Live Brief - Birthday Invites

One of my friends have asked me to design the invitations for her 21st birthday. Although this will involve working with a friend rather than a professional client I am still eager to begin working on briefs that I could potentially be interacting with in the Industry. As it is going to be held on the 10th of January this is going to be quite time pressing as I need to get them done preferably in about 10 days which is going to be a experience timetabling this in with my uni work. 

I haven't really been given anything to work from as a basis but apart from that they just need to be pretty and girly and fashionable. The first thing that springs to mind is a bit Barbie related but I defiantly wont be designing anything along that line. 

Jonathan Doney

A visit from this typographer a well respected designer and member of the ISTD I felt very privileged to be part of a small group who sat in his presentation then got the chance to have a group discussion with after.

Although I am undecided on whether to progress with the Three Minute ISTD brief I still wanted to sit on on this talk as all information from any professional in the design industry is valuable.

I found the talk very inspiring and helpful especially towards the presentation of your work for any competition brief not just ISTD. 

Presenting to Proffesionals: Present as if you would to a client. 

From the samples of work he showed from other existing ISTD members - Alan Fletcher, Alan Kitching, Michael Johnson and Mike Dempsey I am going to look at their work further.

A Weekly Plan

I have alot that I want to do before I move home for Christmas as I will be working full time for the full three weeks which makes me worry about how much time, or how little time I am going to have to concentrate on my Website and on a competition brief. So I need to make the most of this week.

Monday - Researching for the Website 

Tuesday - Working on Competition Briefs 

Wednesday - Produce some initial ideas for the Critique

Thursday - Talk from Jonathan Doney & Critique

Friday - Developing website ideas using feedback for the Critique

Saturday - Traveling home for Christmas

Hopefully I will manage to stick to this. I will defiantly be prioritising developing my initial ideas using feedback from the Critique whilst the ideas are fresh in my head.

 

I LOVE Hand rendered type!

I have always enjoyed using hand rendered type, but more so this year I am addicted to it. I am noticing it everywhere. I think that as an Illustrator it is such a strong part of your identity, when designing my website I will defiantly be using hand rendered type as much as possible if for everything. 

I have been looking at Illustrators who have also used hand rendered type, and there is alot. Here are a few that have really appealed to me.

Talya Baldwin - www.talyabaldwin.co.uk

Chris Ede - www.chrisede.com

Sara Fanelli - www.sarafanelli.com

Because hand rendered almost sketchy type is quite dominating and bold I will have to keep the rest of my website very simple as to avoid over complicating it distracting the viewer from my work.

Flash Workshop - Making Buttons

This workshop was one which I really paid alot of attention to as I will be using buttons on my website linking to pages such as:

Blog, Portfolio, CV, About me etc...

From initial ideas that come to my mind these buttons will either simply be links from the above in Hand rendered type, or I am thinking of designing tabs which almost look along the lines of luggage labels.

These are from Sara Fanelli's website:

This is the kind of thing I would like to design for myself. Although I am very wary of making my wedsite look to busy so alot of experimenting is to be had I think.

Talya Baldwin

I have spent the after noon looking at the Websites of exiting Illustrators, and I came across Talya Baldwin. 

I was completely intrigued by her work, I love the pencil sketches and the delicacy of some her illustrations. I have never heard of her before so I'm not sure how well known she is but I will defiantly be using her as a source of inspiration from now on.

The simplicity of her website also appealed to me. I am finding the use of hand rendered type and thumbnail collages very appealing. This also seems to be a very common design trait for illustrators.

Competition Brief???

I am starting to have second thoughts about my choice of competition brief! Not really a good sign as I should be at the stage where initial ideas are getting well under way, but then on the other hand I suppose that now is the time to change my mind sooner rather then later.

I really wanted to do a typography brief because last year it was something that I was very interested in and wanted to develop my skills as a designer. Initially I was going to produce a piece using hand rendered type which is why I thought it would be a perfect brief to incorporate illustration into it as well.

This is an example of the style I wanted to develop my own work in:

This is an example of text from Sabrina Ward Harrison's website, this ink script is beautiful, i love the freeness and the mixture of the different sizes of each letter.

Although the letters are all different sizes, upper and lower case they all work together perfectly as a piece.

However the brief for 'Three Minutes' requires non hand rendered fonts with style sheets which is where I am now undecided if this is the best brief for me to do, when I want to pursue my degree as an Illustrator.