Tag Archives: University

08/02/2013 · 10:35 am

Because you’re worth it!

Yesterday I had the final crit of my D&AD project with Zoe. About half way through, Barrie popped in. He said he had been interviewing a prospective student and asked them ‘Why Lincoln?’. They replied ‘Because of Natasha Nuttall’s blog’.

I couldn’t believe it! I began writing my blog when I was at college to help be more critical of my own work and engage in the design world. Since then, it has grown into a lot more than that – I have followers that look forward to Tri Fri posts every week. It’s a weird feeling for me, but a great one. I would still blog even if I was only talking to myself, but knowing that some people are reading (and hopefully enjoying) what I have to say is a great buzz.

It’s such a great feeling to think that by just blogging I have inspired someone to study Graphic Design at University, and Lincoln is a great choice. Emma & I have helped out with a couple of open days and it was great to speak to students and parents, to share our experiences and our passion for our course.

Graphic Design courses are famously known as being a lot of hard work and very stressful, but I can honestly say that I have absolutely LOVED my time at Lincoln and it already makes me sad to think that I’ll be leaving in a couple of months! I was editing my CV on Monday (which I hadn’t touched since 1st year) and I’d kind of forgotten how much I’ve achieved in the past 3 years. It wasn’t until I saw it all it written on paper, that it really hit me!

To the person who had the interview with Barrie – Thanks, yesterday I had the biggest smile! I hope it went well and fingers crossed that you will come to Lincoln and maybe even carry on the blogging legacy? Get in touch!

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10/11/2012 · 7:40 pm

Meeting the future

Just thought I would do a quick post about why I’ve been at Uni on a Saturday. Emma & I have been helping out with the University of Lincoln open days for a couple of weeks now. We both love to talk and we both love our course, so I guess we are the perfect pair to talk to all of the fresh faces that could be the next generation of Lincoln Graphic Design students.

Whilst our tutors give the more formal talk, Emma & I are there to give the student perspective – so we talk about accommodation, budgeting for printing, supermarkets, drawing 100 teapots and skulls, Nandos, taking your Grandparents for a cuppa up Steep Hill (voted the best street in Britain!) & Lincoln’s endless supply of nightclubs! (We do talk about other bits & bobs but I guess you will just have to visit an open day to find out! :P )

As students, we know that freebies are very important, so we like to give out a little newspaper which was produced by students a few years ago:

…Emma, modelling them! I’ve also been giving my business card out too!

I thought it would be a good idea to give them out so that the students can visit my blog and look back to September 2012 (when I was a fresher) and see my Lincoln journey over the past 3 years. So if you are reading this because you came to an open day, Hello & I hope we didn’t sounds too cheesy/talk too much!

If you visited the open day today, we gave you an exclusive showing of our video from the latest group magazine project. We are so good to you guys haha :

(This photo wasn’t taken when showing it to prospective students – Emma’s not always this cheesy ha)

I’ve really enjoyed talking to people and have heard some interesting stories and opinions about Lincoln and other Universities. Hopefully Emma & I have helped some students who are finding it hard to make that all important decision and pick the right University for them. I know that Lincoln isn’t going to be the right place for everyone, but I hope that we  showed people the great things that Lincoln GD has to offer.

Now back to work! The deadline is Thursday…

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26/04/2011 · 12:37 am

The Beauty of Books – Final Cover

It feels a long time since my first post about this project which I am going to say is because I was spending time on the project rather than blogging about it. This is a good thing as I usually procrastinate by blogging rather than doing work but I have learnt to force myself to get into work even when I don’t feel like it, not that it was needed for this project so much. I really enjoyed this project!

My approach to the series design was to keep it simple and constrained. I worshipped the grid system, trying to align everything perfectly.

I did struggle to choose a colour theme. I tried different colours for different symbolisms: light pink(female), magenta(passion), lilac(suffragettes and feminism), red(anger) but went with red in the end because I thought the girly colours were not representative of the tone of the book. My choice of a typographic approach with a symbol incorporated would be able to be transferred to other utopian titles to form ‘The Utopian Series’. I chose Futura as the typeface because it is pointy and sharp like the novel’s tone and its O is a circle which helped the female gender symbol to be slotted within the text… and because it’s modern, angular and I just like it. :)

By rotating the title, the design is referring to being on the ‘edge’ and adding a dynamic feel, different from the usual, horizontal text.

I tried to keep my cover minimalist, clean and tidy with a lot of space. Some might say it’s a boring cover for a book with a lot of graphic imagery but I wanted to create something clever rather than busy, and hope that the design is understood as that.

For the inside pages (I realise you can’t see the outline of the pages, so you will have to use your imagination, sorry!) I continued with simplistic approach…

… with small details continued – the female gender symbol in the chapter title (which would only feature in the chapters that have a O in of course!).

What do you think?

   

Before                                                               After

Which do you prefer? I had some positive feedback from classmates, but haven’t had my mark back yet so hoping for the best :)
I have to wait at least 2 weeks until I will get my official mark so plenty of time for any opinions from you!

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05/02/2011 · 11:00 am

Boom Boom Sketch

Yesterday we got all sketchy in class with some old format technology! Old Macs, Typewriters, Cameras, Floppy Disks, Stereos… the list goes on! Armed with lots of pens, pencils and paints we flexed our creative muscles:

As an 80′s child (for 6 days) I decided to take the Neon approach for my stereo…

Then in groups of 3 we produced a big drawing, starting from the same point but in each of our own different drawing styles. On my team….

…. Amy, Bobbins and Myself.

And the finished piece….

Dirty drum and bass (Amy) control centre (Bobbins) and 80s electro (Me)!

You can see some of my classmates working  here at the new course site!

No idea what this new project is heading towards but it will be interesting…

Oh also got feedback for my Magazine Design yesterday – 63! :) I did some sums and my average for Semester A is 62! That’s a 2:1 so I’m pretty happy with that, YAY!

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21/01/2011 · 7:35 pm

Type Tart Cards – Stop Staring At My Tittles!

Over the christmas holiday we were set a project to produce an A6 type tart card. The type tart card has already been celebrated by Wallpaper magazine, St Bride’s Library and Type, where they asked designers to embrace their inner type tart and create a card. In total, 450 cards were produced and displayed at the KK Outlet in London between 22 – 29 June 2009 – I wish I could have gone because there are some really clever creations and funny type innuendo!

We were asked to focus on selling the typeface’s features rather than just being overly sexual but a bit of cheekiness/ subtle hints are all part of the fun!

Here are some of my favourite outcomes….

I decided to present the Constantia card as my final for the critique because I thought it was the one that answered the brief the best – any Graphic Designer/Typographer should get the tittles reference! If not, shame on you! :)  Overall I think it went down quite well, although as per usual I over-talked in my presentation! Haha

My tutor suggested that if I wanted to improve it further, I should think about the text hierarchy and focus more on the phrase ‘Stop staring at my tittles’ so I have reduced the size of the rest of the text.

Opinions? This brief was a good bit of fun – different but definitely fun!

Also, something quite unexpected happened when we received our grades back  from Semester A. I got 68% for Motor Badges (2% off a 1st!!!) and 60%(2:1!!!) for Animation giving me a total of 64% for the Visual Expression unit so far this year…. which is a 2:1 and only 6% off a 1st! Eeeek :) A lot more than I had expected! Still waiting on grades from Graphic Design unit (Film Poster and Magazine Design) and CVP unit(ESSAY!!!)…. but now I need to keep up the hard work!

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