Start Me Up

I bought a fabulous book on branding which has just been published called Start Me Up. It's 256 pages of branding porn for the graphic designer, and the paper smells all inky too. Lots of useful into for my studies.

Stamp design

Hat-trick Design (http://www.hat-trickdesign.co.uk) used hand drawn type combined with photography to create a distinctive range of Royal Mail stamps to commemorate 50 years of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Insertion is used for the different styles of type making the stamps look casual and engaging, with the words flowing around the images. The black and white colour scheme adds to the intensity of the designs.

Another of their stamp designs, for the Olympics,  uses 50p coins as a template for pointillist style imagery:

Generative design

Holger Lippmann is one of a group of digital artists who use computer algorithms to create their designs which are then printed for exhibition. I'll let him explain:

the e-pastel TAR_GRID series consists of a X Y axis grid of bezier vector curves. a seperate vector curve class defines all vector properties such as color, transparency and/or stroke weight. to later position them within different grid arrays. different keyboard input values are used for a layered image build up; coloring, sizing, transparency, count and density of star pedals

Complex but fascinating: http://www.lumicon.de/wp/

Lomography - analogue to digital

Lomography is an analogue photography craze that has a huge online following. The company have recreated, or sourced, cheap retro plastic cameras (Diana, Lomo, etc) and expired film, and used all their faults (light leaks, colour casts, vignetting, etc) as a marketing tool to make people want buy into retro look so popular now.

But many of these people still want digital image manipulation so combine their love of film with all its quirks, and the flexibility of Photoshop, by shooting on film and scanning their images to edit them further. 

There are a huge array of apps available to recreate a similar look digitally with a camera phone, but it doesn't quite get there. Instagram is the most popular. Will people still love this faux-retro effect in 10 years or will they wish they took all the shots without those dubious digital filters?

lomography.com

Eloise Renouf - Illustration to print

Eloise is a successful designer and illustrator whom I admire. Her work begins with sketches and paintings which are then manipulated in Illustrator to create contemporary prints, cards and fabrics designs:

littlepaperplanes.com

Andrea Lauren - hand printing to digital print

Andrea Lauren is a printmaker I have followed on Instagram and on her blog for sometime. She uses linocut and screen printing to create her initial motifs for fabric, cards and print, and these are manipulated in Photoshop and Illustrator before being printed digitally.

andrealauren.com

Gordon's Gin assignment

I've finished my packaging project for Gordon's Gin and included ideas of two of their other flavours - Sloe and Elderflower.

Gordon's labels

The bottle labels:

Mono printing

To mono print, we inked the brayer with oil based printing ink, and inked a sheet of acetate. A sheet of news print was placed over the ink, and an image over the top. By tracing over the image the outline is transferred to the newsprint. I will reverse this image and integrate it into my bottle label design. 

The monoprint above by Tessa Pearson, shows how mono prints can be developed into stunning vibrant images. Her monoprints are produced using oil etching inks built up in layers over a multicoloured background and would be fabulous printed onto fabric. 

Momento Mori and Vanitas

We were shown examples of art using skulls, in particular Momento Mori and Vanitas. Momento Mori means remember one day you will die, and Vanitas is an art movement that highlights the objects you can't take with you when you die. Both use skill imagery. Skulls can be a signifier for pirates, poison, death, danger, rebellion, Day of the Dead etc, and are found in many areas of art including popular culture, band art and tattoos.

This image is called Vanitas by Antonio de Pereda y Salgado and features skulls together with all the valuables that the person collected during their lifetime.

The above image by David Bailly (1650) is meant to communicate the stupidity of spending money on consumerist items and hobbies and is a reminder that you cannot take these items with you when you die. Most of this style of painting are dark and sombre and are easy to recognise as Vanitas.

We had to design two images, one reflecting a positive use of skulls, and one a negative.

For the positive I produced a pattern, which unless viewed closeup, is not clear what the imagery is. It could be a flower motif, and works quite well, I think.

Gordon's patterns

These patterns were created in Illustrator and are loosely inspired by Art Deco and will possibly used for the 4 varieties of Gordon's Gin. I referred to pattern books and books on art history to give cues for the designs. I have also read a lot of books on digital pattern design recently, and spent a lot of time learning how to create different types of pattern in Illustrator.

Gordon's Gin

Pattern and typeface

After  having considered my choice of typeface I have decided to use Futura. I designed a pattern in Illustrator to compliment the Art Deco feel of the label, which I might use as a background to the label on the back of the bottle.

Different version of this pattern could be used for the 4 varieties of Gordon's: Extra Dry, Elderflower, Cucumber and Sloe Gin.

The following are sketches of ideas for the pattern:

I created the pattern in Illustrator. I'm pleased with how the look, and how the type and pattern compliment each other. It works well with gin, as this drink was popular in the 1920's.

Now I need to work out how to combine these elements with the image on the front label.

Photography research in London

Gordon's Gin assignment

I spent a day in London looking for ghost typography, which proved to be very elusive. I also photographed lots of interesting brickwork, some of which I will use in my Gordon's Gin design.

I read about the history of Gordon's Gin on their website, and researched buildings in the Clerkenwell area where the distillery was located. The latest incarnation of the distillery building is still there, but this was a relatively modern building as the previous one was destroyed at the beginning of the 2th century. The building is now one of the largest data centres in the UK.

The first photo is looking east along the Southbank towards the Oxo Tower. I love the colours and greyness of this image, coupled with the red of the building on the left.

The next 3 images of of some ghost typography that I found whilst wandering round Clerkenwell, where the Gordon's Gin distillery was based for over a hundred years. The photo on bottom right is the beautiful Art Deco windows on Tate Modern.

Art Deco buildings really inspired by design, as it conjures up images of when people drank gin and tonic in the roaring 20s.

I wanted to use textures of bricks and concrete to reflect the urban nature of where Gordon's Gin originates.

Photos of brick, tiles and limestone I shot in London.

Art Deco Patterns

Gordon's Gin

I'm considering creating an Art Deco pattern to be used as a background to the text on the rear of the Gordon's Gin bottle, and then perhaps distressing it.

The following are images of Penguin Classics books by F Scot Fitzgerald which are from that era.

I want the pattern to link to the Art Deco lines of the architecture on the front label of my bottle design.

Digital collage

We experimented with a digital collage effect in class. I adapted the concept to my London imagery for Gordon's Gin.

The placement of the typography symbolises smoke coming from the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. I will develop this concept further to see if I can create a useable packaging label for Gordon's.

This concept could be developed for their other gin based products by using different shapes representing different London buildings, and different colour palettes.

The image was produced in Photoshop with various shapes (set to pixel, overlay), overlapping each other. The magic wand was used to select shapes, a layer of texture was selected, then select, inverse, delete. This filled each shape with the texture. A layer of handwritten text was added over the whole image and then I placed a stormy sky underneath everything. Each of the layers were adjusted for colour, opacity, levels, etc.

This works better as the text has room to breathe, and is not fighting with the imagery underneath. The typeface is Gill Sans, but has been stretched. I need to look at something more geometric that reflects the Art Deco architecture of the Oxo Tower and Battersea Power Station. The sky contrasts better with the buildings as it has been desaturated.

Gordon's Gin experiments

Some further ideas I have been experimenting with for the drinks packaging assignment:

This woodcut style sketch incorporates the Oxo Tower, The National Gallery and Battersea Power Station. I tried to do an Art Deco style sky, but  it was too dominant, and I'm not happy with how it turned out.

I used photography layered in Photoshop to create grungy effects, reflecting the industrial heritage of the drink, and updating the brand to appeal to a younger consumer. This image gives a leather like effect which would work well with the clear glass bottle, and looks quite subtle and interesting.

The effect below is much lighter and brighter but still retains the texture and image, but looks more summery, and the imagery is much clearer.

Packaging function

What is packaging for?

To protect the product from damage and contamination
To identify with name, brand, description
To contain the product and keep it together
To inform - price, ingredients, safety information
To sell - a marketing tool

Other things to consider are ergonomics and sustainable design.

Surface design is the flat design which goes on the packaging.

Thumbnails for additional packaging for Gordon's Gin:

My two ideas were:
1. Create a foldable chopping board which wraps around the bottle to chop up your lemons with. A knife could hold the board shut around the bottle.
2. Two leather coasters attached the the front of the bottle. The protection only would need to be on one face as when packed together, the front of one bottle would protect the back of the next one.

Gordon's Gin assignment

A collections of London imagery to use for my label design:
The London Eye, The Southbank Centre, Battersea Power Station and the Walkie-Talkie building, representing recent history and modern day architecture.

Gordon's Gin development

Some ideas

After doing the woodcut illustration, and being quite pleased with how it came out, I think I will use this method to produce an illustration for Gordon's Gin. I want to include imagery of London such as the Southbank Centre (for it's Brutalist silhouette), perhaps the Gherkin, and another iconic building, but not a tourist attraction (I'm thinking about this one). I'll use the overlaying technique to give the work character and age it, and maybe use concrete, bricks, water, perhaps overlaying different parts of the image with different textures (or maybe not).

Woodcut art and design

We looked at the images produced by woodcut artists in today's lecture. The image is carved in a block of wood and used for relief printing. This was most common way to produce artwork for print during the time of the Guttenburg press.

Vincent Van Gogh produced many woodcuts, and it was a popular way to experiment.

The first two images below were by Paul Bloomer and Maurice De Vlaminck. Although the first image is very naive, I prefer its simplicity. I particularly like the way the sun is depicted with circular carving lines around it. Reduction carving of woodcuts can produce omplex multicoloured images, by taking a print from the first cariving, then carving out the parts you want to remain in that colour, taking another print and so on. Because there is no going back, it is also know as suicide printing. Angie Lewin, a printmaker who produces such work, made the third print from woodcut, below.