Graphics Ranking Project - Week One

Book cover design this week. We were each given a research brief this week which outlined the process for this week. It was to choose a book, read it, and then work out visual research under ten different topics. It was about how to see the book visually whether it was a time or place or the mood of the book.

A ten page powerpoint presentation was due for the end of the week on the book or we were told we could use the online presentation tool Prezi to put the piece together. This opened up a lot of creative doors one I got comfortable with the platform, which luckily wasn't that difficult. Once illustrator and flash got on board I was starting to run out of time to get what I wanted done even though I had a presentation together early in the week. The possibilities for more and more experimentation started to become clearer as we all worked away on our different slideshows. The competition in the class was pretty hectic this week. You'd have one thing done and suddenly somebody else has something new and shiny to add so it all gets very interesting, hence the late timing of this post. Things can only get done as quick as they can get done, especially when there are loads of things.

The book I chose was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I had wanted to read this excellent novel for a while and this project was the perfect excuse. I was a fan of 1984 but wasn't that keen on redesigning a cover for it as I had done work last year with cctv cameras and I thought I might be going back over old ground, plus Brave new World is a great other option. Having really enjoyed the book, setting out on putting together the research from it was no hassle.

Many of the previous great book covers I found with one or two 1984 covers too.

Clothes they might wear, shape only as there is a colour coded caste system in the book.

Place

Theme

Theme

Theme

 Time

Brave New World on Prezi

Click and drag with the mouse and use scroll to zoom in and out or press the buttons for forward and back or autoplay. Easy.

I want to add in some of the other well designed book covers I found through my searching.

Just look at this for beautiful design.

Someday to hit on making gold like this just once would be a great achievment.

One of my favourites.

Graphics Elective - Second Week

                                        -Illustration-                    
      

At first I was anticipating this week to be the easier or the more accessible of the two seeing as it was a relatively nice word to work with and the fact I was looking forward to getting creative with imagery. This turned out not to be the case. I think I was wildly missing the mark for the first two or three days which is a lot out of a 5 day week where 1 day is a crit so I think I was stressing out a little with it. Everything I came up with was very literal or narrative and missing the conceptual side. I was racking my brains to think what the answer to the problem was but I had a complete mental block and couldn't see how to show 'Between' without actually being between things or being absolutely obvious. Roll on thursday and suddenly there was a few things happening and then there was so many it was nearly going to be impossible to do them all, including 50 little thumbnail drawings in a night with all the rest of the work and editing and changing file types and tweaking and watching a tiny little beachball spin rapidly in front of you on the screen telling you that your computer is considering just giving up. Thankfully it didn't and the advent of shorter nights sleep in graphics module had begun.


 Thanks Jake and Kevin for being props with the basketball.


 These are all the rough work sheets of overly obvious ideas and clear narratives.

It was hard to escape the whole bee thing. 

Some interspecies play.

See, couldn't let it go.

Between the thing that's always between things.

Between

and this,

sometimes this,

and (ha) sometimes this.

Well this was an interesting part of the week.

The colours in this one appeal to me but really these were just too reliant on illustrator
and didn't really have a concept. I still like them as images though.

Well it still managed to bee in there at the end. But do you get it?

Life is between.

Democracy de jour.

The late night brainstorming session I inflicted on my housemates. What is 'Between'? 

My finished poster from the work from my sketchbook that night.
'BETWEEN"