Cresta Court Brochure

As my placement was over at ADZ Studios, the Cresta Court Brochure was completed and sent to the client for one final look. I look back on the design and now, I would probably change some things to it. Overall, i felt at the time it was a right decision to go ahead with the completed design as the main objective was pleasing the client.

Marian Bantjes

On the degree, my recent brief is to design a visual identity and range of promotional materials for a type museum and gallery. The target audience in relation to the brief are designers, school children and tourists. The main objective of the brief is to work with typography. While researching for inspiration, I was lucky to come across a female typographer called Marian Bantjes. I found her work with type and different materials fantastic and will use some of the techniques from her work in my designs.

ADZ Studio's. 8 Week Placement

During my time on the HND, I wanted to get an insight on what the industry was like in a design environment. I wanted to see a real life studio with live briefs and designers dealing with day-to-day problems with clients. To do this, I asked my tutor how I would go about getting the opportunity. I was advised to look up some local design agency’s in my area and contact them ether by phone or e-mail. I decided do both for ten local design studios in Manchester and I was lucky to get a positive response from ADZ Media. I decided to phone ADZ and spoke to Michael Dandy, the Creative Director. Michael was happy for me to come down and show my work and maybe agreeing some kind of one-day a week placement. The agency was based in Whitefield close to Bury, which was easy for me to get to in the morning. When I arrived, Michael introduced himself and sat me down looking through my portfolio. He was impressed with my work and offered me the opportunity for an eight-week placement every Friday. I decided to make a diary of my time at ADZ and was very pleased with the friends I met and the knowledge I was lucky to learn.

Editorial Design - The Process (Video)

Here is my process in designing the magazine.

Editorial Design

After finishing the HND, I started the BA Degree in Graphics. I new the standard of work would be grater and I was looking forward to tackling my first brief. This was based on Editorial Design so I was required to produce a front and back cover, an editorial page, a content page and two double pages spreads. The magazine was on the supplement insert for the Sunday newspaper, the Observer. The text was available but the rest was for me to design. My starting point was to look at books such as Editorial Design by Yolanda Zappaterra and The Best of Brochure Design by the publishers Rockport. These helped me a great deal into successfully having consistency in my magazine. For a secondary resource, I decided to look into Neville Brody more. I was lucky enough to find a copy of the book The Graphic Language of Neville Brody that had most of his best work including articles from the magazine, The Face. His spreads were inspirational towards my approach in design and I tried using his techniques in my work.

I found the area I struggled in was having a related theme for the two main spreads. The topic of the article was the debate on buying bottled water instead of just pouring it straight from the tap. This rose topics such as the cost of transporting the water around to its destinations. Part of the brief required you to use your own imagery so I decided to illustrate topics from the articles. Using different illustrations was fun to do but changing them with the colour, placement and detail was frustrating. I finally completed the two spreads, which led me on to the front cover and other parts of the magazine. Many changes were made throughout but I was delighted with the finished designs.

Area 51 Nightclub Flyers/Posters

As the HND was ending, one of the last briefs was to design a poster or flyer for a local nightclub. I was very excited about this opportunity as when I receive flyers myself, I always appreciate the use of colour and images used. I always feel confidant of maybe designing something similar or maybe even better. The choice of music the nightclub in the brief played was mostly dance and gararge so I needed to target certain audiences such as young drinkers and people who appreciated the particular music. For resources, i collected handouts from bars, information from the local newspaper regarding themed nights and designs from Neville Brody. The choice of colour and shape was important and I feel happy with the outcomes.

Photography Poster Design

In 2006, Stockport College announced a new development in its facilities and confirmed a new building will be arriving for around 2010. As this was exciting news for all students and teachers, the college decided to promote this news with a photography competition. All the HND students were to design a poster to promote the competition and show the awareness to future students. I looked into David Carson for inspiration in this piece and feel it works quite well.

Word Festival Poster Design

During my time on the HND, I had a brief to advertise the 2008 Word Literary Festival. The description of the brief was to produce three related posters, which targeted all audiences such as youth, middle age and the older generation. I came up with many ideas but overall was very happy with the outcome of the designs. For my research, I looked into hundreds of different poster designs including Words of James Brown by Moctezuma, Inside and Out by James Chae and Moma by Jamen Hegeman. These were good resources but I needed something to help me design a related look towards each of the three posters. I was able to find some posters designed by the graphic agency Chase. These were for the British Council for creating new understandings between individuals in Africa and the UK. This helped me very much.