Magicseaweed t-shirt design

http://store.magicseaweed.com/MSW-Wind-Arrows-T-Shirt-Blue/Item/16977/

T-shirt I designed for the international surf forecast site 'magicseaweed.com'. They wanted a design that was relevant to what they do, I played with patterns from wind and swell charts used on the website.

Feel Good Drinks competition brief re-brand

Re-design of the Feel Good packaging and a re-brand

The cartons include several themes. The first theme I started looking into was colours that make you ‘feel good’ from my research I found that the colour yellow is the colour that when seen makes you feel the best and it has been proven to stimulate the brain. So I chose to use a bright yellow as the backing of the front of the product so when customers see the carton, it hopefully makes them feel good and want to buy the drink. I chose to make cartons not labels for existing bottles to seperate this drink from other similar companies. All health drinks seem to rely on customers being able to see the drink they are buying, so if they are so sure it tastes and looks amazing, why do they need to show it before the custmer has bought and tried the drink? I went with the ‘honesty’ theme and covered up the contents by making cartons, making my branding sell the drink and not using a tiny, transparent label on a see through bottle to sell the drink.
The next theme I played with was using a ‘feel good meter’ on one side of the drink. On the loading bar of the website there is this feel good meter that goes from good, to great to extatic. I guessed this was suposed to be the reaction the customer gets from drinking a feel good drink. So I played with a few ideas and found that sainsburries have little windows on their juice bottles so you can see how much you have drunk. I thought about how I could use the feel good meter in this way. I ended up designing one strip that shows you the level of the drink, and another 3 windows alongside the level meter. In the windows I put the words GOOD to GREAT to ECSTATIC going down the drink. I designed the words to be printed on assatate in the same colour as the drink, so it is only when you have drunk past each level that you can read the message in the window. So after a couple of sips you will be able to see the first window that will read GOOD and so on.
I then had to think about the size and shape of the cartons. I decided to make 5 drinks and play on the ‘1 of your 5 a day’ theme. I then thought how I could group the 5 drinks to make 1 pack and so started looking at ways to pack them together. I originally wanted to make a circle that had 5 triangle shaped drinks making it up. Kind of like taking a slice of melon or fruit, but instead you are taking a slice of drink, which is 1 of your 5 a day. I realised it would be hard to mock up the curved triangles to make the circle, so started looking at making a pentagon. I spent ages looking at equations on how to split a pentagon into 5 isometric triangles but eventually worked it out. I then made a net for the triangle I had designed and mocked up my first template. I then used the pentagon I had created as the logo for my drinks, encorporating it with the type from the old logo. I rounded the logo to make it more friendly and added colour to one segment depending on what flavour drink the logo was on. I used sans serif as well as serrif typefaces on the packaging. I liked the way the flavours looked in Baskervill from the start, I tried a few versions with sans sefir typefaces but they didnt have the same feel. I feel baskervill brings a slight sophictication to the drink. I had to use a narrow sans serrif typeface for the infomation on the packaging, aerial narrow fitted the best and is easily accessable on any uni computer so seemed the best.
Then I added graphics to the packaging, designing vectors for each flavour to give a fun feel and using the colours of the fruit to colour the sides of the packaging to brighten the whole thing up.
I designed some promotional material to sit around the drinks on the shelf, I thought it would look nice to fill the ticket bar where they put the price labels in with the poster. I carried on the theme from the packaging but included a new ‘feel good’ meter using the colours from the packaging. I added some text relating to the consumer describing how the feel good drink makes you feel ‘ecstatic’.
Finally I created a simple banner to sit above the fridge. This is big and bright and hopefully would draw the customer towards the fridge to the Feel Good drinks.
The making of the products went ok, I used a thick card whick made me have to change my net as I couldn’t use the same one as I used for paper. They were pretty fiddely to make, especially cutting and sticking in the windows. I have submitted a pile of unmade nets aswell as the final products.

plenty more fish in the sea?

Sea of fish, this contains 3 types of sustainable fish and 3 types of unsustainable fish. The unsustainable fish are upside down, and there are 30 if them!

Final screen prints above.

Magicseaweed info design

This is an info graphic I designed for the well knows surf forecast website 'magicseaweed' whist doing work experience there at the beginning of summer. They wanted me to design an info graphic template for each spot on the world surfing tour.

The graphic had to contain information about optimum swell directions for each spot, predicted swell sizes, where the swell comes from and information about how good the waves have been during previous years. Above is what I came up with. The top map is an interactive home page where the user clicks on what spot they want to get information on. The user is then taken to one of the info pages above.

I stuck with a theme of incorporating the iconic star rating system that magicseaweed uses in their forecasts within my infographic. I chose my colour scheme from the colour of the stars on the site. I also used the way that swells are visualised on the website as red being good through to green through to blue and finally purple being not so good within the swell predictions.

I designed 11 pages for the 11 spots on the surfing world tour (the ASP WCT). The info graphic is due to be published on the magicseaweed website in the next month.

(the body of text is just random text to fill the space for visual purpose. Magicseaweed will fill the text box with there own information before publishing the articles.)

The Calorie Counter!

We were given an open brief to write ourselves with the starting point being the word ‘post’ and had 4 weeks to develop ideas towards an exhibition at the end of the project. This could be interpreted in any sense of the word, from literally a post in the ground to a piece of mail. I decided to use the word in the sense of it meaning ‘after’ and look at the effects after a journey promoting exercise after transport so the effects ‘post’ exercise. I started comparing the carbon footprint after a journey over the calories burnt by choosing physical exercise.

Annother issue that needed a solution was getting people to the exhibition. The exhibition was on the seventh floor which was a problem with getting people all the way up the seven floors. I developed my idea to encorporate it with getting people to the seventh floor.

My final exhibition was a calorie counter, which took people from the bottom of the building on a journey all the way to floor seven where the exhibition was. I worked out how many calories were burnt during the walk up the stairs and used this information as the basis of my design.

The final exhibition showed a poster on the bottom floor of our building in between the stairs and the lift as shown above. The poster reads 'want to burn 34 calories?' and 'don't want to burn 34 calories'. People have to choose whether to take the stairs to keep fit or take the lift. If they choose to follow the journey up the stairs to floor 7 they have to time themselves. The journey is mapped out with green tape to be followed all the way up the stairs. At each calorie burnt during the walk the equivalent amount of food in calories is stuck on the floor. For example, at the one calorie mark there is a picture of 20g of celery, as 20g of celery contains 1 calorie so you have burnt 20g of celery.

The journey continues up 14 flights of stairs with 20 different calorie stickers stuck in random places from jelly babies to pork chops. The tape eventually reaches the top of the stairs where it continues to my exhibition space. At the exhibition space there is some scales and a table. People who have taken the journey can weigh themselves and take their weight and time to calculate exactly how many calories they burnt during the journey on the table. Also on the exhibition space is a wall of all the equivalent foods burnt ascending next to lift buttons showing vectors i designed of what is burnt at each floor. I also took these vectors of food and stuck them onto the buttons in the lift to show people what they could have burnt at each floor.

Sun Ra Musical Score

This is my final Graphic Score, my map and installation.

My concept was that Sun Ra was fascinated with space since he ‘claimed’ he was teleported to saturn and was a missionary on earth. I took the idea of extra terestrial experiences people have had on earth, mainly America where Sun Ra was brought up and found several maps of plots of UFO sightings across americe. I chose to settle on a map of ‘flying triangle’ sightings. The map shows all the flying triangle report locations in the last 10 years. There is about 400 spots that were reported. Each reported sighting is marked with a triangle. I remade this map and simplified it to uise in my piece.

The triangles were reported to have been lit up with white, red and blue lights. And to be hovering in the sky traveling very slowly. The UFO’s were thought to be the size of a football pitch and hovered around 100 feet above the ground.

I had been looking at simplifying maps using the London underground design as inspiration and used the triangle plot as a basic grid to plot my journey. I wanted the players to be taken on a journey to make them think in the style of Sun Ra and break away from the typical forms of Jazz, making them play in the futuristic style that Sun Ra would have intended the music to be played in. Obviously the idea of using UFO sightings fitted well with this idea.

I decided to make an instillation as a final piece taking what I had researched about Sun Ra, the london underground and UFO sightings. I plotted my map, designating diferent journey lines to different players. The music follows a rough pattern of the music which the player is free to improvise from, but has some sense of form with the shape and small icons indicating pauses, volume, time checks and repeats. After I had the map plotted I worked on the instillation. I laser cut two pieces of purspex, one with time lines on and one with the triangles on. I then printed my map on assitate and sandwiched it inbetween the perspex. Onec I had the final piece I hung it with fishing line, which, from a distance, is not visible and looks like the map is ‘hovering’ much like the flying triangles. I then lit up the instillation with a merge of red and blue lights which gave a purple/red light as I thought that blue and red lights made the piece look too police like. The photo’s I took work really well and I feel have a real extra terestrial feel to them. This is a scaled down version of what I would like to have made if we were doing the project for a performance. This instilation would have filled the whole stage so both the crowd and musicians could see the huge glowing UFO which has the written on.

I also made some indevidual maps for each player. I looked at some maps and decided a basic lay out. The map includes a key on the back so the musicians can work out what to play at each part of the music. The maps work really well as an indevidual piece for the players to refer to and also fits in well with the theme.

I think this project went really well and I am pleased with the way my Sun Ra inspired graphic score has turned out.

The Old Face Of Futura

Concept

This book is a cellebration of the old face of futura. I found that the old letter ‘g’ resembled a face and so decided to incorporate the idea of 'the old face of futura' on the cover. Also, the letter ‘g’ was the one letter that Renner had most dificulty designing so was the most significant letter in the typeface. I played around with various ways ofusing the letter but settled on punching the shape of the letter through the front cover so that when the cover was shut, the ‘g’ was visible.

Although Renner was not directly afflicted with the bauhaus, his work strongly resembled its style. I was interested in the way that the typeface was geometrically created using circles, triangles and squares and so wanted to use this idea on the cover. Kandinsky’s theory represents each shape as a different colour claiming the colours compliment the shape; Triangle: yellow, Square: red and Circle: blue. It was because of this I decided to use the colours on the front cover, highlighting the geometric shapes within the typeface.

I then transfered this geometric idea into the book and made a master grid using circles, triangles and squares, as I found it fitting to ‘geometrically’ create the book, like the typeface was ‘geometrically’ designed.

The end result is a geometrical book designed in the stlye of Paul Renner and the Bauhaus.