jack hainsworth
Art and Design Blog
Designer.
For the first session of our Designer brief, we had a lecture by the head of the Purity Beer Co, in which he told us about the history of the company, what makes it's beer unique, and our brief. For this project, we have to create 1-3 designs for beer mats, and optionally enter them into a competition to become actual beer mats to be sent around the country. We started by creating 3 mind maps, around the company's 3 main pillars - Eco, Community, and Quality. We went through Eco together as a class, as an example for the sort of thing we should do.
The Quality mindmap was the hardest for me, as I couldn't think of many branches to go off on. Community was fairly simple, and ended up linking back to Eco in a few places such as how they both effect the planet.
Once we created our mind maps, we were given some ways to generate ideas from them, such as picking 3 words at random from each mind map, and combining them together to create a character, or scenario. In the case of the class example, the three words were "swamp" "creature" and "plastic", and so that would be an idea for the beer mat. The 3 random words from mine were a bit more...interesting, and not exactly an idea I wanted to follow. "Meerkat" "Cult" "Factory".
One limitation we had for our designs, was that they had to fit onto the original beer mat shape of a hand drawn star.
Then, we came up with come initial ideas, basic quick sketches of as many different images and layouts as we could, whether or not we thought they were any good. This was challenging for me, as I tend to be quite perfectionist when coming up with ideas like this.
My main idea I had been thinking about since the mecture, was to show the idea of a community with arrows spreading out and pointing to the center of the mat. After trying a couple ideas of this, I decided it wasn't very good in practice, and looked too simple and empty. I tried some more, based around wheat and barley, the 2 main ingredients in their beer, one of a landscape and one of the 7 pools Purity filter their beer through, in the shape of a piece of wheat.
![IMG_4561[1].JPG](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/cc5da3_9c3d0716d4b7426f86bf6741fc41b7fb~mv2_d_3024_4032_s_4_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_308,h_406,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/IMG_4561%5B1%5D_JPG.jpg)
After this first session, I developed some of my favorite ideas, and created a few new ones digitally.I first made a few versions of the minimalistic rabbit and car, showing the story of how the company found the farm they use to make their beer. I played around with the colours and proportions, and decieded that without any context, the image just looked like a car about to run over a rabbit. I removed the car, and this image of a rabbit became my main idea.
Another idea I came up with was to make the design a speech bubble. My idea behind this was that you would palce the beer on this mat, inside the speech bubble, and so the iamge represents people talking about the beer. It seemed like it would be a good idea, but the annoying part was that it wouldn't look very good on the star shaped mat which we have to use, so I decided to contiue developing my rabbit idea.
During our second session, we were split into 2 groups, and each showed what ideas we have so far, so that we could get criticism and ideas for improvement from the rest of the group and the tutor. The tutor liked the rabbit idea, and suggested for me to try using a photo in the spaces of the rabbit's body. After the session, I tried this using an image of a wheat field, and it turned out pretty good. I first tried it with the irange and brown colour scheme, to match the colours of bear, however I thought this looked too monotone with the similar colours in the wheat field, and so I changed them to blues, to compliment the oranges. It also reflects the sky above the wheat field, or the water they are combined with the make the bear.
![IMG_4559[1]_edited.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/cc5da3_e6ed1679c91d45358ad1af5aeb15066e~mv2_d_3000_2250_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_600,h_450,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/IMG_4559%5B1%5D_edited.jpg)
Designing a Typeface.
14 Dec 2018
The second half of our Designer Brief was to create a typeface as a group to be used in our 'Production Manual'. Our first task was to walk around the school, and new street, and take photos of an example of every letter of the alphabet.
We then had a mini lecture on font design, and the history of it, dating back to the 16th century. This is a subject I've been interested in for a while, but it was nice to know the origin of alot of famous fonts. I didn't know that most modern fonts were actually designed upwards of 60 years ago, such as Helvetica, the main font used by Apple.
As a group, we were each given a letter of the alphabet, or a commonly used symbol. I was given both v and w, as they were similar letters in font design. We were then given tin foil and pipe cleaner to make these designs out of. Although I was expecting to be able to create this typeface on an actual computer, a task I have quite a lot of experience in in the past, this was at the very least something new.
I started by creating a simialr effect to an example we were given at the start, of shapes being ceated with the shadow of objects rather than the object itself. I used tin foil to make the right leaning lines of the w, and shone a shadow to create the right leaning lines, completing the letter. It was suggested for me to be more messy and experimental with my designs, and so I tried to create more abstract letters. This is a weak area for me, as I wanted the letter to be readable in the end result.
Once everyone had filled a sheet with various designs for their letter, we put them on the walls of the studio, and as a class chose one example for each letter, which would then be digitised into an actual font to be used on our production manual.