Category Archives: Sketchbook

28/09/2012 · 6:04 pm

Triangle Friday #14

Happy Tri Fri everyone! I am under the weather at the moment but writing this post is cheering me up. It’s amazing the effect that triangles can have, hey?

Today is the first Friday of my last year at University. I’ve been getting back into the swing of things this week, buying Graphic Design student essentials – printer ink, pens, glue etc and I’ve also been shopping for a notebook. My search for a perfect notebook continues, but I saw this and knew I had to share it:

How AWESOME is that?

It’s a limited edition triangular notebook designed by Tan Mavitan. It was available to buy from MoMA who had this to say about it:

‘MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, has proved that an average notebook doesn’t have to be square or rectangular. Designed by Tan Mavitan, the Triangle Notebook is available at MOMA’s Destination Istanbul collection. We are not sure if the Turks use triangle notebooks, but we would definitely love to!’

Unfortunately, as I said, it is a limited edition notebook and when I clicked to buy it I was met with this:

It’s no longer available :( I’m not sure if I could justify spending $17.95 (roughly £11) anyway, especially with my track record of notebooks:

I find it SO HARD to make the first mark in a notebook for fear of making a mistake. I like notebooks/sketchbooks to look ‘nice’ and structured – I don’t like starting a page without knowing what I’m going to put on it. That probably sounds a bit weird but I guess it’s just what happens when you get Graphic Designer OCD? I have to write/draw in pen otherwise I will never make a permanent mark – oh dear!

Does anyone own one of these amazing triangular notebooks? I’d love to see one being used. I don’t know what I would put in mine (if I had one – hypothetically speaking). I probably wouldn’t be able to put anything in it for fear of ruining it haha

Has something caught your tri-tention recently? I’d love to see it. Read more here and don’t forget to join in with #trianglefriday on twitter.

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29/06/2011 · 10:43 am

Public Transport

This isn’t a brilliant sketch but…

…just thought I would post it to show that I’m getting a bit braver about sketching in public. I did get some funny looks like ‘Why is that girl drawing the bus?’ but I need to keep practising my sketching! Although I find I’m better at drawing things with a lot of straight lines (buildings) I need to try and get better in general so have started taking my sketchbook places like a real designer! Haha The problem is that it takes me like half an hour to do a sketch, which was perfect for this bus journey but is a bit awkward in other situations haha

I’ve started a temps job at Accessorize (which is heaven), so I’m managing to fill my time up nicely :) Oh and also, I haven’t spoken about this yet because it was a bit touch and go on wether I was going…. but I’m going to D&AD’s New Blood on Friday!

If you know me, you will know how excited I get about yellow pencils – I’m SO excited! Dani, Bobbins and I are going to the Design Bridge talk at 3pm and hoping to bump into fellow ex-CoWA students Aaron Skipper and maybe Jake Pover if we’re lucky! If Christian Bird (who works at Design Bridge) is there too, 4 generations of CoWA will be present – that’s one big CoWA fest! Haha

I will be posting about my D&AD adventure to London so watch out for that at the weekend :)

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25/04/2011 · 9:34 pm

Hola Holiday!

It’s been a long while since I last blogged, the longest I think I have gone without posting since I started blogging actually! My excuse? I was mega busy with Uni work until the 14th, finishing off the last two units of first year and then preparing all of my work for digital submission – it took 15 hours to organise! Then next day I jetted off to Tenerife to catch the Island Escape cruise ship for some sun, sea and sangria(most of the canary islands’ first language is spanish)! I was quite happy to say Hello to a holiday!

I had been on a cruise in 2009 and despite the stereotype of cruises being for oldies, I really enjoyed myself! I didn’t enjoy myself as much this time, but I can’t complain – a holiday is a holiday! :)

There’s the Island Escape ship behind me! It’s tiny compared to the Cunard ship, Queen Elizabeth that was docked next to us in Madeira!

The weather was gorgeous most of the week, although I was quite disappointed to hear that it was actually really nice weather back home – just typical!

I walked past this shop in La Palma called Banana Computers, which ironically had Apple’s Ipad 2 in the window! Made me giggle a bit :)

Also in La Palma I found this beautiful, hand painted tile sign. There were quite a few of these around in a flower market in Madeira aswell, but a lot more detailed & illustrative.

Back on the ship I got my sketchbook out. I hadn’t sketched for a while so felt a bit rusty. I really need to pick this up a bit more over the summer…

As the ship docks in the port area, it wasn’t exactly the prettiest of views but still quite interesting.

When we docked in Madeira’s Funchal, the walk into the town was made a bit more interesting due to graffiti art lining the dock walls. I thought it was a great idea; quirky, colourful and a lasting record of the ships that have visited the port.

This was my favourite ‘Graphic Design’ of my trip. I’m not really a fan of the typography and branding(or lack of) in the Canaries. The culture is quite different to England, including the approach to Graphic Design. I would describe it  as Word Art-esque and cringeworthy! I understand that it’s purpose is to grab attention of tourists, not to please Graphic Designers so I tried my best to ignore it but I reckon my sister was probably fed up of me moaning about the use of Comic Sans and Mistral… nevermind! :)

After hunting for a postbox, I sent a postcard to Jack and photographed me posting it as proof – the post is proving to be a bit unreliable recently! He received it before he saw me Saturday afternoon – I’m impressed! That’s quicker than if I had sent it from England!

So that is a little insight into what I got upto on my travels. Oh did I mention that our flight back to England was delayed for 5 hours?!!!!! I always find myself saying this – there is no place like home. I love living in England and going abroad makes me appreciate how lucky we are – I’m glad to be back and eager to blog!

I still have a week left of the Easter Holidays so I have time to make up for the lack of posts this month, helped along by some Easter chocolate :)  Check back for the two final projects of my first year at University – Eeeek it went so fast!

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20/02/2011 · 4:24 am

Getting My Zine On

… a.k.a getting in the Zine mood!

I wish I could get paid to blog but I don’t think it’s really a job is it? Nevermind :)

Working on the most confusing part of the whole Zine process right now – Imposition/pagination! Scary words right there but put simply, page order – a lot harder than you think! I’ve made it a bit harder for myself too because my Zine is A6 size – A5 size open as a double spread. The majority of people in my class are doing an A5 size Zine which means that they can quite easily print on A4 and then fold it in half. I like a challenge… haha

With the subject of my Zine being Smoking, I have taken an Anti-Smoking voice due to my personal views. However, the brief required creating a narrative style so I have kind of divided 4 different sections in my Zine:
1. Starting smoking – the appealing factors
2. Realising the downsides
3. How it feels to quit/ Life post-smoking
and 4. My negative views on smoking.

I photocopied a selection of my page ideas to create the first draft of my Zine and arranged them into a Zine form…

To help get my head around printing the final thing, I’ve made a dummy copy Zine with page numbers…

…and drawn a layout grid so I just need to add the thumbnails of the pages and make sure I’ve got the right mix of pages and also in the right order! Keepin’ it simple! :)

I’ve also chosen my paper stock! On Thursday we had progress feedback sessions with the tutors and the points suggested by Chris included using more imagery & faces, having a proper ending, showing the difference between my voice & the smokers’ voices and to add some colour. I think that the best way to add some colour is to use coloured paper because I want to keep my type-llustrations simply black.

I have chosen a light yellow (due to the title of my Zine – Yellow Fingers – and also because it’s the kind of colour smoker’s teeth and nails go!) and a light grey (because it reminds me of the ash left by cigarettes) but I think I will still use some white paper too.

My Zine is going to end up being quite thick (48 sides in total) so I think I will be just sticking to a simple binding method like saddle stitch just to avoid anything going wrong! Haha

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· 2:32 am

Type-llustration

I just read back through my last post and realised…. I haven’t really explained the artistic direction of my Zine. (Before you start reading… I’m in a chatty mood so this is going to be a lot of writing! So get a coffee & get comfy!)

From my drawings you can get that I am going with what I like to call ‘Type-llustration’ – typographical illustration. It’s completely not me – I’m not an amazing illustrator(I can’t draw?) and I really can’t doodle spontaneously because I like to plan everything out first. So how did I get here? I don’t know… but I like it!

I actually really love this project – I chose smoking which I absolutely hate with a passion so have the fire behind me to really put the punch in! The only problem was that I found it so hard to put pencil to paper. This is because I was scared that it wasn’t going to turn out as well as I wanted – I had to force myself to use pen so that permanent marks were made! Once I get into it I absolutely love it and can run with it like the wind (bullseye – Toy Story reference for J.K :D ) but I keep having to challenge myself and get over that first hurdle!

The other night Bobbins, Danielle and Helen were over mine to do work at 8.30pm… I didn’t draw anything until 11.30pm! Just too scared to put marks down on paper incase it didn’t turn out perfect! I really need to get over this because it’s starting to affect my work – I’m leaving things until the last minute and then rushing them a bit. This is typical me. I did it at GCSE, A-Level and even College but thought I had got over it now I’m a big girl at Uni…. wrong! I guess it’s kinda like procrastination? I’ve got the vision & ideas but I’m being lazy/ too much of a girl to do it!

Anyway, so I think this Type-llustration is the new way forward for me!? I’m really enjoying making words/phrases/quotes into images – I love typography afterall! I have found some amazing examples of this kind of work here at Typostruction – absolutely AMAZING! This site will keep me amused for hours/ maybe even days haha It’s run by Chris Piascik who puts lots of examples of Typostruction (my ‘Type-llustration’) in one place but he also does his own stuff! And in the spirit/interest of the Zine project… I have been admiring his zines! They are basically everything that I wish mine could be! So jealous of his talent!

So anyway, I’ve decided that I’m going to carry on this even after the end of this project – I’m going to Paperchase and getting me a lovely little notebook so I can do some lusting over type (Type-llustration) more often! But first I should get my Zine finished, hey? I hope it turns out as amazing as I want it to…. Yellow Fingers crossed (Yellow Fingers is the name of my Zine – you heard it here first!)

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