Emma Ridgway 'Methods & Madness' EGRD3014, 1006485

Emma Ridgway Methods & Madness

PaperCo

PaperCo set us a brief which was to become one of the most challenging briefs I’ve ever completed; however, it was also probably the most enjoyable. The realisation of creating work which could potentially be used as part of a campaign put enormous pressure on me to create work which met the standards of the global giant which is Virgin.

From the meeting with the client myself and Georgina (the person who I worked with on this brief) decided to stick to the specific guidelines set by Virgin, however still following the indications of adding some individuality in order to make the work more fun and exciting. The message we got from the first briefing at the BAFTAs was that the designs they wanted from us had to communicate a specific message of ‘fun’; also, that we needed a unique selling point for our ideas by using our own concepts. The designs also had to be engaging to the audience.

Georgina and I wanted our designs to follow the original briefing thoroughly, so we devised a concept of catergorising the main sub-brands of Virgin. From this I created these 6 icons, which are intended to represent the main Virgin brands in an engaging and fun way to the audience. From this we went on to create our brochure.

Virgin Atlantic was born in the early 80s through Richard’s dedication to give his customers a high end quality airline with a value for money.

In 2007 their turnover grew by over £200m to £2.14bn, and they’re still growing stronger than ever since Virgin Atlantic first flew into our lives 25 years ago!

They take pride in their heritage, so the staff take pride in it too.We are fully dedicated to giving each customer a journey worth remembering, so its quite simply...

“Love at first flight!”

Virgin Atlantic have since extended to thirty routes worldwide: 10 routes to the US 6 to Asia Pacific 4 African routes 1 Indian Ocean 1 route to the Middle East 8 Caribbean destinations

Want to hear about our exclusive service? Well here it is...

Virgin Holidays is one of our most exciting branches. It’s the gateway to some of the most fantastic destinations on the planet!

Virgin Holidays are always on the lookout for new ways to make your vacation even more enjoyable. So whenever customers book with us, they can choose to book with a company who have their best interests at heart.

People who choose us as their holiday planner are guaranteed a vacation of the finest quality, whatever the budget may be!

With over 200 nation wide stores our customers can book their holiday of a lifetime with one our trained specialists or simply from the comfort of their own home by personalising their own holiday entirely online.That’s why we’re #1!

Our Rockstar service means that we can worry about the little things while you take our customers pick from one of our fabulous destinations, lie back on that lilo, and relax like the superstar they are.

Virgin Media is one of our newest and most innovative branches of the brand.The new TiVO Box has made us one of the UKs favourite media providers, and the proof is in our feedback; we’ve had more positive customer service than any other network.

Catch up tv- Our pick of the week's TV shows are available to watch on demand, just in case you missed them the first time.

On Demand- Our TV Choice On Demand service gives you instant access to over 500 films and 1000s of TV shows and music videos.

Sky TV- We have the best range of Sky programmes including Sky Sports, Sky 1 and Sky Movies, so no one gets to miss a thing!

We’re proud of our expansion into the media market which provides top-quality service for our customers with an unbeatable value for money.

'Above all, you want to create something you're proud of. This has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off not doing it.' Richard Branson

Virgin Money is one of our biggest branches in the Virgin family. Like the other Virgin Companies, it was launched in order to give our customers a better deal.

This began as Virgin Direct back in 1995 and quickly became a global business in 2003.With its award winning service and advertisement campaigns it has now become one of the globes largest money companies, and it’s still growing every day.

Virgin Money also provides Home Insurance on top of its competitive pre-paid cards and credit cards.

Virgin money has strected to help good causes too, with Virgin Unite being lauched in 2004 by Richard in order to tackle tough social challenges by using Virgins global resources and it’s people.

We decided to carry on our ‘icon’ concept throughout the rest of our designs for PaperCo/Virgin. We used the icons to summerise the main Virgin brands as well as placing them next tot he original logos, creating a link between the two. I also felt that these made the brochure more playful and fun.

The original idea for the brochure came from drawing and sketching ideas (see image above). Our idea was to originally cut the icons out of the brochure, in order to have them as separate objects, however I felt this took away from our original concept.

The brochure therefore folds into an A5 size piece, allowing for clear images and easily readable fonts. This makes the brochure compact but still easy to read.

Virgin Mobile, an award winning service and well deserved too.We’ve been voted ‘best customer service’ for the past 8 years running by the Mobile Choice Awards, and we’re confident enough in our team that we’ll continue to gain our customers support and recognition.

We provide both Broadband and Landlines for our customers to ensure maximum communication to the rest of the world! Our fibre-optic cables make our broadband service the fastest in the UK, and the most reliable. It also makes downloading easier, quicker and a lot more efficient.We’re already one step ahead of the competition!

Our Mobile service also offers the latest phones with deals to suit every one of our customers.

Our highly reliable service makes our overall communication area of of Virgin’s most exciting companies!

Virgin Active is more than just a gym, it’s a lifestyle. Here we’re all passionate about health and well being, and of course, excercise. That is why we offer the highest quality equipment that include state-of-the-art cardiovascular equipment, toning circuits, free weights, swimming pools, indoor cycling studios, aerobic studios, and junior care facilities.

Virgin Active is by far one the most fun and exciting gyms of it’s kind. Only here will our customers be offered top-notch help from some of the finest instructors, or they can simply lay back and relax in one of our spas. With a gym like this, we can only be proud of it.

Of course our brand values still stand as the most important aspect of our company. The most important thing we want our customers to do whilst joining in our gyms is to remain active, at a good value for money, and most importantly, have fun whilst they do this.

The timeline which was also a requirement for this brief was a late edition to our brochure. We decided to place the brochure on the back of the brochure, allowing it to double up as a poster, due to the fact that folded out, our brochure stretched to A1 size.

The timeline also had to be informative as well as visually interesting, I found this difficult and after our presentation to the client, I realised that a few changes could be made to our timeline in order to make it even better. We changed the order which meant the timeline began at the top, creating less confusion on the direction.

I feel that myself and Georgina designed the brochure and poster in a way which responds to the brief of the clients. We also met their requirements on regards to the use of the paper, by informing them on the presentation boards and the rationale that everything will be printed on to PaperCo’s 9 Lives Paper.

The final requirement for Virgin was the information graphics poster. Myself and Georgina both found this to be the most difficult part of the brief.

I found it hard to create a poster which was both informative eye catching, and unique. I finally devised an idea which involved going back to our original circular icon concept, from this we created shapes which became our final piece.

As the poster was intended to celebrate Virgin Atlantic’s birthday, we wanted to make sure we got this message across clearly. We also managed to make the information look clear as well as informative.

The poster is A2 size, with a map on the back which we designed to show Virgin’s global reach as a brand.

Finally, as part of the PaperCo brief for Virgin, we designed somewhat of a sleeve for all of our items to fold and fit into. We designed this as an added extra on top of what was being asked of us. We felt that it gave the information package a more personal feel and made it less likely for a customer to throw the package away.

Again we devised the box from our original icon concept by placing the icons inside the box, with the Virgin logo cut out allowing the audience to see the icons even when the information has been taken out.

This was not an idea we thought of at the start of this briefing, it came about when we had finished the other designs, and came as a solution to how we would keep our designs together.

I feel that this brief has allowed me to turn a lot of unique ideas into actual products, the fact that we were able to print our brochure and poster at the actual size we wanted them helped give us an idea of how the audience

Look-I-Likey This was the first brief set this year. I found that it was good in which it added a lot of humour the start of the year. It did however, give us the difficulty of establishing who we all look like in regards to the celebrity of fictional worlds.

I eventually found my ‘likeness’ with the fictional television character Lizzie McGuire, who was played

by Hilary Duff in the early 2000’s. I then found a useable image of her and attempted to mirror this image. The image below shows the image of Lizzie in which I mimicked and the photo on the next page shows my attempt at copying the photograph by using similar clothes, hair and expressions.

This image shows the final version, in which I attempted to photoshop my own face with Lizzie’s face in order to create a some-what celebrity-moph. There were issues with dimensions and skin tones which I attempted to change.

However I feel that overall I created a successful celebrity-moph.

Shooting Stars

For the Shooting Stars brief, I was asked to analyse how media stories have been constructed and represented in a particular way, and then reinterpret one of these news stories in my own way.

I chose to reinterpret the News of the World phone hacking scandal. To get ideas for this brief I decided to research those who were already broadcasting the story on a weekly basis; the BBC and Sky News channels, as well as other rival newspapers. I found useful sources on their websites, which allowed me to gather information on the scandal itself. I then began mind-mapping ideas for the brief (see next page).

From this, and my initial research, I came up with a concept, in which I asked what would happen if the original hackers were hacked? And what sort of conversation this would unveil.

I then decided to create a stop-motion style film, which would represent the old-fashioned type writer. The type writer would then type a some-what transcript, which would unveil a conversation between the hackers, putting the audience in a different position altogether.

These are screen grabs from the final video which I created. It shows the old type-writer format revealing a transcript of a conversation between hackers. I also added an additional ending to the film, in which a news presenter tells the audience that the News of the World is to close, therefore revealing the consequences of what is happening in the previous conversation.

The video is uploaded to my blog as well as through Vimeo. I have shown an image of my video on my blog and on Vimeo on the previous page. Links are below. http://vimeo.com/30334697 http://eridgway.gdnm.org

Chinese Whispers

This brief entitled us to experiment with how different people would respond to a certain think, and in return, analyse their difference and individuality in that context and how it differs from that of other people.

For mine I decided to chose a poem I know very well; the poem is called ‘Mother Any Distance’ by Simon Armitage. I decided to write the first line of this poem word for word and how it is exactly written in the poem. I then asked someone to rewrite the line, but to change one thing, then another person would rewrite the new line.

This continued until I had asked 10 different people, and by the time they had finished, the sentence had completely changed from the original ‘Mother any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands’ to the much more humorous ‘Bears any pear less than a single bear wears several pears and bears’.

The interesting fact was that each person valued the original structure of how the poem was written, and instead changed many of the nouns. From this I created a design which showcases the different sentences as well as displaying the original and the final sentence.

Biography: George Orwell I found the this particular brief difficult, however I was relieved to find out that I had chosen a name I was familiar with; George Orwell.

To begin this brief I decided to research his history, particularly, his books for which he was famous for. I decided to read one of his books- ‘Animal Farm’. Which I found to be quite a dark book. I then decided for this brief to reinterpret one of his book covers for animal farm, in a way which reflects the darkness of the book whilst still maintaining the ideas from the original covers.

I then realised, however, that this wasn’t necessarily diving into Orwell’s history. With my original idea for this brief being a kind of booklet exploring his books, I decided to change it, and to instead research the history of just one particular book and it’s many covers; one of his most famous books ‘1984’. I then made a layout which explained my research into his book cover history for 1984.

I decided to research Orwell’s book cover history for the book 1984; starting from the original book cover and publisher and progressing through the years to see how the image of the book covered changed.

His first cover for one of his most famous novels, 1984, is shown on the right. It was first published on 1949 published by Secker and Warburg. Since then it has be republished to feature all sorts of new covers, most of which reflect the actual contents of the book. One of the most recent republished covers was created to celebrate it’s 60th anniversary in 2009 and was designed by Jason Jonhson.

Throughout the last 6 decades there have been dozens of versions of the book, however, I personally still appreciate the simplicity of the original book cover. I realise from this brief that book covers especially, can be reinterpreted, however comparing them to the original shows how important the first cover was in influencing those later designs, albeit better or worse than the original.

Bibliography Visual Research: An Introduction to research methodologies in Graphic Design by Ian Nobel and Russell Bestly http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14187122 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14846456 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12296392 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14017661 http://news.sky.com/home/video/16026335 http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16026251 http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16026231 http://www.simonarmitage.com/ http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/index.jsp http://www.virginmedia.com/ http://www.virgin.com/ http://www.paperco.co.uk/pco/index.cfm George Orwell ‘Animal Farm’ George Orwell ‘1984’

Evaluation This term has been both good and bad for me in regards to my work. I felt like I struggled on certain aspects more than others, although I do beliveve that they have helped me in gaining more experience in certain areas.

The shooting stars brief in particular was tough in the actual creation of the film itself. I feel I am a much better edittor of films rather than an actual film maker, and working alone on this brief was difficult in getting my original idea onto film. I made more than one film for this brief, due to the fact that I had made one before deciding to scrap it because I had filmed it wrong and it needed remaking only a couple of days before the deadline. I felt that simply because I lacked the skills to make a decent film that this slowed me down for this brief. However, I was eventually happy with my final video. I felt that it was an interesting brief in which it gave us a chance to reinterpret a story in our own way, and I chose a story which I had already been following in the news. This gave me a better understanding of the outcome for the brief.

The PaperCo brief was by far my favourite for the term. Knowing we were physically showing a client our work put pressure on me and made me work even harder in order to get a good outcome.

It also gave me the realisation of doing an actual client brief. I was also extremely happy with the work I produced for this brief, and I feel that myself and Georgina worked very well together as a team, with both of us having strengths in particular areas.

I also enjoyed the Chinese Whispers brief. I found that it was very interesting to see how different people interpret something as simple as one sentence from a simple poem. Reading different peoples analysis of that one sentence gave me an insight into how that person sees certain things, whether they chose to take it seriously and think about what to write for ages, or whether they simply made it humorous and added a funny word to the sentence, changing its context altogether. I found this brief useful.

The biography brief was probably the most difficult, as it seemed to me that the idea of the brief was in the research and not necessarily about the end product. I found research difficult, and changed my idea for this brief several times, however I managed to find some interesting areas in which to research, and decided to present my research and my findings as the overall outcome for this particular brief.

This term I feel that I struggled when working in unfamiliar areas, however I feel I have done well in regards to methods for this semester, and have tried to show progression throughout my work in this portfolio