2010 Self Promotion

Craig Baldwin The assembled works of designer Craig Baldwin 2010 | http://craigbaldwin.com | craigsbaldwin@gmail.com

© Craig Baldwin 2010 As the whole point of this paper is to get my work out there I don’t mind if its transmitted, just don’t go saying it’s your work.

Designed by Craig Baldwin http://craigbaldwin.com/ Inspired by the design of Protein (http:// prote.in) and Be Brave by Alex Hunting (http://iamhunting.com) and Charlie Hocking (http://charliehocking.co.uk).

Main body copy set in DIN 1451 Std Mittelschrift at 9pt. Title font is Georgia with Bodoni Std Poster used for numbering.

Printed by the Newspaper Club.

Newspaper Club is a service that helps people and communities make their own newspapers. www.newspaperclub.co.uk

?

Craig Baldwin URL: http://craigbaldwin.com | EMAIL: craigsbaldwin@gmail.com | TWITTER: @CraigBaldwin | MOBILE: 07865398815

So who is Craig Baldwin? Well I graduated from the Winchester School of Art in the summer of 2010 with a 2:1 in Graphic arts.

I’m hard working and dedicated, a bit of a perfectionist and quite probably obsessively compulsive in lining things up and getting them pixel perfect but design is one of the few fields where such behaviour is beneficial. I’ve self taught myself most of what I know and have a broad range of skills in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro and if I don’t know it I can generally pick it up as I go along pretty quickly.

My main area of interest is in print and publishing, I prefer something printed to something digital any day. Of course I’m still pretty good at web design with a solid knowledge of HTML and CSS but you just can’t beat the fulfilment of holding something physical in your hands after having

spent so much time designing it. I don’t see it as a dying industry either, there is always going to be a market for books and magazines, they just might have to change to fit into that market.

I’ve included my Twitter username in case you Twitter would like to follow me and find out a bit more about the sort of person I am. If you go to my website you can find me on a few more social sites as well.

So why am I sending this to you? I’m sending it to you because I like your work, I like what your studio produces and would quite like the opportunity to prove myself to you and your studio. Really I’m looking for placements or employment, I want to be designing and I want to be able to show what I can do. This send out shows what I have done and what my skills are, I hope you enjoy the typography, the layout and

the work contained within it. I hope you feel that what you see here is worth getting in touch with me about and offering me a placement or a job.

Where’s the rest of it? I was limited by the size of newspaper that the Newspaper Club can print (though in some ways its a benefit) I’ve included three projects that I’m most proud of and then a quick look at some more projects I’ve worked on. To get the full range you’ll have to visit my recently updated and redesigned website at http://craigbaldwin.com, go on, you know you want to have a look.

By the way this newspaper is in black and white, in the end I’ve come to like the limitations I think it suits the medium better but it was also all I could afford. I’m afraid I don’t have £500 spare to meet the minimum order for colour printing.

1 Is Print Dying?

CLIENT: University brief | OUTPUT: 176 page book | SOFTWARE: Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop

For all of the last semester of the last year we worked on our final major project. It formed a substantial part of our final mark and would also be presented at the degree show. For 18 weeks we would be working on a brief we created, so it had to have substance and genuinely interest us to keep the momentum going and not run out of steam half way. This was about the same time that an Apple event had been called, one which would eventually lead to the unveiling of the iPad. It was a time of great discussion about the future of print, would this Apple tablet put the final nail in the coffin of the print industry?

This seemed the perfect topic and for the next four months I was busy keeping track of all the discussion and opinion that was being thrown about the Internet.

The sheer amount of research certainly helped with my reflective journal (a proj-

ect that ran alongside the final major project and helped illustrate our research).

As I was researching print it made sense that the final outcome would be something related, I played around with ideas of a book, magazine, zines, posters or blog articles. I produced a series of ‘poster’ zines to document my research and provide a chance to experiment with layout and paper stock.

By the time that the Easter holiday rolled around (half way point more or less) I was playing around with the idea of a ‘pretty book’, a book whose contents perfectly demonstrated why print still had plenty of life left in it. During the four week holiday this eventually became ‘Is print dying?’ a book that brought together all my research and provided a space at the back for some of my work to be committed to paper. After playing around with

format I settled on a 40 by 25cm spread (the closest rational approximation of the golden ratio) and a seven column grid, this grid allowed a great deal of flexibility whilst staying close to the three column grid I used for my own work.

The content was divided into five sections with the headings physicality, personality, permanence, futuregazing and creativity.

The first three were the key attributes of print in my mind; how it feels, its layout and the permanent nature of paper, and the last two let me look ahead and include more of my work. I came back from the holiday with 180 pages of content that in the remaining weeks was refined before being printed on GF Smith Naturalis smooth recycled and hand bound by P&G Wells. To the right is only one spread due to space constraints, visit http://craigbaldwin.com/portfolio/fmp.php to see more.

2 Manifesto CLIENT: University brief | OUTPUT: 11 A2 posters | SOFTWARE: Photoshop

As we went into our third and final year of University we were told we had to define ourselves, to set ourselves a manifesto and a set of rules to which we abide when we work. With these rules we had to create a series of posters that visualised these rules. Through a process of refinement I whittled a large list of possibilities down to just 11, we were meant to only have 10 but that’s the point of the last rule. I have included them at the end as a reference.

I’m constantly evolving but I find these 11 statements of intent still hold true. Some are a bit contentious, such as the first and the sixth rule but that doesn’t make them any less true to me.

What I enjoyed most about this project however was the supporting poster work.

We were only asked to produce 3-5 A2 posters but I found the process so much fun that I created a poster for the entire

series. At the time I was reading Stefan Sagmeister’s ‘Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far’ and was enticed by the idea of physically recreating my rules in much the same way that Sagmeister did for each of his lessons. I was especially interested in 3D non-digital typography and I wanted to create an installation out of each rule in its appropriate location.

It’s strange that I decided to pursue one of the most time consuming ideas I’ve had when I was only given two weeks to finish the project but I found the whole process enjoyable; cutting out letters, experimenting with different locations and taking the photos. I particularly enjoyed the reaction by the fine art students when I stuck a few bits of paper over their studio sign so that it read ‘design is art with a purpose’.

I hear some of them had a meeting about that and were quite annoyed, oops. The

sixth rule doesn’t literally mean steal anything you like it’s a homage to the JeanLuc Godard quote “it’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to”.

The ten rules 1. Design is art with a purpose.

2. Touch can never be replaced.

3. Design is in the detail.

4. Be colourful, but not for the sake of it.

5. Hard work pays its own dividends.

6. Steal from everywhere.

7. Seek criticism and be nice about it.

8. The best ideas come at night.

9. Always take down notes.

10. Don’t design for the money.

11. Break the rules.

To the right I have included the main overview poster, you can visit http://craigbaldwin.com/portfolio/manifesto.php to see the whole series.

3 Shoreditch CLIENT: University exhibition | OUTPUT: 2 A0 posters | SOFTWARE: Photoshop

Alongside our end of year school wide degree show we were invited to submit work to be a part of a graphic design only exhibition taking place in the Shoreditch town hall basement organised by the Winchester School of Art. We were given the working title ‘Out of dust; more light and power’ a homage to the town hall’s motto when it operated as a power station of sorts.

Before starting this project I decided to visit the location to get a feel for the place, it’s not your typical gallery space, not like the white cubes you normally get.

This place had emotion and history in its cracked and peeling walls. I visited during another exhibition by an orchestra and their music added to the almost haunting atmosphere. But what I felt most when I was there was isolation, I was near to the centre of London yet in this dark base-

ment I could have been anywhere, I was cut off from the rest of the world and this is often how I have felt whilst at University; when I go inside my mind and think, creating my own personal world.

I decided instead of working to the title they had given us I was going to use this theme of isolation that the location had inspired to create a series of posters. I don’t normally create photomontages but found the whole process enjoyable, combining photography I took when at college and hand written type very much inspired by the posters for ‘Where the wild things are’ and the work of a fellow student (Katy Gravett in this case, link on my website). It was a fairly rough process I used to create the final two posters that I settled on.

They encouraged us to use the space given to us, the Shoreditch basement is

a very large space and even with lots of large scale work we only managed to use half the space. To match the rough style of work I used a black and white photocopier to blow up the images, which were designed at A4, to be A0 by combining eight sheets of A3. Reproduction wasn’t perfect but that suited the work just fine.

To the right is a photo taken by Chris Greenaway of the two posters in situ, it was a fairly dark area I was given which helped add to the posters.

These were not the only posters I created for the project, just the two that I decided to use. If you would like the see the other three that I created you can see the full series at http://craigbaldwin.com/portfolio/shoredtich.php along with all my other work. Now that I’ve redesigned it I reckon it’s well worth a look.

M More work CLIENT: Various | OUTPUT: Various | SOFTWARE: After Effects, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere Pro

One - This is the self promotional work that I created at the end of the first semester of the last year. After defining who we were in the Manifesto project we were told to create the collateral that would represent us to everyone else; CVs, business cards, letter heads, compliment slips and everything else we could imagine such as stickers.

Two - For this live brief I created the identity and stand design for the Winchester School of Art fashion stand at a London fashion show. We were briefed to work from the title ‘eccentric heritage’ and I spent a lot of time looking at the wallpaper that you find in stately homes like the ones featured in the Dave channel idents.

It was almost a last minute idea that had me drawing flowing floral designs on black board with silver marker pen but they worked and I was one of five (out

of about 40) short listed so I turned the designs into vectors and applied the idea across all the different formats; tickets, stand design, posters and other mock ups. The idea was to print using Pantone silver if I was selected, in the end I wasn’t but it was good to do some illustration.

Three - ‘Across the stars’ was a self initiated three minute stop motion animation that was made by creating physical objects, photographing them all rotating and then digitally compositing them together in After Effects. Music and sound effects were added in Premiere Pro and then the final piece was exported. It combines children’s storybook visuals with a story about a community fleeing war. After the crit one of my tutors asked for a copy so she could show her children which I was quite chuffed with. You can see it at http://vimeo.com/4843325.

Four - An entry for a competition between the Winchester and Dalian schools of art.

We had to create a logo that represented our local city, I used a map to plot points of interest in Winchester, linked them to form a W shape and then used the surrounding hills as inspiration for the flow of the end logo’s shape.

Five - Whilst working on ‘Is print dying?’

I created ‘poster’ zines to document my research and later one to give myself a chance to experiment with layout and paper stock. These were called TraDigiZines, a combination of the subject matter in each; Traditional and Digital.

The idea was originally inspired by a visit

by Alex Zamora of Feverzines, I found that I really wanted to play around with the zine format but moved away from the traditional 32 page booklet so I could be more experimental.

1

2

3

4

5

Twenty Ten Hope you enjoy the rest of your year! | http://craigbaldwin.com | craigsbaldwin@gmail.com