OUGD502 - Cost of Living

I decided to fill out the cost of living form to give me an idea of how much money I spend in an annual year and how much money I need to be earning in an average year to be at a happy stable place.

Physical Needs such as House, Rent, Food and Health mounts up to £8,741.

Then I added my safety and love and belonging needs to this to give a total of £9431.

A few holidays in the year including a two week holiday abroad would add another grand making the total £10, 431. 

Self Esteem and Social Needs add another £1414 to the equation making the total now £11, 845.

Finally, adding on Self Actualisation Needs along with Travel makes the grand total, £13, 625.

Adding on tax that we need to pay makes my total income required £23, 568. A good standard wage that I feel I should be acheving. From this, I can work out how much income and profit myself or business should be turning over each year in order to survive healthily.

To work out a daily rate of charge I need to add on my business expenses which for now, say £10,000. This brings my total to £33, 568. 

I now divide this by the number of working days in a year (which is roughly 233) to give me £144.07 which again is a fairly average amount to be expecting on a daily charge for design work. 

Creative Industries - Task Two

Make a list of 3 for each;

____My chosen areas of practice as of now

- Editorial
- Branding and Identity
- Typography

____My main Strengths as of now

- Contemporary
- Branding and Identity

- Versatility

____My identified weaknesses as of now

- Illustration

- Web Design

- 

____A set of main goals for this year___3 Wishes

- Carry on getting Internships at different places and better places 

- Win more Live / Competition Briefs - Hopefully D&AD or YCN

- Push areas of my work into Branding, Identity and Deisgn for Packaging. 

Republic - Week Two - Work Diary

____Fabric

Second week into my internship at Republic and I was asked to work on another in house Brand called 'Fabric'. Fabric is aimed at a younger audiences. Teenagers to Young Adults. Aztec Patterns and Illustrative T-shirts mixed with Snap Back Caps, Knits and Backpacks. It's a quite colourful Brand, here is the statement off the website:-



For effortless style opt for Fabric's menswear range which takes inspiration from Pro Green + Rizzle Kicks. It's slogan central this season in logo sweats + tees - accessorise with snap back caps + backpacks to complete the look. For a more layered Fabric Men's look mix shirts with bold aztec pattern knits + wear back with denim or colour pop chinos.

____Brief

My brief this week was to focus on illustration for t-shirt design. I was specifically given a few images as a starting point for research and was told to follow a similar style but put my own edge on it. They wanted to include 'characters' along with different symbols and items, quite randomly to create a pattern of illustrative elements. 

After brainstorming some ideas, we come to the conclusion of including a few of these items;

- All Seeing Eye

- Dollar Sign 

- Fast Food (Burger, Pizza, Drinks, Hot-Dogs)

- Keys

- Cigarettes

- Snap Back Caps

- Characters

- Etc Etc. 

Using this as a starting point, I began by sketching up a few ideas then mac-ing them up and finally put a few designs together which the head of menswear Simon seemed really impressed with....

From here, I was told to use the t-shirt templates to see how the design could be positioned on a t-shirt if it was gone on to be used as a print for sale...

This is the design that they seemed to like the best. 

Republic - Week One - Work Diary

Recently I started an internship working on the design team of leading UK fashion retailer's, Republic. I will be helping out on fridays working 9-5 on various different live briefs and ideas for them.

___Interview

I had to come in for an interview which was a lot more laid back than I first expected. I took in samples of some of my work as well as well as my online portfolio to give them a good feel about my work.

I talked through a couple of projects and they was particularly interested in my sketchbooks where I had lots of little initial ideas and collages that I had created from bringing different materials together. They seemed quite interested in some of my ideas and working on bringing them into their brand somehow. Eventually they asked for my availability which was Fridays and said I could come in and help out for as long as I wanted and they would pay me minimum wage which will cover all my expenses and everything so thats all good!

___Week One

Last Friday I was briefed on the project that I will be working on for now. It is their newest brand called 'Crafted' and is aimed at 16-24 year old males primarily. I was talked through the mood boards which was all about juxtaposing images that shouldn't work together and placing them with symbols and type to create bold graphics that represent the youth of today.

The mood boards consisted of street style and common themes were:-

- Dip Dye
- Studs
- A 'Fuck The World' attitude
- Youth Related Slogans
- Large Type
- Photographic Imagery
- Greek Gods
- Roman Numerals
- Skulls
- Roses
- Crucifix & 'X' Symbols
- The City / Lights
- Space / Nebular Themes
- Silhouettes

Originally I come up with some contemporary designs that I thought might look good on t-shirts but got told that these wasn't commercial enough so I had to rethink the way I was looking at the brand and where I wanted to go with it. There was rules I needed to stick to....




Here are a few current designs being sold under the in-house brand already which I can use as reference and a starting point. This is not my favoured style of design but it will make for some really good experience of the industry and hopefully give me chance to get some designs on sale in store.

Here are some of the designs that I come up with on the first day. They seemed to like the more 'commercial' look more than my initial contemporary look. At first it was hard to get into the mindset of designing for the public. It is understandable that an average male who shops at republic isn't going to be into contemporary graphic design so as soon as I got my head around that then it was easy for me to churn out a few designs for head of menswear Simon to have a look at. Here's a few selected concepts I was working on:-

They seemed pretty happy with these designs so we'll have to see where we progress with them in over the next few weeks.

Industrial Experience - Bezier Internship - Work Diary

    Integrated Retail Services.

Initial Impressions

I spent a week placement at the Bezier design agency up in Rose Wharf in Leeds. I feel that I got a lot of experience from the short time I spent there so felt that I should evaluate this so I can refer back to this in future as well as using this as a starting platform in my Intern experience. 

I was initially a little apprehensive about working with the professionals in the studio. It was my first experience in a working studio and wasn't really sure what would be asked of me. 

The general atmosphere in the studio was really quite laid back, even though there was a lot of hard working individuals. Everyone on the design team who I spoke to was very welcoming and open to give me vital tips on the industry. 

Tips

A great tip I received was from one of the Head Designers. He told me that it's important to get into different studios whether they be small, few people studios or bigger agencies like themselves or even a "shitty little printers". He said to just go and do it gives the best experience and helps you to determine where you can fit in the industry. 

Another tip came from the creative director, Chris. He asked me where I could see myself as a designer? In an agency or smaller studio. I generally thought that I would probably fit better in a larger acency. He also asked me if I see myself purely on the design side of things or the idea generation which was mainly his job. At the moment, I try to keep well on both sides, but I would love to see myself in a Creative Director position in the future. That would be a really good career move for me. 

Live Briefs

I also got to sit and speak to one of the head designers as he was working when I had a spare minute. He was working on quite a big brief for Morphy Richards and it was really useful to see how fast designers work in this kind of environment and how they interact with the companies and each other in order to get the job done. 

The creative Director, Chris, who was setting me briefs came up with the ideas for the Morphy Richards brief and he talked me through some of his thoughts and techniques around the brief. They was looking at basing the inspiration of the brief around the Great British Public's recent growing love for 'Baking'. So from this, I seen the stages of a large scale branding and advertising campaign taking shape for a new product by Morphy Richards that includes a Serrated Edge Blade Blender as well as a brand new Iron which uses 'Ion Technology'. This was entitled with the slogan 'Don't just Iron, Ion'. 

The next brief I was involved with was some work that the company was doing for Lynx's new fragrance, Apollo. The company was already involved in the re-brand of the product and they was now looking to create an interactive game for the Boots.com website to help promote the new release. 

I was involved in a  couple of meetings around what we might want to do for the target audience of young, student males. The first one was a brainstorm of games to see which direction we might want to take. This meeting involved Chris, the Creative Director and also two members of the game design team and was really useful to see how the conservations work around idea generation, working for certain target audiences and certain companies. 

I also come up with the initial mood boards and scamps for the games which used in a second meeting, proposing the idea to boots. I hope to see some sort of variation of our initial design stages become a reality over the next few months in preparation for the launch. 

I was also involved in some initial stages of a brief for Fox's Biscuits. They wanted to increase sales on their biscuits by doing an on-pack promotion and left the rest up to us. Me and the creative director, Chris initially come up with a few ideas that we could roll with. They wanted us to include their mascot, Vinny so our first idea was to win a cuddly toy of Vinny with selected packs. This could be entitled 'Win Vin'. I created a few different design sheets for this brief which are still in the process of early stages of the brief. 

We also looked at new media technologies in the form of Blippar. Blippar is an interactive application for the Iphone which uses the camera to create awesome new interactive experiences with an advert or product. We come up with various ideas of having the animation of the mascot coming alive on top of the buscuit packet. See below for a video on Blippar. 

Working on such an interesting brief opened by eyes to new technologies and how they are changing constantly and being used within the moden world today. It also showed me that this is functioning in the real world outside of the four walls of the studio and it's a really exciting prospect that we can be designing for these new medias. 

 Return 

I have been invited back to Bezier next time I have some time off from university. They said that they will be putting me on the pay roll with a small wage which is good of them. I would like to get more experience whenever I can so would definitely love to go back and work on other exciting briefs with them. 

Industrial Experience - Bezier Internship - Work Diary

Business Cards

Above is the design for the new Bezier business card which I was working on this morning. i altered the layout of the 'contact' side so that it was much more clean and professional. The address was hanging out before but i altered this so that the body copy all fit in one place.

i also had to change the Spot UV varnish on the back of the card. From the previous samples, the company felt that the varnish would work better if made full bleed to the edge, which is what I did. They also wanted the lines to be thicker because the logo was getting lost in the design. I corrected the mistakes and hopefully these will make for some swish business cards.




3D Christmas Card

Above is the initial design stages of the 3D christmas card. The card will be delivered flat in one peice and the clients will have to cut around the four sections following the simple instructons beside the peices. Once cut out, the peices can be tied together and hung as a decoration on their christmas trees.

The sections when tied together will form a Three Dimensional looking Silhouette of a Reindeer which will hang in seperate parts and therefore be moveable.

To link the card to the company Bezier, there will be a QR code on the back peice of the Reindeer. This will take the client to a moving showreel on a website which will be all about the services that are offered. The Reindeer itself will be the purple branded colour of Bezier to make the company stand out and keep consistant.

This very basic template can help clients interact with the business and could possibly leave a longer lasting message about the services we offer instead of a regular christmas card.

Lynx Apollo - Interactive Game

Over the last couple of days we have been brainstorming ideas for an interactive online game that will be hosted on the boots website to help promote the launch of the new Lynx Fragrance, Apollo. With the name, it's obvious to take a space theme throughout the whole brand, including these games. 

My job was to create the initial mood-boards and mock-ups for the games in time to take into a meeting about moving forward with solid ideas for the games which will be created over the next few months.

Mood Boards

The first mood board was research and ideas that we discussed in our first meeting that I was involved in with Chris, the Creative Director and two games designers. We talked about games that are addictive and 'The Helicopter Game' came up the most popular. We also looked at old 8-bit style games such as Asteroids, Space Invaders and Moon Lander. We then went on to talk about modern adaptations of these games such as 'Monkey Lander' as well as more puzzle style games with the introduction of 'Mario Space Galaxy' and 'Portal'.

I then created a mood board of my initial game scamps and explained our discussed ideas underneath each one. These will be used in the meeting on Friday which will be deciding to move forward with ideas for the final games which will be used on the Boots.com website for promotion. 

The last mood-board was on the ideas for prizes for the competition. Boots had commissioned for the first prize to be a virgin galactic flight to space which costs around 200,000,000 american dollars or 20,000 to go on the waiting lists. Smaller prizes include a Zero Gravity flight courtesy of 'Zero-G' and then money off the new Lynx Apollo range, Coupons and Lynx branded flight toys. 

Game Mock-Ups

Here are some really rough scamps I put together to help give a sense of the game so we can take it forward to proposal in the meeting on Friday. 

Th general idea we had was to split it into three games in a 'Lynx Apollo Arcade' style theme. The games would be based on old school classics such as Moon Lander and Asteroids. We also had the idea of using the different products for each game. 

For instance the Shampoo would be used as a rocket where you have to click to squirt our the gas and guide your way through the tricky course and up to the moon. 

The Asteroids style game would be using the shower gel to squirt out at the meteors in space and break them up and the Deodorant would be used for the Moon Lander style game, where you have to pick up the Lynx Space Girls and get back to the podium before you runout of gas.