OUGD403 - Poster Research

POSTER DESIGN

For studio brief 4, we need to do some preliminary research on poster design, looking into the different genres and designers. I already have a few people in mind that I want to look at, including Kate Moross and Neville Brody, but hopefully after conducing further research I will have a wider knowledge of the different types of posters and designers.

PROPAGANDA:

Propaganda is a type of poster design that is used to influence an audience. It played a big part in many wars, and usually these posters can be made sense of without having to read them. Many countries have their own style of propaganda, for example, these are posters from Britain in WW2:

  

These posters are mostly encouraging, making the people of Britain want to keep fighting in the war. Some of them are made to make you feel guilty, for example, "who's absent? Is it you?", pointing to the viewer. It makes you feel like you should be fighting in the war, or at least doing your part. Everyone should all join together to help win.

Here are some posters from nazi Germany in WW2:

These posters are glorifying Germany, rather than showing encouraging people to work together, it shows that Germany are supreme and gives them a feeling of assured victory.

Modern propaganda also exists within politics today. Here are some examples:

TV AND FILM:

It is very important for TV and film to get across their story or grab peoples attention with poster design and advertising. Here are some posters from the popular TV series Game of Thrones:

These posters are all very similar in the way they look, but all present different characters and different stories. They look very dramatic and make people who haven't watched the series want to know what's going on. 

Here is a poster from the Star wars trilogy, which I really like. It evokes the spirt of the film and has really nice colours:

Tv show, UTOPIA has a very striking poster design:

They use bright colours that correlate with the cinematics within the series, and have used Futura to display their logo, which is crisp and clinical, which also fits with the tone of the show.

MUSIC EVENTS:

For many years, music events such as small gigs or huge concerts have used posters to advertise their events. I have found a collection of inspiring posters here that are advertising musical events:

SHEPARD FAIREY:

Shepard Fairey is probably best known for his poster for the Obama HOPE campaign. He has also designed many other posters:

He grew up in America in the 80's and his art emerged from the skateboarding scene in which he spent his adolescence. He is now known as one of the most influential street artists. The main technique he uses is printing.

KATE MOROSS:

Kate Moross is a London based designer who likes to work with 3 sided shapes, illegible typography and free form lettering. Here are some examples of her work:

From these images you can definitely tell she has her own style and way of working. She uses a lot of colour and usually hand draws her lettering. Some of her clients include Ray-Ban, Converse, Vogue, Nike, Adidas, Nokia, Samsung, The Guardian, Ralph Lauren, Virgin, Vice Magazine, Cadbury and Topshop. I really like her style and how she turns her simple doodled letterforms into something really colourful and creative. The majority of her posters feature type, but a lot of the time they look like images.

NEVILLE BRODY:

Neville Brody is a large name in graphic design, and is known for this work for The Face magazine, Arena magazine and being a founding member of Fontworks. Here are some examples of his work:

A lot of his posters focus on type, and have a large emphasis of communicating a message. 

OUGD404 - Studio Brief 1 Colour Theory

In today's session we played around with colour. We were all asked to bring in 5 objects of a specific colour, mine was red. Our first task was to order the objects from light to dark:

This was quite difficult, as we had some orange items and some pink, so it was hard to tell which ones were lighter or darker. Comparing each object close up to another one was the easiest way to tell. 

This was quite tricky as it's hard to tell with reds. You have to compare it to something yellow or blue, to see what its base is. After that, we had to arrange our dark and light reds in a circle, and we chose to have the darkest in the middle, gradually getting lighter: 

Then, we had to take one item from our circle, swap with another colour and place our item where it most fits within their circle. We went to yellow, and placed our items:

I don't agree with the placement of the light blue decoration in the middle, I think it should be on the outside, as it is a lighter blue and the light red is on the outside.  After this, we had to arrange all of our coloured items together in a line:

This session was fun and I learned a lot about colour. It's interesting to see how colour changes when it's next to something different or on a slightly altered background, for example, the paper we used for a background had a slight yellow tinge, but comparing the colours on snow white paper gave a different result all together. I also have a better understanding of reds and how they are blue and yellow based, and how that translates to it being cool or warm.

OUGD403 - Studio Brief 03: Message and Delivery - Research Crit

For Studio Brief 03, we were asked to collect a varied range of newspapers and chose a story that we found interesting to research from Saturday 25th October's press. I chose 3 newspapers, The Sun, The Independent and The Daily Mail. I found a story that was featured in all of these papers, which was the First Successful Dead Heart Transplant that took place in Australia. The way this story was presented in all 3 newspapers was very different.
The Sun had a very small space in the top corner of the left page:

The Independent had quite a concise 2 columns:

The Daily Mail had dedicated half a page and an image to this story:

I think that the way these papers have laid out their information says a lot about their target audience. On this particular day, The Suns main headline was a woman with a phobia of Simon Cowell, yet quite a large breakthrough in science gets relegated to barely a paragraph of text. I think that the readers of The Sun are more interested in celebrities and football, and devoting a large section to something their readers aren't interested in doesn't seem like a clever idea. 

With this story, I'm going to look into peoples opinions about whether this new technology is a good thing, and whether their religious choices effect their decision to be an organ donor, as the response to this story is quite mixed. I will be conducting research through social media, asking my friends on facebook and followers on twitter what their response is, and also looking on newspaper articles online and seeing what the comments are. I am also going to look at YouTube to see if there are any videos on there where I can also look at the comments. I'm aiming to produce a leaflet that will show both the For and Against side of the argument, and also looking into the morals/ethics of organ donation with new technology.

OUGD403 - Study Task 3 Crit

Today we had a small crit about the work we make as a group on Friday. We presented our newspaper layout to another group and explained to them our thought processes and design choices. Our feedback was quite straight-forward. Although it wasn't required of us, it would have been better to actually make a digital version of our layout with appropriate text and images, so people could actually see what it looked like and give more valid feedback. We were also asked whether we looked at broadsheet papers and seeing if we could report the story in a more sophisticated way - which we didn't. 
This feedback was useful as we found ways in which we could improve our design presentation and also our initial research into various different formats. 

The group that presented to us had the story "Micheal Schumacher Makes Progress". They chose a serif typeface which made it look quite sympathetic, because as they looked further into the story they found that if he makes a recovery he won't be the same person. They also had various (almost 20) different layouts made on a computer, which made it easy to comment on and give feedback. The group didn't have an outstanding favourite though, which is something I would consider when making something as part of a team.

OUDG403 - Study Task 03

For this study task we were looking at the layout and composition of newspapers and magazines to see how they convey a message. We got split into small groups of 5 and were given a headline. Ours was "Mario Balotelli Shirt Swap Scandal", and we had to design a layout for a newspaper that would best suit this story.

I firstly wrote down some initial notes of things that we discussed within our group. We looked at different news papers and how they laid out their sports pages, and quickly found that there were lots of pictures and less emphasis on the body text. 

We decided on one or two columns for the text, and two columns for a large image. We also thought that the headline should take up a large amount of space, as it will grab the attention of the passionate fans. It has to be serious, as the target audience take the sport very seriously too. We came up with a rough copy of a layout and grid system:

We have a 4 column grid with 2 columns for text. We thought that 2 columns is enough as people will just want to know the facts about the incident and have a large visual. We then made a neater copy once we had all agreed, and made a better version of the grid which is shown in red:

After that, we made a few notes on the page showing what other decisions we had made and why:

These include the type of font we would use and why. We researched into existing newspapers and found that the majority use Futura Condensed Bold for their headline, as it grabs attention, it is legible and also quite versatile as it can be used in many colours and sizes. For the body text, the majority of papers use Franklin Gothic. This is a sans serif typeface, which gets the point across with no decrease in legibility. It is simple and clear, but also has a robust and modern feel to it. 

The kerning in newspapers is also very wide, and the tracking is large. I think this is so that the legibility is increased and also to fill up more space (if there is a small word count it will all fit into the columns).

I have learnt a lot from this session as I have never looked into layout and editorial design before. I think this will give me a good starting point for my next task for Studio Brief 3, looking into newspapers and seeing what the layout and design decisions can say about a story and what the tone of voice is etc.

OUGD404 - Studio Brief 1 Anamorphic Typography

For today we were asked to bring in some cardboard. We got split into 3 groups and got told that we were making some anamorphic letters, focusing on the depth of field. As we were the second group to do it, we looked at the group from this morning to get a better understanding of what we needed to do: 

Our first decision as a group was what letter to make, and what typeface. We chose to do the letter A, because no one had done that yet, and we wanted to add serifs to it because all the other letters from this morning looked quite simple. We drew out a rough guide so that everyone knew what they were doing: 

After that, we got to work!

To fit with the theme of depth, we decided to pain the cardboard with red paint at the back and adding white as each part of the letter moved closer.

Assembling the diagonals of the A were the hardest part, and took a lot of effort from everyone to get it right.

Eventually we came out with a really great outcome! I enjoyed todays session, it was really hands on and involved a lot of teamwork. It also made me think about how to work with space and how to apply this to my letter forms, as we've only been working with them in 2D. We were also told that next week we're working with colours and have to bring in 5 red items - I'm looking forward to doing more hands on, messy work!