A little while back, the 2nd years were working on designs for the Penguin Book Cover Awards 2013 and it reminded me – I wanted to enter. Last year I submitted an entry for One flew the cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey. This year the brief was asking to design a cover for The big sleep by Raymond Chandler. It’s set in LA around the 1930s and is based around the adventures of private detective, Philip Marlowe.
The story is based around crime, murder, blackmail, money, pornography and backstabbing so it’s pretty dark and dodgy. For me, the main root of all the problems was money, dirty money. Now I’m pretty sure that defacing money is frowned upon, but in the name of art, ooops…
… needs be. It’s not real money though so it’s ok, right? Just a normal day, defacing some money and then I arranged it on a page:
It didn’t really turn out how I wanted, but it wasn’t the main part of the design. For the cover I wanted to create a camera with the money pouring out of the lens… so I did:
I stuck the money down but not completely flat, so that when I took the photo there would be shadows.
And here’s my final cover:
For the background of the blurb on the back cover I used a newspaper texture with jagged edging. On the front cover I added the title and other required information.
I should probably add that I basically did this in a day – the idea and the production. I know it’s not amazing but I just wanted to submit something, so I did! It was just a bit of fun
I’ve seen some great entries on Behance and cargo so good luck to everyone!
Yesterday marked the deadline for the Creative Roses Student Awards, so it’s now ok for me to post about it. About a month ago we were given the option to work on either a D&AD or YCN brief as well as undertaking the Creative Roses Pen Pals brief. We were given the option to work in pairs, so my partner in crime Emma & I teamed up.
I posted a hint of what we were producing here but I don’t think that showed enough of the journey. Emma is probably going to kill me, but here’s a few behind the scenes photos that we took along the way…
Remember, always keep your eyes on the road!
Emma taking our campaign strap line very seriously – making friends with the world/my fridge!
Shooting in our photography studio/my room…
… but we’ve always got time for a cheesy smile or two!
Crit time (with other work by Talveer & Harry and Lisa)…
…. and making final amendments:
Since first year I’ve avoided using the plotter because of a bad experience, but I decided it was about time I faced my fears…
… and it printed out!
Our final boards presenting our campaign…
… and a thumbs up means a job well done – all handed in and ready to be sent off! This was all done in a week by the way – we worked pretty hard!
Hope you enjoyed that insight – I’ll post more about our campaign soon. Fingers crossed the judges like our work!
Happy Triangle Friday! So yesterday was Valentines Day. Whatever your view (retail gimmick or romantic celebration), in the spirit of love, I found the perfect tutorial on Design & Paper which shows you how to make this:
Take some triangles…
… and make a cool heart Simple, effective and looks great in a frame!
You could use patterned paper, magazine cut outs or photos of that special someone to create a personal and original piece. And you don’t have to wait for 14th Feb 2014 to come around – this would make a great gift for birthdays, anniversaries or just because!
Get creative and let me see what you make! Hope you all have a great weekend, and remember if you spot anything triangular get in touch (read more here).
I haven’t posted anything work related for 2 weeks now – this is the downside to working on competition briefs! Due to competition etiquette, I can’t really post anything online, but I just wanted to show you that I’m keeping nice and busy. Today I’ve been making things out of paper. I love the work of Yulia Brodskaya and Julien Vallée and have wanted to give it a go myself for a while now. It’s a lot of fiddling about, but hopefully will be worth it in the end!
It’s that time of year again – the sun is out (kind of), the University year is over and the new grads are looking for jobs. The first stop? New Blood, of course! I have been excited about going to New Blood since this time last year – I just love everything about it!
This year, I went with my girls Emma, Amber and Lucy (the orange arm owner!) and we stayed in London for a couple of days.
It was in a different location to last year and bit cramped too as it was basically a pop up exhibition inside the Old Spitalfields Market. It was a bit disappointing because it meant that it was really busy and there was not really any space to stand back and look at the work. I kind of felt under pressure to move quickly from stand to stand so that I wasn’t in the way of everyone else – there was a lot of elbow touching! But anyway, what it lacked in space, it made up for in work:
I saw a lot of work which I recognised from Behance and competitions including the above entry for YCN’s Fedrigoni brief by Jonathan Shackleton. I was really surprised to not find it on the finalist list – It was a winner in my eyes!
A curious response to the 4’33″ istd brief by Megan Brooks of University College Falmouth:
See it in action here. Another great piece of work from the istd briefs – this time The Waitress by Jack Bardwell:
…simple and sophisticated!
Also found some great Penguin Book Award covers, including a shortlisted entry (far right) from Matthew Hall.
Staffordshire University’s stand grabbed a lot of attention thanks to Rebecca Clemson’s beautiful paper craft work:
and Melanie Milne’s typographic picnic set reminded me of the comedy carpet:
Yan-Jung Hsu of Edinburgh College of Art (PostGrad) had some interesting business cards – tracing paper laminated!? Caught my eye anyway…
… which leads on to interesting work by Yu-chiao Huang (also PostGrad of ECA). ‘Journey in Progress’ had interesting typographic experimentation:
Next door, at University of the West of England stand there were lots of nice things to look at:
Then, something caught my eye across the corridor:
Fresh Meat – where have I seen that before recently? Reminded me of my Limited Edition posters immediately!
Southampton Solent definitely won the prize for best free stuff (all will be revealed in next blog post)!
I hadn’t really heard a lot about DJCAD (University of Dundee) before last year, but they produce some great work! Really loved Kyle McPartlin‘s style…
… lots of clever layering to create interesting compositions and it was quite refreshing to see something just simply b&w too!
Kirsty Turpie‘s response to The Waitress (istd) left Lucy & I green with envy…
…and I was really not surprised it was awarded Best in New Blood – stunning work!
As always, the NUCA stand was jam packed with excellent work:
One piece that caught Emma’s (and my) eye was this innovative book/coffee cup design by Kerrie Scott.
We also loved Kerrie’s istd response to ‘The Waitress’:
I think this one was my favourite of ‘The Waitress’ work that we saw whilst at New Blood – wish I had done it!
I absolutely love the house illustrations and the menu style index:
Great typographic detailing!
Alison Bell of Gray’s Art School produced a beautiful 3D piece for the YCN Triumph brief:
and Ruth Wood‘s interactive poster was intriguing:
and lastly from Nottingham Trent, something you might recognise:
I featured Lun Yau’s Fedrigoni work in Triangle Friday #1 – check it out here.
Spotted this banner by Heleliis Tume (Cardiff School of Art & Design) as part of her ‘Thifty Designer challenge’…
… sounds right up my street!
And finally, just finishing on some interesting publications from Bath Spa University:
Above right – Rosie Cullen‘s National Trust work looked great.
And breathe… I definitely got to see a lot more work this year! Sorry if I have got anything wrong name/university/website wise. If I have, let me know and I will correct it.
I had a great time again and picked up a lot of good free things which I’m going to do a separate post about. It’s so scary to think that the next New Blood I go to I will be seeing the work of all my competition because I will be going into the big scary world! My fingers are crossed SO tightly that I will be lucky enough to exhibit at New Blood, but I know I will go and visit anyway even if I don’t get chosen for Lincoln’s stand!
Oh and I mentioned the last time I was in London the Troika V&A sign was broken, however:
Ben informed me it was up and running again and he was right =a happy Tasha!
