Showtime is paying off.

Despite the fact that is seems to take an abnormally long time to upload a single image to showtime,  I have more proof that showtime is a worthwhile doing, I just received this email from an interactive designer:

Hi Rachel,

I saw your work on the LCC website and thought it was lovely. I am an interaction designer (www.anab.in) currently working on this project :http://powerof8.org.uk

In the first phase of this collaborative project 8 of us have got short stories/words of a possible future world in the form of "idea maps". I am looking to get an information designer to help us visualise these "future maps" - I can explain more if you are free and interested in something like this? 

Hope to hear from you,

cheers,
Anab

Anab Jain | http://www.anab.in

Which is fantastic, I've never really been approached before, except by family and friends, so this sounds like a great opportunity, i've emailed Anab back and hopefully can help them out.

Showtime

I seriously need to update this blog, need to put photos on from my portfolio and from the show, also have a few issues and things that i have seen that I would love to mention just got to find a few spare hours to get down to it.  

Must also update my Showtime profile and YCN profile, now that I have nice images of some of my work I might as well upload them and get some exposure, and its definitely worth doing so cos one of the images I added to Showtime is the profile image on the UAL homepage representing the Showtime page for LCC, which is pretty snazzy. There are only 13 pages of Showtime profiles for LCC atm, which is surprising i thought there would be more, i reckon a few people have forgotten to make one. I didn't even know my image was on there until someone else pointed it out to me.

Life is out there

When i received email with stuff in like "she's rarely had a holiday in the passed 20 years", it really does make me doubt some people in "the industry", I doubt the world would fall apart if many people took a 2 week holiday every year, so i find it very odd that this woman hasn't. Is she really the only person who can do that job?  More shocking ST seems to thing this words would encourage me to go running head first into a graphic design studio saying " take advantage of me i'll work for free for a month, it would be an honour to be in your presence!" I don't want to be defined by my job, I don't think my job should ever be the most important thing in my life and I don't want it to be.  I am a hard worker, but as the saying goes "No one ever says on there deathbed, 'I wish i'd spent more time in the office.' Life is out there." I think some people forget that.

also just remembered this on noisy decent graphics, which i think co insides nicey.

Habit 7: Take Lots of Time Off: Principles of a Balanced Life

There was an article in The Economist a while back about how the best US presidents worked the least hours. (Bush used to to take loads of holidays, but he increased his tally by always working very long days.) Obama doesn't start work until the kids have gone to school.

As I've mentioned many times before the reason successful people can do more stuff is exactly the reason they are successful. They are better at getting stuff done. They make the best use of their time. They don't waste a minute. They know that an hour off is as important as an hour working. Successful people go on holiday. You should do that.

Typologies

business cards typology in colour order, when laid out flat reaches from the front of my house to the back!

Vernacular Type

my buttons i have created for the soical networking links

close up of the navigation bar

my hand drawn alphabet, based on my magnetic letters

website so far.....

^ This one is a mix of all the ones i have created 

Think this one is my favourite

Blue Monday

more conventional web page layout.

grab and drag website layout very rough first mock.

Adopt a plant..

One day group project for DPS, set by Gilles & Cecilie Studio. Being entredonneur instead of being entrepreneur (given back instead of taking from).  Brief "What would you change today?"

WHAT? What would you like to change today?

WHY? Why would you like this change to happen?

WHO? For who is this change? Who needs to be involved?

WHERE? Location

WHEN? Timing, one time action or sustainable change

HOW? Which actions are needed? Planning.

ADOPT A PLANT

Lucia, Jane, Rachel and Shia-Ying wanted to make people

stress free and more green by adopting an edible plant.

(Herbs, fruit and vegetables) Gardening is therapeutic,

it makes you more happy and less stressed. They made

small packages with a small cardboard pot, some soil and

a seed wrapped in cloth (so that the soil would not fall

out when bringing it home in your handbag) and a tag

with instruction. These natural gifts were given out for

free.

Fancy a Coffee?

paper

today one thing went wrong after another! firstly i found out you can't put your own paper in the A4 printers at uni, then i find that the paper we we going to use in the a3 printer is 10gsm under the minimum weight. So in the end i have printed the a4 sheets all at home, but having to do it though my PC not my mac cos for some unknown reason it comes old pale through when i use the mac to print, even though they are connected to the same printer! so i have had to download a trial version of Indesign onto the PC in order to print them, I would have printed them via PDF format but you cant adjust the scale of all of the a4 prints to 95% you can only do stuff like scale tp page which is no use. Whereas on indesign you can set the scale at whatever value you like.

Website

The images are all the ones we will use for the yellow one we are going to have a stack of letters but i think we need to photography that and for the stickers one i think we are going to photograph that. But basically i think this is the rough layout. I will add the extra two pages in a mo, the We are curious page and the page that opens when you click on are you curious? to get you to fill in your details.

White verisions which i think we will go with 

I thought i would try the coloured ones but i really don't think they work as well

cake boxes

Don't ask me why but after Sarah spoke to us  today I wanted to try and find a more unusual cake box design, i know we probably won't have time to use this one but this it what i came up with and i have tested it in my green card.

Its not perfect but its pretty much there!

Green card attempt

First testers

shopping

today was good, we went shopping for materials, met up in the flagship paperchase and brought card for the cake boxes. Jen showed us some tester stickers she has done with the typographic done with letteraset which was a good way of getting the type on the stickers cos we cant seem to find anywhere that sells circular stickers that we can fit through a printer.  We have decided to resize the letters so that they are more similar sizes and not becoming half of the size of the pervious one.  We are going to print the address size through the computer and the inside main but using screen printing.  Only thing i'm not sure of is how we will print the sheets smaller than a4 through the printer and get it too be correct, actually wait you could just center it and give it a boarder then you just crop it and it will be in the middle, so long as there is a bit of give inside our printers are a bit off. 

so far 

Beer bottles are designed, just i need to give everyone there drink! 

letter folding and layout is design, just jen needs to resize them.

Cake box net is designed, we aren't entirely sure how we are doing the circle bit inside i think we are just printing the website on it in black. but we shall play with that.

With the stickers we are going to letteraset the ones that go on the cake box, and create some using that method. And the ones we want were you can peel and reveal we are going to create mock ups of cos we can't do them in reality. I think we should also photo some sticker sin the environment for the presentation.

I think me and julia are going to try and do the website over the next few days.

Liz has designed some postcards too which are good.

The posters we have the concept for and Liz really likes her one to have, and they could be put inside the bus.

We are going to start the presentation side of things next week.

I started looking for images of buses which we could had the curious brand on to the side of.

I am going to try and do some spray painting somewhere too.  

I think we are all going to try and make our outcomes over the weekend, or as many of them as possible.

I need to also do VCT at some point, but this project is way more fun! I'm not sure if we will need to come in on friday i think we can work that out tomorrow, not sure if some people also have work on fridays, but the screen printing room is open til 8pm tommorrow so hopefully we could get that done all tommorrow as it s only 2 colours we need to print 

i think things are looking up! woo somehow today everything seems to be coming together we have final drafts of more or less everything which is good. 

bugger

hmm hmm hmm today reminded me of why i normally try to avoid group work, personally i don't like the fact that we are still testing stuff and disagreeing on things.  i think it would work much better if we spilt into 2 groups, as it would be easier to communicate and decide on things with just one other person, but no one else seems that keen on that idea. We resolved some of the issues but i think person weren't happy with decisions and so thats why i thought it would be good to go into 2 groups cos they we could just do both versions.

the bus idea is nice odd a little strange, but i think we could make it work.

Looking forward to seeing some more on the cake box idea. 

I personally prefer the dynamic lines you get with the letter folding me and julia found.

i dont know how we are going to do any embossing or screen printing considering we don't have a decided layout for things, and no one seems to be pro active in learning how to emboss or screenprint at uni or go and do some testers.

I was hoping that thre would be more than 3 letters in each letter, i think it could work but i dunno.

I am hope things will have improved by wednesday,  i think atm i am having issues with trusting that others will have thing decided by wednesday.  i would love for it to be like everyone has final mock ups. 

more testing!

julia's lovely tests - msn is great for communicating and testing!



left or right? or right right? and left left? of left right? just a few of the questions me and julia have been considering this evening. I have realised that tomorrow we really need to make some decisions on some of the elements of our design. Such as:

the web address

+ will it be www.areyoucurious.com

OR

+ www.curious.com

or will it be .co.uk??

Do we all definately like the colour scheme of pink, blue, green and yellow?

HELVETICA or ROCKWELL! the battle continues. personally i think both work, we could use both like rockwell for logo and helvetica for body copy.

Are we each gonna create one of the campaign ideas, create the grid layout, type size etc then pass it on? 

Are we going to have the strips revealing peoples work?

Does the slogan on the website page for each campaign need to relate to the product or be the same through out so 

+ 5 days until curiousity gets the better of you

OR

+ 5 days until the good things are brewing

+ 5 days until the cookie crumbles

+ need to decide on line spacing and kerning

Curious or curious? capital or not

Taking the dot off the i playing with the i in some way.

The use of the colours We are/ are you in black then curious in the colour? yes or no!

Testing, testing 123

Tester beer label inital ideas, working with the idea of revealing part of the designers work, within the strips.

for the real one i would have the image flush with the background, so no obvious boarder around it.

Testing helvetica and rockwell type on a website setting.

Poster/letters