job of a Graphic Designer is to solve a problem! As a Graphic Design student, I am so inspired by this message – if what you want isn’t available then create it!

Jessica’s first font, Buttermilk, is what it’s name suggests…. creamy, rich and tasty

You can purchase it from MyFonts

Deciding she wanted to set herself a challenge, Daily Drop Cap is one of Jessica’s side projects which has seen her produce a drop cap letter nearly everyday for a year, creating 12 alphabets (at least). Here are some of my fave letters:

Another of Jessica’s side projects is one that I think every design student should see – the ‘Should I work for free?‘ flowchart.

Jessica has enjoyed a lot of success so no it’s surprise she regularly receives emails from students asking for advice. In the current climate, the design industry is a competitive place to be. For some students it would seem that to get your foot in the door, you need to work for free. Jessica’s flowchart explores several situations that design creatives might find themselves in and answers them with logic.

Personally, I think that if someone thinks your work is good/ they like it enough, they will be willing to pay you. There are instances that working for free might be appropriate e.g. charities but at the end of the day your work is not only your passion, but what you live on and if a client values your work they will respect that.

What are your views?

Visit Jessica’s website (an appropriate address) for SO much more great design than what I have space to show here. I think she is incredibly talented and might even go as far as dubbing her the ‘Typography Queen’! She is definitely one to watch…

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11/07/2011 · 6:39 pm

A Bullet With My Name On It

… or there will be, come September for the Fresher’s issue!

You are looking at a member of the new 2011/2012 Bullet Magazine design team. Along with some other creatives I know (Sam Dowse, Dave Morris, Jake Townsend and Claire Kearns), I will be helping to design the University of Lincoln’s student magazine :)

I’m looking forward to making reading look pretty :)

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07/07/2011 · 12:55 pm

Date with Design Bridge

Ooooh the suspense since my last post!? Sorry, there was just way too much to fit into one post so I decided to break it in two!

After browsing some brilliant work at New Blood, I had a date with Design Bridge - using the word ‘date’ really loosely! :)

Dani, Bobbins and myself were really excited to be going to the 3pm talk, not only because Design Bridge are a super successful studio (alliteration!) but also employ Christian Bird who, like us, is an ex CoWA student! He came into college to help us with our FMP and it’s just really exciting and inspiring to see someone from our college be successful!

Before we set off to the Design Bridge studio, we met up with another ex CoWA student, Aaron Skipper who will be a 3rd year at Leeds College of Art in September. On the way to Design Bridge (a 45 minute trek across Shoreditch!!!!!) I had a little catch up with Aaron and got some handy advice – cheers Aaron! :)

And we arrived at the studio, greeted by the lovely Christian with bottles of Magners! Lovely! Christian introduced us to other members of the team and gave us a quick summary of what Design Bridge is all about.

The team gave us a lot of useful info and you know me, I took A LOT of notes, so I will try and summarise as best as I can:

Design Bridge is about having a ‘Great Idea’. Design Bridge’s ‘Great Ideas’ try to be: simple but bold, authentic to the brand, Engaging, enduring & memorable, focused & confident and brilliantly executed & crafted.

Design Bridge digs deep into the context of the brand/product by research and travel. They travel all over the world to get a feel for what the culture is like! (Sounds great!)

Being at Design Bridge isn’t ‘just a job’. The designers get inspired out of the studio, enjoy studio banter, celebrating birthdays etc together and really bond as a team. (Sounds like they have an AMAZING time if you ask me)

Design Bridge believe that it’s the message, not the medium that is important – an idea can be transferred to anything e.g. billboard, ipad app, sellotape etc

Design Bridge has several different sections which each specialise in an aspect of design and they all work together. (Means the best people for the job are chosen)

Design Bridge’s tips on how to become a Junior Designer -

Keep your portfolio simple with the best ideas at the start and end. Keep it clean and tidy, with no scruffy looking pages!

Again, keep your CV simple. You could use a clever idea to make you memorable & show off some personality e.g. one of the team said he included instructions on how to turn his CV into a paper aeroplane :)

Enter as many competitions as you can – it can’t hurt!

Aim to have 1 placement at the end of your 2nd year at Uni (at least) and make sure you’re interested, ask questions and get the most out of your time in industry! Also… make tea and be nice :)

When going for an interview make sure you are well prepared - do your research about where you are going, what they do, their history etc. Also have an opinion about their work/ current design work of the time so you can discuss it with them. Have personality – you will have sent them some of your work already so they will know what you are capable of but they want to see what you are like. Your work will get you in the door but your personality is what will get you the job, after all if you’re going to be working in their studio they need to like you so get over your nerves and be yourself!

Also for interviews, practice talking about your work. Most importantly, be confident and proud of your work because if you’re not going to sell yourself, who is?

Afterwards there was a Q&A session and then we got shown around some of the studio…

The Design Bridge studio is beautiful! I wish I’d had the balls to take more photos, but didn’t want to seem too creepy haha The spaces are are light and airy, organised and have nice little details like quotes on the walls – They have a beach set up in their reception at the mo(for the launch of their Mahiki Coconut bottle design)!! Now, I haven’t seen many design studios but a beach in the reception is pretty up there on the scale of coolness, right? (Just a thought – I’m thinking about doing a post on beautiful design studios… is that something you guys would like to see?) They definitely seem to have a great work hard, play hard ethic!

If Design Bridge sounds like the kinda place you would like to be designing, then the best way to get your foot out of the stream and into their studio seems to be by winning their Student Awards! I requested this screen printed Dogs Bollocks Awards 2011 poster earlier this year from Christian, but unfortunately the awards are only open to 3rd year students…

… still, it’s a nice poster.

I really enjoyed the Design Bridge talk, so thank you to all of the team for being so inspirational! You do an amazing job and also you either live in the studio or walk for 2 miles from the underground every day so well done to you :)

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05/07/2011 · 8:06 pm

D&AD New Blood 2011

Sooo on Friday I travelled down to LDN for the first day of D&AD’s New Blood 2011 festival with Dani and Bobbins! I was super excited and also really ‘feeling’ London for a change which is really unusual for me!

We had such a busy day, I was so drained and felt like I’d walked half of London… which I will explain later!

Here’s an attempt at nicely organising all of my souvenirs from my trip:

I didn’t pick up that much really because we kinda ran out of time :( As I mentioned in my previous post, we had booked in for the Design Bridge talk at 3pm. We didn’t find the Old Truman Brewery until about half 1, then after registering we didn’t really have that long to look around. There was so much great stuff to see!

We bumped into the 3rd years exhibiting at new blood who were on their way to a talk by The Partners. Seems I have earnt myself a nickname – ‘Graphics geek’ (cheers Taran) and Anna told me that a past Lincolner who now works for The Partners was talking about my blog! How great is that? I’m such a loser… I blushed HAHA

After flashing our wristbands, firstly we popped over to the University of Lincoln stall to show our support! Notice the arrow pointing out Best New Blood? Jennie Plant was scouted as being one of the best in show – what an achievement! Well done Jennie :)

Our tutor Chris Twigg  told us ‘I’ve been here since yesterday and I still haven’t seen everything!’ He was right, it was definitely impossible to see everything in one day unfortunately :( Sadly we only managed to get round to seeing like 5 stalls, but here is a tiny amount of what was on offer:  (btw if I haven’t credited but you know who it belongs to/credited wrong do let me know)

Over at Ravensbourne I found these striking 2012 Olympic postcards

and this cute summery poster for ‘Redfest 2011′

I got a bit snap happy in University College of Falmouth’s stall…

I really liked the style of Rebecca Fleming‘s 100 year sale spoof catalogue highlighting the sixth great animal extinction.

I absolutely loved Alexandra Allden‘s 100 years of Solitude cover – It’s beautiful and the overall winner of the Penguin Books competition 2011

Maja Håkenstad‘s Japan poster reminded me of earlier in the year when us Lincoln first years tried something similar… but hers was better!

and Dani admires her ‘Evoke’ Magazine work too…

… great imagery for front covers!

This identity for Product Library by Joe Moore caught my eye…

Gemma Hockey‘s student meals from scratch packaging was pretty cool…

and I liked Jane Harwood‘s cherry-less cherry bakewell idea – cute!

Wow that was a lot of work from Falmouth! I just want to point out that I have no ties to Falmouth, but was just really impressed with the work AND this cool typographic, printed effect poster…

Walking past Hereford College of the Arts, this really lovely typography pencil poster stood out …

… and then I recognised fashion blogger Lily Melrose and got a bit starstruck (which is really silly when I think about it now because if someone recognised me from my blog I would at first be embarrassed but then of course I’d love to have a little chat – so sorry Lily) haha I’d seen her work on her blog before and have admired her alphabet:

I also popped into University of Westminster’s stall to say hi to Alex Auld, who’s wooden log fluoro typography I love! Check it out! I really like his business card letters too :)

At Nottingham Trent I found some typographic beauties…

Lucinda Ireland‘s The Type House makes me sooooo jealous and I picked up one of her Girls like Type Too leaflets which is lovely and true :)

Dani had a chat with Sophie Garwell about her ISTD project to create a typographic branding for a restaurant which was so so so lovely…

And that is about all we got around to seeing really :(  Although here are some random things incase that work didn’t already put a smile on your face…

I did find it strange when I found the timetable on the back of the girl’s toilet door but then girls are good at multi-tasking I guess…

D&AD Student Awards 2013… and the Yellow Pencil goes to…

… it could happen :)

After seeing some great work, when it came to 3pm we were really looking forward to Design Bridge’s talk! To find out what happened…. you’ll just have to wait for my next post :)

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