It's History (Typography Timeline)

Research, Reading & Illustrator Designing

Recently, we have been learning a lot about Typography and it's origins. In the past I spent most of my AS levels learning about the origins of Fashion, art pieces and other Art related areas. So, I have found these seminars to be quite interesting. 
After our typography seminars, we were given a two week project to complete over the Christmas holidays I've gone ahead and conducted some research of my own in order to find out a bit more about typography. We needed to add information given to us during the seminars plus the information we gathered ourselves. I used the internet a lot more than books because I felt that it was easiest source I could get to for information at the time. I was able to find a sufficient amount of historicals facts that I think is relevant to the project. I'm hoping that what I am including in the poster will not be useless because I did collect an abundance of information therefore, I'm unsure as to whether or not I should include it. 
In terms of designing the timeline, I was unsure as to how I should present my information, what it should look like and what I should include in the poster. I have finished the poster a little while ago but I am still unsure about the presentation. It's plain, simple and you can see the information clearly. I was unsure whether or not I needed to add a wealth of images therefore I decided to only add relevant images that related to the most important facts. Here, you can see my Typography History timeline.
As mentioned before, it's quite basic and looks very simple. I wanted to make sure I was including more information rather than images because we told to give information. 
If I had a little extra time, then I would go back and redesign the entire timeline to make it more aesthetically pleasing. But if I did make it look more interesting then I may not have had enough space to add information. I


Before I even started designing the timeline, I did some research in timeline designs and here are some of the designs that appealed to me the most. This first one seemed to make the most sense to me so I wanted to create a timeline similar to it. It's plain and does what it's supposed to do; present information. 

This next one is similar to the one yo see above. As I researched further, I noticed that most the timeline designs were all the same so I decided to lean towards the growing ages line design. I thought that instead of having my timeline horizontal like these designs, I would have mine vertical so that I'd have enough space to place information. At the time, this seemed to work best for me but as I researched further and found other images of timeline, I started doubt the look of my poster. 


In the end, I decided that the information I added would be from the seminar and from the information that I gathered myself. Although I am not entirely happy with the way I designed my timeline, I prefer it this way because I have presented more information that images. 

Book Worms (Magazine and Book Layouts) 05/11/11

Magazine and Book Layout Designs

These past couple of sessions have been spent talking about book covers and magazine layout. This is something that I have always been interested in since sixth form. I've always been curious to know how books and magazines are published and what goes in to the production before creating an entire book cover. For the next few weeks, we will be working on some book covers and magazine layouts of our own. I'm going to be using a few magazines and books as inspiration. 
Last week, were instructed to pick some titles out of a long list given to us and these were the tiles I chose to use because U assumed they would be the easiest to work with:

• COOL DUDES
• Haute Couture 
• California
• Archaos
• Pop Art

Because I have grown so used to designing with a computer over the past years, I have decided to try and continue working in my sketch book and layout pad using only pen and paper so I can learn to draw and plan better. Here are some images I of the lard thumbnail sketches I did before I decide to design them on the computer. 
So far, I'm quite enjoying Book cover designing even though I haven't gotten round to designing anything totally solid on the computer. I'm sure I will be able to create something by the end of this week using Illustrator and Photoshop.

I've also been researching a variety of Book cover designers these past few days and I've come across an urban artist know as Jeff Hendrickson. He designed a book cover that I cam across online during some research. The book was called "Doing The Dead"; you'll see it on his website. His work is all very commercial and professional which is something I might like to do one day but not right now. The book cover design that Hendrickson designed was very plain but still eye catching, which I liked. Here is a link to his Blog site: http://www.jeffhendricksondesign.com/blog/
Here is an image of the book cover that I saw. 

This is the sort of cover I'm aiming for. Something simple and not to wild. 

I haven't thought too much about magazine layouts yet because I've been concentrating a lot on book covers. I have photocopied and researched a variety magazine layouts that I want to analyse and use as part of my project. 

Update:

I've started creating some front covers of my own because I was quite eager to get started. Here you can see that I have created my first book cover using Photoshop. This cover was created for the book title Cool Dude. It's very basic but I believe it subtly illustrates the title. I chose a black background because black is usually associated with gangs, night life, clubbing and  all sorts of negative things. Then I chose make the letters connect to each other so that it would illustrate a group of close friends. The bright colours of the letters made it, I think, slightly more interesting to look at because busy colours is something that mainly associated with youth. The image beside it what I wanted to use in case I wanted an underline. 

Magazines: 


Because I needed some inspiration, I visited the Library on occasionally in order to find spread outs of magazines. I found a few layout Ideas from journals such as Creative Review and other journals. I chose to focus on the layout pages of creative review because this journal is the only one with square shaped pages unlike other magazines that have rectangular (A4) pages. I have not started my magazine layout analysis yet but I will conduct some more research so I'm sure what I'm doing.  

Lets Get 3D!! (3D Design in Illustrator) 07/12/11

Lets Get 3D!

We're still working on Illustrator during our workshop sessions but it's getting a lot more interesting than I expected. We spent today's session working with illustrator to create funny looking shapes. We intended on creating actuall objects and sticking titles of Christmas messages on them, but because I am still trying to figure out how to use the vectoring tool, I still haven't gotten round to creating any recognisable shapes yet. Here, you can see an image I found online of the sort of shapes that can be created using Illustrators 3D tool and the vectoring tool.

Here, you can see that I was trying to create a heart shape, but instead ended up making what I think looks like an apple shape falling into pools of red. Despite the fact, that they didn't come out as I intended, they were still fun to make. In my opinion, the 3D tool seemed to make everything look a lot more interesting. I used it to create half a dozen more shapes because I found it to be quite an enjoyable tool to just mess around with. I had no idea what I was doing but eventually I ended up with the image you see below. 

I created a candle in a candle in a candle holder so that I could finally add a Christmas message to an image. The only problem was the image was too thin and I didn't scale it very well. However, I think I have finally gotten the hang of using the vector tool on Illustrator. This will come in very useful for any future projects that I may have. Here are some other images that I created using simple words and Illustrators 3D tool. From this image, you can see that this was my first attempt at using the 3D tool and it did not come out as well as I had hoped.