How to... OUG405

For this brief we were put into groups and given a word in which we had to base our research around, The word my group was give was deception. We started to do some research on examples of deception and one of the first things that really came to mind was deception within the media. Its a well know fact that newspapers lie or fabricate a story that is based around the truth to make something more exciting to the reader. Doing some research I remembered a few years back ITV had been involved in a scandal that had been running fake competitions for some of its shows. The story behind it was that viewers were phoning into to TV show competitions when the winner had already been chosen, ITV were said to have taken nearly £40 million in the fake competitons.

Other research I found was on scratch cards. In some newspapers they give you a free scratch card as part of the issue, on these scratch cards you win every time or so it appears. To claim your prize you have to ring up a premium hotline for "insurance and delivery", you get charged a lot of money and you dont really win anything, or not what was suggested on the card. This was an investigation made by Watchdog.

Aside from the research we had a task that was to try and deceive either our whole form or just a single person. We started a brainstorm to try and come up with some ideas, eventually we decided on coming up with a competition to try and trick our class and anyone else who wanted to get involved. The idea was we were going to announce a 1 week competition for people to be within a chance of winning a prize. 

It wasn't as straight forward as just making up a competition we had to think carefully about how we would do it without anyone else knowing, this was probably the hardest part of the brief. We stayed later a few days at uni when everyone else had gone to get some printing done and to put up the posters. If people knew we were doing this it would mean that it wouldn't work, success for this brief is based on how believable we make it look.

We thought of different prizes like an Ipad or computer but we thought because we were aiming this competition at art students it should be something that we would find useful. In the end we decided on a Lomography camera as the prize, we felt it wasn't an expensive enough prize for people to not be suspicious of the competition and we linked it to Lomogrpahy to make the competition appear official.

The idea behind the competition was to get people to send a picture of the worst face they could pull, we wanted to something visual like this because at the end of the week we had to present to our year and if we were successful then it would be humiliating to the people who had taken part.

The prize was a Lomography Diana, we all did some research around Lomography to see what sort of style they had to make our competition look genuine. I saw on the website they ran competitions and so copied how they worded their briefs.

We created posters and leaflets that had information of where to send your pictures and the competition deadline. We also created a Facebook page, Twitter page and a blog that the photos could be displayed on. To get the ball rolling we went round asking people if they wanted to enter the competition  me and Jamie mainly targeted tutors and were overall pretty unsuccessful, although we sis get Simon and the library guy. We all asked our flatmates if they could help out, which they did. This was so if anyone visited the blog it wouldn't look empty.

We also drafted in a double agent in the form of Joe to try and help us make the competition seem more legit, because he wasn't part of our group he could post stuff on the Facebook page encouraging people to take part.

It was hard working as a group for this project, realistically we were never going to convince everyone but we gave it a good go. Because we had to keep what we were doing in secret there was a limited number of jobs, we all had input into the poster and leaflet design and we all tried to get more people involved. The problem with this brief was that once we had done all the work we couldn't do much more apart from try and promote the competition. I did the best I could with this brief by helping out going round the uni trying to get people to enter the competition, I also created the twitter and a logo.

Eames chair final piece OUG405

I started by scanning my images in to illustrator and editing them from there. It took a long time to correctly space them out and get them in the right order 

once i had done this i had to put the information in on the right chairs, i decided to use the chairs model, the date it was made, the material it was made out of and who it was made by. I felt this was relevant information to make the poster more interesting.

Once I had finished the information I started to experiment with colour because I felt it had no real imact when you looked at it doe the the line being pretty faint on the white background, I didnt like the way the colours looked and overall i felt it looked pretty unnecessary.

This is my final poster design, instead of using colour I effectively highlighted the model of each chair which i think overall gives the poster more impact. I got pretty lucky with the final design because I felt the poster lacked a point until I found that in 2009 Muji had released a 150th anniversary chair of the original No.14 Side chair. The chairs design looked like a simplified version of its iconic counterpart and I felt by including it tied the whole poster together.

Photoshop postcards OUG405

We were given a brief where we had to go round collage and take some pictures that involved a shape that we were given, I was given a cross. The postcard images didn't necessarily have to perfectly represent the shape so I chose to be quite abstract with my images.

 Im pretty happy with the way my images have turned out, Im not too sure why the middle image has some weird grey marks on it, this isn't on the the photoshop document or the print out so I think its fine.

InDesign Workshop

Things that might be useful to remember - 

New document  setup.
bleed is used for when you print and cut out you wont have any white borders where the page may have been cut wrong, a standard bleed length would be about 3mm, this gives you room for error, or printing error.
Margins are used for specific print documents for example a newspaper layout, ect.
Facing pages are for when your laying out a book

Standard document -
On the side bar menu is a pallet for all your pages, this is an overview of your document which also includes all your layers plus the pages you have been working on. In the top right hand corner of the pages pallet there is a personal menu for single pages here you can add or remove them.

Facing pages document -
We started by using 4 pages in the document, this comes out as a single page at the front a double page spread in the middle and a single page at the back, this is basically an a4 sheet of paper folded in half, this would be the end result.

If you double click ruler tool you can make marks to snap to, works on all adobe platforms.

when making text and want to see how a font looks in a certain pace go on the type drop down menu and go to create placeholder text
place the image same as how the text was placed, you can crop an image easily by adjusting the box, but only hafter you have held down on one of the adjusting handles for a second.

Eames Chair Research

My initial research consisted of taking out 3 books from the library, one on Eames's history and the other 2 on chair and product design design throughout the past 50 years. When I was given the subject of Eames chairs, I felt like I wanted to continue my project within this because i found reading the history behind chair design quite interesting. I liked how you can the influences taken from other chairs and this gave me an idea of trying to make a family tree out of some of most well recognised or iconic chairs. After researching in more depth I found it too hard to create a tree that really reflected each chairs influence. Some appear much more strongly influenced than others. I found it very interesting how looking at lots of comercialy manufactured chairs for airports school and hospitals looked like they took huge influence from a lot of the Eames designs. This was what really gave me the idea of a family tree of chairs. 

I got my friend who is in France at the moment to take some pictures for me when he went and visited a chair museum, he sent me back some really interesting pictures.

I started looking at more info graphic themed family trees to see who they would work, I liked the style these had been done in and was something I wanted to try and replicate. 

I started by drawing out all the chairs I had selected through my research, I found a really useful website that had listed a lot of commercially produced chairs starting from the first chair put into mass production in 1859 the Side Chair No. 14 created by Thonet in Austria. 

My first attempt at creating a family tree didn't go so well, I felt there wasn't enough correlation between the chairs that would link them together, some fitted together well and made sense but there would be other chairs that wouldn't have any relevance to any others.

After deciding that the family tree idea wasn't going to work the way I would have liked it too I went back to research to see what else I could do. I found some really interesting chair posters that made me decide to make one myself. I wanted to keep it in the same style as I started the the family tree in because I quite like the illustrative style.

I liked the style of the opticians poster I think it works well, but I wanted my poster to make sense or have some relevance.

Typogateux OUG405

I had a couple ideas I wanted to try out for typogateux, for my research I thought about how Blackpool rock is made and thought it would be good to try and incorporate the letters within the cake. The only cake I could think this would be possible to do it with would be a swiss roll sort of cake. I also thought about making a wooden mould for a cake in the shape of a letter.

The letter S would work well if I did a swiss roll cake, unfortunately i never got round to making my cake due to the lack of ingredients and stuff, sorry.