Bad Manners, very poor manners indeed.

Recently, I have been working on a poster for the overly large, and large tongued band that is Bad Manners. And now I've been Ska'd for life. hahahahahahahahahahahahaha—I should be a comedian.

Anyway, It's been loads of fun designing this poster, and learning a bit more about the influences of Ska and the design style that came along with the genre.

As I already knew, Ska and Punk are quite closely linked—although I'm not completely sure why, so I decided the best way to tackle the poster was to work from what I already knew, so I made a hybrid of the two.

Once I had got a style and look, that I was happy with for the main structure of the image, I decided I would start by making the poster information almost exclusively out of sharpie markers and tippex; because there is nothing more punk than abusing office supplies. 

And then, I attacked it with a photocopier, like every good punk designer. And whilst operating the scanner, my good friend Nathan popped over to encourage me to mess with the settings and see what came out. After a short while I began making them into two-colour scans, which made some strange results—which were great but not suiting at all.

After all this, I looked at it and thought; "it's just too rough." What I wanted to get across is that the poster was made with bad manners, so I drew on his face and wrote over him as if there were to be little respect for him. But I felt the pens just made it too rough, that it didn't have the right impact; so once again I made a hybrid. This time of digital and manual construction and editing.

So this was the outcome, which I hope conveys that I made with poor manners, but also a respect for the culture and genre of the band, which had to of course include Buster Bloodvessle and his enormous tongue. So if anyone is thinking of going, I'll see you there as I'm planning on rocking out with my parents for one of the oddest Christmas holidays I've ever had.

Layouts a lá Finito

Honestly, I have no idea of what I wrote for the title. But I have finished my layouts project, which included photography and constant rules and grids in what seems like endless amounts of InDesign hell. Well it's not really hell, but my goodness, it's like a whole new world of structure and confusion.

All 36 in lovely un-viewable thumbnails

We started by being set a photography project, with some strict rules, set in groups of four. We had to have all four of us in every photo and each member in the group had a separate rule to stick to; mine was that we were not to include any faces. We were set to get 36 photos minimum, of which I got all mine in monochrome because I felt it was just a much nicer aesthetic and made it a little more challenging for me. As sometimes photography like this is tediously boring.

Once we had our images, we were then to use them to make layouts based on the ones we previously made from magazine cut outs—which was sort of the previous project but linked into this one.

I don't feel that I recreated some of the layouts to the same effect, but as a whole, I realise I am quite weak at editorial design and the things I created satisfied me and looked quite different from conventional layouts.

I got an alright grade, and I may just work back into them to make a stronger outcome, but whether I'll have the time or not is the question. We'll see children, we'll see!

Laying out the law.

A FECK TONNE O' LAYOUTS

Well it's now a post about layouts, and I'll be honest—I'm loving this project.

It is a very short project as we've been given from Monday 13th until Thursday 16th, to create a range of editorial layouts using only cut out from magazines and papers, so basically previous editorial layouts. We have been given 8 tasks that are very open and have a set of rules such as a number of images to use, a style to make it or the amount of body copy to use; therefore making challenging but very free to open interpretation.

This is my first editorial, and it isn't very strong but it was require that me made a dynamic and dramatic change in scale of two images. So as I love to try and inject a little humour into my work, I thought Del Boy would make a great out-of-scale model.

This second layout had almost the same rules as the one about but instead of a dramatic change in images, it this time had to be in type. And upon making ideas I came up with this structure that I liked, but it wasn't all that dramatic so I did what every boring designer does and flipped some text upside down. It's not exactly amazing but at the same time it does work.

This one I have little to say about because it is very experimental, but one of the main structure rules for this layout is that it had to have two images and one of the said images had to bleed off the page. I would re-do this one as I'm not fully happy about it, but I do like how the image was dissected.

For this one, you had to have a block of colour and one page had to be centred whilst the other had to be aligned right or left, so I chose to align to the left on the right hand page. I used the bright pink to contrast with the dull images of the left hang side and with the little snippets of text and image; I wanted to make it slightly punk like. Despite how rough this is, I do like it.

Ah, here we go! Slowly getting better!

For this layout we had to make contrasts of white space, as one page was required to have lots of white space and the other to have as little as possible. So with this one, as well as making a layout, I made a little political comment of "Money is inside everyone" and I tried to make an illusion of reduced white space on the right hand page by making many areas dark or black.

And as you may be able to tell, we are slowly getting better and this one is really one of my favourites as it's complete monochrome and still makes a strong effect. For this one we had to include 5 areas of slender columned body text and two of wider bodied text, an image and a headline, and to me this is definitely the best outcome I could of made for that specific task.

This one has a few rules that I won't go into detail about but the main one was that an image was to be repeated for dramatic effect—and without knowledge I went slightly Constructivism on it, and I feel it works really well. I am really happy with this layout and will definitely use it in the not so far future.

And here we are le' finale, the last task in this project! For this one we were asked to create a repeated letterform, so I font a condensed 'DIN' looking font in about 12pt and used and abused it on the photocopier. I quite like the contrast of colours and scale, so I'm rather happy with this also!

I find that I'm not very good at layouts and this project but helped me display this to myself but also help me improve, as I found my last four layouts were much stronger than the first four. I feel this is due to giving myself an overnight break between the the first four and second four and that I had learnt more about them by experience for the last ones. I tried my hardest to also not look at other examples of editorial design thus not to be influenced and just to work of what is bouncing around my head.

That pesky Motown and Soul night again!

Well, it has risen again!

I am once again posting another poster design for a Motown and Soul night at The Brickyard, which means only on thing—it's once again time for you to guess which famous face I've used this time.

The clues are as given: he is also known as Mr. Pitiful and often sits on docks, at the bay.

Who's that Pokémon?

But before I get too distracted, I'll let you know what it look bright and pink. Because super bright pink is more Rick James than it is Soul. I made this poster a strong contrast of bright pink, monochrome and yellow because although I rather liked my previous poster, I found that it just sort of blended into the background.

So although it worked for it's purpose, I wanted to make a poster that grabbed you face and smashed it against your head (with beauty; or at least good typography). And I feel this can convey the message it needs to whilst standing out from the crowd and being a big bright poster of soul goodness.

I'd like to share something with you.

Well, it's a post frenzy at the moment, and here's another for the collection.
Recently my friend James has been designing a lot of posters and design dedicated to good causes and his political views – of which I strongly believe in too – including a list from Arthritis awareness, to promoting a change to views towards mental health.

But one that stood out for me; for it's message, combined with it's beautiful design was one of the posters designed to promote anti-homophobia. James has this message close to his heart, not because he is homosexual, but because he and myself have friends struggling through the grudges of homophobia.

Kudos to James Reay.

I'm just making this post because his poster is for awareness, and being on two blogs is twice as much publicity for the cause—but also because I think it's beautiful design and I'd like it on my blog too.

The creation of a logo—and almost self-branding

T'other day I created a logo for myself on the basis of a sharp idea popping into my head, and having a bit of free time. I previously had told myself that I didn't need a logo because I'm not really far enough in the industry to have to brand myself for recognition and I also thought that it was just a tad egotistically to have a logo for myself – which makes little sense I know – but I finally gave in and made one for myself.

I basically had a strong idea in my head, so I just grabbed the sketch book and threw out a few simple ideas before settling on the one I was most happy with. I was just using a brush pen, because I feel that would emulate my style best (as it it my current obsession).

I wanted the logo to display me without being an irrelevant image or just a scribble—even though it is inspired by a scribble because besides me being a perfectionist, I don't make anything super clean-cut because it's not my style.

In a lovely yellow, to display the variety of colours I could use it in.

The logo itself is created by the amalgamation of all my initials "VJW" because I feel nothing describes me better than the title I have, my name. Which I have recently began to embrace, as I used to hate my name as a younger person; but now, I love it's 'uniqueness' and I feel it really helps describe me as a person.

The logo I've made is not because I needed one, but it was more of a case of having a good idea and not wanting to loose it. So through a little progression, it turned into a logo for myself, which I am happy to potentially creating branding on.

But one reason for creating and digitizing this logo, is that I was inspired by the designer of The Cure EP's and LP's by instead of writing contact information, he just left an image of a tea cup as a form of branding and recognition.

So as a whole, I rather like my new logo and will try to incorporate in into my work and blog.
I hope this overly extensive blog post has help illustrate that.

Smack My Course Up

So, these past two weeks I embarked on my first project of the second year; which was entitled "Show What You Know" so that is exactly what I did.

Instead of just making a poster to tell my tutors what I learnt, through typography or an info-graphic, I decided it would be best to make a pastiche of a Prodigy classic.

So this week, Smack my Bitch Up became Smack my Course Up—which resulted in my ripping things, throwing darts, starting small scale fires and printing Chip Kidd many, many times.

I strapped a GoPro to my head, and ran around my house and campus making a fool of myself.

So I've uploaded it to YouTube in terrible quality for your viewing pleasure, so I hope you like colourful and violent pixels.

I will upload a better quality version when After Effects stops messing me around.

I wanted to display what I learnt this year, and I just wanted to make it different. So I thought about what I have learnt this year, and what I found most important. After a small conclusion I realised that one of my biggest lessons, was learning about and getting interested in music, so I let that take me.

So if it isn't made obvious in the video some of the points I wanted get across were that I never had any toilet paper or milk, I got into record collecting and Jazz, I never had enough money and developed a healthy hatred for my tutor Tony (not really).

Also a big thank you to the lovely Maureen, Rachael Smith, Anne of the loveliest art shop in the world, the lovely ladies of the cafeteria and Tony Peart for unknowing being a temporary dart board.

Teasing you is just getting boring now.

So today, I'm making final edits, and I thought I'd make the very last teaser of the terrible teaser series.
I can see see it in your eyes, you are super excited.

So to make you want it, here is Sophie being bullied by me wearing a GoPro.

Get under the table, where you belong! Vermin!

The second worst teaser in the history of the world.

Yup, it's me again—for your second instalment of terrible teasers. This time it actually includes a clip of what is in the music video though!

This time you get the charming and ever so graceful Rachael Smith, swearing at me as I bother her trying to read Deadpool. This isn't really unusual because I bother her a lot, but it's hella fun with a GoPro because I get to publicly embarrass her through the internet now!

#SorryIMadeYouIntoPromotionalMaterial

The worst teaser in the history of Mankind.

I am currently in creation of a re-make of the music video for "The Prodigy - Smack My Bitch Up", in which I am re-creating it to display a variety of things I learnt over the previous year.
I will stress, that it will not contain nearly as much nudity of prolific drug usage as the original; as I'm really not that exciting. 

This ranges from the over-usage of tea for stress relate to the love of Chip Kidd, and this lovely little teaser will give you nearly no idea of what it will actually look like. And until about 2 days from now, that's all your getting—so deal with it.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. Let's not fight again.