Collection Project

Cameron Little

Collection A book of my work during the second year of university.

I am a graphic design student at London Metropolitan University, currently I am in my second year.

This book contains information regarding different projects set across three classes; Critical Contextual Studies, Creative Industry Practice and the Impression Studio class.

This book has been developed as part of the module DN5001 or Creative Industry Practice (CIP) the aim of this module is the prepare young designers for real world working practice and to give us a chance of experiencing working in the creative industry.

Narrative and Graphic Media Structured in a way to run as an actual design studio rather than a class the impression studio covers the modules DN5003 Narrative and DN5005 Graphic Media.

These modules aim to expose students to specialist design practices in print, screen, illustration and photographic media in design whilst working alongside industry professionals.

Workshops During the second year there have been multiple workshops set up to allow us to experiment with ideas using different practices from analysing a book design to practical workshops in letter press.

The workshops were very useful during the impression studios latest project when I when I was looking into different ways an anaglyph effect can be applied to typography.

Projects The impression studio have so far taken on two projects the first called Publishing Unbound. In this project we young designers were asked to create an A3 zine containing an article about publishing innovation and a typographic poster in editions of twenty five. Each studio member created their own packaging or box and we then shared the zines between each other and heald a display in the studio.

Another major project the impression studio completed was the Anthology Project that consisted of two elements the first was a group assignment to create a concept to pitch for the creative writing departments anthology book. This project required the groups to have a final pitch at the end showing their ideas. for a cover, typeface,

layout and format.

My main role in group 1 was coming up with a concept for the cover. The idea was to have the signatures of the authors around the title so I created a concept using hand writing fonts to show how it could look.

For the second part of the Anthology project each student was assigned written a piece from the anthology to then create a visual responce to accompany it. My assigned writing was called “An Acid Romance� written

by Jack Houston, this piece explored themes of unity and anonimty in the underground rave subculture.

What I found most interesting was that Jack Houston had positioned his text in an effort to purposly disorientate the viewer. This got me into looking at creating anaglyph images as a way of disorientating the viewer. I also researched some artists of the psychodelic art movement like Victor Moscoso as this was relevent to the subject of drug use that is common in the reading. After I felt I had enough to work from I began creating a design for a poster, this idea then developed to include a zine booklet that would act as a publication of the piece.

The latest project taken on by the Impression Studio was the Riso Show Project. In this project the studio members all collaborated together to help in the development of the CASS Summer Show catalogue.

Myself and other studio members started by looking in the LondonMet artists book archive. I started by looking at the book General Schmuck which had some pages I thought looked much like riso print or could be replicated using riso.

My first assignment in this project was to think about and create different ideas for the signage that would show the inventivity studio.

I started bylooking at the shape of the studio and how that could be brought into my designs I first made some pattern designs and test them on the RisoPrinter but the tests were unsuccessful as they consistentky jammed in the printer.

After that I started creating typographic designs out of the same shape I came up with a few different ideas before settling on one but in the end this wasn’t chosen for the Inventitvity studios signage.

I was then asked to instead design signage for the Animation department as their work would be showcased alondside visual communication

I decided with this design to give it the appearance of motion whilst remaining as a still image.

CIP: Thoughts of the Week Part of Creative Industry Practice has been for us to do some research into the ways other designers have worked the first of these was Massimo Vilgnelli who spoke about how the white space around type is where its true essence lies and that it is infact the the negative space around the letter that forms its shape.

I think looking at typography in this way can help to raise more qestions when reviewing work and thinking about how the letter will interact with the space around it and other letters it will sit next to or above and below from.

The Second Designer we looked at was Kate Moross I found her quite interesting and I could see she had a very strong “brand identity� in a way her own personal taste is utilised in her work to make it immediately recognisable.

I thought about this and how I could apply it to my own work and decided to continue my idea from a workshop in CIP on self promotion and branding where I decided to used black, grey and white as a colour scheme in my work.

Our third practitioner to look into was Alan fletcher in a short video of him talking about his book The Art of Looking Sideways. In the short interview he explains his process of laying out the book in a smaller format making it easier to manage and also can be seen all at once. He also talked about the reading pace of the book and that he tried to have the same pace as a film might have and in doing this he says it make the book more enjoyabe for numerous audiences by making the reading pace more casual.

CIP: Pastiche 1560 This was set as our first CIP Project. The aim of the project was to find a person from the creative industry of major influence and to then create a 15-60 second pastiche videdo that demonstrates critcical thinking about their work.

Before recieving the brief we had been asked to bring in a mood board of practitioners and processes that we liked so I decided to work from this as a starting point. The prctitioner I found most interesting was Malika Favre so I decided I would look into her work.

When looking at Malikas work I also thought about what kind of video I would like to make. My first idea was to interview Malika and ask her about how she became part of the creative industry.

However this wasn’t possible as she was out of the country so I decided to watch interviews and read articles about Malika to try and find out as much about her as I could. When I felt I had gathered enough information I thought it would be a good idea to assemble some quotes from different interviews with her in a way that would sound like an answer to a students question.

I began making my video by creating rough story boards of how the video would look and how it could transition between each of the quotes.

My initial idea was to have a female figure in the video as this is a recurring theme in Malikas work

After I had finished the storyboard and knew how I would like the video to play out I looked into how I could actually make the video and decided stop motion could work well because the pieces could all be made from paper and photographed on a wall.

When I looked back at the images for the video I wasn’t happy with the quality and decided I would created the objects as silhouettes and animate them in after effects. I had also seen another pastiche video of Malikas work on youtube that was also created digitally and very well done that kind of supported my initial idea.

The digitaly animated version of the video looks uch better and the objects in it movemore gracefully so I think this helped to get some likeness to Malikas work.

I was also able to move the objects in a way that came of as much more natural movement.

The final video can be found on Vimeo at https://vimeo. com/197231674

CIP: Market Ready Whilst working on some competitor our pastiche projects research and budget students in the CIP evaluation. The first class were divided session in the project into small groups was for us to create for this project each our groups brand group had to create identity we decided a product to sell at on the name Gum Up a christmas market. and created a logo Each group had to and colour scheme create product designs for our brand with and a brand identity the idea to carry aswell as doing it through out our products.

At this point in the project we also began doing some competitor research at different markets like Spitalfields market to see what kind of products are sold there and how they may be displayed or priced

I started creating my designs with rough draeing that i’d later improve with Adobe Illustrator I made some drawings of christmas icons and pattern ideas.

By this time our group had decided to pitch the idea of selling christmas themed stationary like wrapping paper with the theme of a sweet shop like stall using our own twist on christmas colours instead of primary red and green we thought it would be

good to use mint green and a bubble gum pink colour these different designs could be applied to many different items.

Towards the end of this project each group pitched their idea to a group from Accelerator the chosen group would then go on to have their idea funded to become a stall at the Sunday Up Market although our team was not chosen this project was enjoyable and helped me to understand and how to be entrepreneurial with my work in different ways.

Group Members Billy Klofta Cameron Little Ee Zin Teh Hannah Phillips Katherine Lozada Puro Merika Serafina Laevuo Zarajane Ferrier

CIP: Kickstarter Our last project for the CIP class was the Kickstarter Project.

The students worked in their original market ready groups to come up with new ideas or if they wanted they could continue with their previous idea our

group decided to re-brand ourselves as Gum Pup to suit our latest product idea of designed dog collars.

After finishing our re-brand as a group I went back on to the kickstarter website to see if any users had similar ideas to ours and I found someone on kickstarter had an idea very similar to ours. Created by Heather Bloss the brand is called Spoon Full of Cats.

Selling not just collars but also t-shirts, badges and bags amongst many other things and a tier system ranging in donations from $5 - $1000 this page was certainly a fully developed version of what we envisioned for our idea.

The group got back together after that and began gathering fottage for our kickstarter video. We made some mock up dog collars with our own pattern designs and put them on Buster the dog and took some pictures.

We added come more video footage whilst at the university and then we began to assemble our kickstarter page featurung an icon, video, reward tiers and product prototypes aswell

I wouldn’t say the Kickstarter page is developed to it’s full potential but I do think this is a good start to one in it’s very early stages. It was a good project to work on and I think it shows how much can be done when working with a group.

Group Members Billy Klofta Cameron Little Ee Zin Teh Hannah Phillips Katherine Lozada Puro Merika Serafina Laevuo Zarajane Ferrier

CCS Case Study In our CCS classes at the university we have taken part on module CP5014 Critical and Contextual Studies.

My own Case Study was on The founding of typography looking at where typography began, how it grew and where it is now.

Exhibitions talks and visits During this year we’ve taken alot of different trips as part of our studies. One of the first places we visited was the small publishers fair.

We have also had alot of different people come into the university to talk to us

about their careers and experiences a whole week was dedicated to making a living after university were we had talks from the likes of Will Hudson from Its Nice That and Tom Robinson from Handsome Frank.