My name is Hannah Phillips and I am an illustrator and designer from London. This year I have focused on publication design in the Impression Studio. With illustration being my main passion, I have also helped put on a few drawing sessions for illustrators studying at The Cass. This publication is a Collection of my studio and Creative Industry Practice work from this year at Level 5.
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04-05 // Impression 06-07 // Summaries 08-09 // Studio Identity 10-13 // Publishing Unbound 14-15 // Mini-Monograph 16-19 // Anthology 20-21 // Riso Show!
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32-33 // Miscellaneous 34 // Thought of the Week: Kate Moross 22-23 // Creative Industry Practice 24-25 // Summaries 26-27 // Pastiche 1560 28-29 // Market Ready 30-31 // Kickstarter
35 // CCS 36 // Thought of the Week: Fig Taylor 37 // Blogging 38 // Thought of the Week: Hannah Slaney 39// It's Fcking Drawing 40// Contact Me
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Studio Impression explores publishing within design practice, with an emphasis on original thinking and innovation. Working in teams that reflect the real working structures of the design publishing world, we have taken on roles including editor, art director, publisher, designer and writer.
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Studio Identity // Creating the studio's identity was the first brief we were given at the beginning of the year. The goal was to create a logo and set of aims that would go on to represent the group and be used on all our publications. Publishing Unbound // Our first full length project had us research innovation in the current design publishing scene and respond to it with our own publication in the form of a folded poster zine. This was to be an edition of 25 which would then be given to everyone in the studio. Then we were to create a binding system to bind the collection of publications. Mini Monograph // Over the Christmas break we were given a mini-brief. I was appointed Ruth Ansel, whom I had to research, design and create a mini-monograph for. It had to take the form of a printed exhibition guide for an imaginary design exhibition. Anthology // Working alongside the English Literature and Creative Writing Department we redesigned its bi-annual literary anthology of student writing. The anthology is a selection of the most outstanding work by English Literature and Creative Writing students in the last academic year (2014-15). Along with creating their anthology, each student was given a piece of text to visually respond to which would then be put into an exhibition along with the reimagined publication. Riso Show // As a studio we were to design and print the Summer Show publication for Visual Communication 2016/17. We were also create a series of printed products to sell at the show. seven
// Studio Identity In order to create a visual identity for the Impression Studio, I first looked at existing brands' logos and identities. After doing so, there was a short amount of time to create a page of ideas for our own logo. Once a few ideas were produced in the studio there was time to then continue working on a proposal. I started with three different routes for but two of them were a little predictable - using the letters 'press', from Impression. So I developed my last idea further. I had sketched out sections of the letters that make up the word Impression within a square to create a really abstract idea. The problem I had when creating the logo was using Adobe Illustrator as I hadn't used it before. However, after looking at tutorials online I was able to translate my drawings onto screen. The logo I designed for the Impression studio's identity was chosen to represent us. However I had to make a few tweaks to the design, before Angharad sent it off to be created as a stamp. This stamp has then been used on our publications to identify our work.
Page nine Impression studio logo design eight | nine
Publishing Unbound // The Poster Zine // After researching a number of London based publishing houses I decided to base my zine on Pushkin Press. I was then going to focus in on their Vertigo imprint and Jamie Keenan's book designs for the series as well as the logo he created for the imprint. The first draft of the article was a basic layout of two columns with the heading at the top of the page and an image of Pushkin's edition of Vertigo. This first draft was very bland and I found it was more to work out how much space I had to write my article. So for the revision, I kept the two column design but included a pull quote and made the opening paragraph bold in comparison with the rest of the body. Rather than using one large photo across the bottom of the article using two smaller images helped to break up the text. I think all these elements helped to create a clean, easy to read spread. The method of print I had my heart set on was letterpress, however I couldn't get into the room until after the deadline so I found a font online and digitally created the design. While there was nothing wrong with the first version of my zine I created for the brief, I knew I wasn't going to be happy with it until I substituted the letterpress styled font out for actual letterpress.
Page ten Poster design Page eleven [Top] Posterzine article [Middle] Front and back cover of posterzine [Bottom] Article close up detail
The week before we broke up for the Christmas break I went into the letterpress room and printed the following words: Pushkin, Press, Vertigo, Design & Crime. Then I had the Christmas break to clean up the scanned in words and slightly alter the design of my zine.
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// Publishing Unbound // Zine Collation Before I started looking into ways to collate all the zines together, I was set on an idea. However my idea was to create a wooden box and I don't think I could've pulled this off on my own, I definitely would have needed the help of my Grandad. So with the help of Pinterest I started some visual research. I came across some really simple designs that were cardboard containers but I wanted something that could expand as I didn't know how many zines I would end up with at the end of the project. Where some people in the studio are hit and miss with coming in I wanted to create a device that I would be able to expand and add more zines to rather than something more certain such as binding. This led me to look at how to incorporate elastic into the device as it is expandable and I can adjust the collation of the zines. For the outcome of the method of zine collation I used card covered in blue paper to place either side of the zines. To do this I used backing card from a sketch pad and wrapped paper over it, this kept it cheap and quick to produce so that if I wanted to change the colour or make more then it wouldn't set me back days or much money! Then to keep the sandwich of zines together I used elastic and my trusty hot glue gun to secure the black elastic to the right length.There is then a booklet at the front displaying the names of everyone who has produced zines.
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Page twelve Zine collation with Impression Studio logo stamped on the top cover sheet and project description sheet underneath. Page thirteen [Top] Collation design from the side shows that zines can be moved about and are not fixed in place [Bottom] Zine collation front view
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// Mini Monograph When I was given Ruth Ansel as my designer for this brief I was a little unsure. I hadn't heard of her before so my excitement for this project took a while to kick in. It's a real shame I hadn't heard of Ansel before as she really is a really important figure in magazine design. While I have wanted to keep the layout of my monograph simple, I wanted to experiment with the colour and images that I used in order to bring some energy into the project. During my research I found a design that overlaid images of different colours. So in order to recreate something like this I found two images, then changed one pink and the other green using Picmonkey. After this I would then print off one of the images, then place the print out back into the paper feed in order to print the second colour. I went into the letterpress room with a quote from Ruth Ansel. With this text I wanted to make a poster for my middle page spread. I ended up with pages of experimentation using the quote 'Magazines give you an idea of what it was like to be alive at a certain time.' But I struggled to effectively create something in the time I had. However it did help generate ideas which I took across to InDesign. For the final outcome I used an acetate sheet for the cover, which I thought really brought the monograph together, giving it a sleek, professionally finished feel. Page fourteen [Top] Poster spread [Bottom] Article spread example fifteen
Anthology // Redesigned Publication // From talking to our client Trevor from the English Literature Department one of the things that was apparent was we were pretty free with how we chose to create the book. So as a group we looked at ways to mix up the traditional book. Our visual research had us looking at binding and ways of making the publication unique. However, researching into printing quotes was the biggest wake up to reality I've ever gotten while in university. With a budget of five hundred pounds, I was expecting to get quotes come out at around seven hundred pounds and then we'd have to lower the paper quality or something but that was not the case. To begin with I looked at two or three websites to get quotes for a perfect bound, 120 page book. The quote from Book Printing UK for just over three thousand pounds was actually the cheapest response I got. Our group then thought about ways to print to actually print and bind the publications ourselves. This would involve the whole studio helping out to print off 300 books but it was something we thought we could do. So, Maria introduced us to screw binding and it was something we put together ourselves for the pitch to Trevor.
Page seventeen [Top] Group research and mock up print spec for redesign proposal [Bottom] Screen printed cover development ideas in sketchbook sixteen
The outcome of the Anthology redesign was a combination of both the group I worked in and another team. This meant that it was primarily our group that set up the design and layout of the inside of the publication, while the other team worked on a screen printed cover for the books. Everyone else in the studio worked on an exhibition to promote the redesigned publication.
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Anthology // Individual Response // For my individual response I was given Kashta Wallace's 'The Teen Epic of Absolute Beginners' which is an essay reviewing Colin MacInnes's portrayal of the new, financially enfranchised teenagers, their rejection of the values of their parents and their refusal of the broader racism of society, and shows their creation of a new society, accepting of racial and sexual differences, in the musical and cultural fusion of Soho and the West End. While completing my visual research I was really drawn to a 1960s teen monthly publication - The Mod's Monthly. A short-lived magazine from around 1964, it's more of a novelty these days than any kind of critique of the mod scene past. After discovering The Mod's Monthly magazine I had to work out what I would include in my own riso printed publication. I selected some of the images I found during my visual research in order to brainstorm what some of my pages could include. This included 'fight posters' which I looked at to create my own version to advertise the Brighton Beach fight between the Mods and Rockers. Using riso printing I produced three red spreads and a blue, which represented the teen subculture of being a 'Mod' in London. Page eighteen [Top] Back cover design [Bottom] Riso magazine spread nineteen
// Riso Show! This brief was our last chance of the year to work as a collective and was very bittersweet. The publication was set up as an unbound format of A3 sheets, folded to A4. It collects Studios Impression, Dialogue, Inventivity and Author Reporter, as well as Level 4 and Animation. The publication contains an account of each studio's work from the year and will unfold to create signage and wall visuals for each studio. My input to this project was to create the signage for Studio Impression and I started off by looking at the manicule. I felt that because of the manicule's strong link to publications it would be perfect to use with the Impression signage as we are the publication studio. The manicule would not only make sense with the studio but work as a means of direction for the Summer Show. Using letterpress I printed the word Impression along with a few squares which I scanned in and manipulated on Photoshop. With this I created my own pixelated printer's fist because of the links between the manicule and the digital cursor. After I did this I had to work out how the design would spread across the four A3 spreads that make up the signage because of being able to print this on the riso printer. I found due to having large areas of ink I had to really lower the contrast when taking the design over to the riso printer because if the riso roller put too much ink onto the page, that page then got stuck to the rollers and ruined the print. The task of creating signage for the show was very experimental and I was very pleased with my outcome. twenty | twenty one
Page twenty Letterpress pixel manicule design Page twenty one One of the A3 spreads for the Impression signage printed by riso from letterpress scans taken by myself
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Creative Industry Practice has allowed us to explore working on live briefs and begin to think about our places in the creative industry. We have worked in groups on projects and heard from a range of practitioners and professionals in the design industry.
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//Pastiche 1560 Creating a pastiche video of between 15 and 60 seconds was our first individual brief of the year. We were to select an iconic designer or current practitioner to base the video on and could comment on whichever element of them we wanted, whether this was their style or career. //Market Ready In groups we were to develop a proposal for London Met's Christmas Market taking place at Brick Lane's UpMarket. Our group Gum Up developed a collective brand, designed and created products as well as pitch this to the Student Enterprise team at Accelerator. //Kickstarter Working in the same groups from the Market Ready brief we were to develop a project plan and page on Kickstarter. com. The aim was to further our collective brand through collabration and developing a social media.
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Pastiche 1560 // I began looking at one of my favourite designers Mary Blair. She has a strong style through her uses of shape and colour so I think this would translate well into a pastiche. The first thing I wanted to do was look at how I would create a stop motion with paper puppets. After finishing my puppets, I found they just didn't capture the idea I had set my mind on, so I had to find another way to develop a response for the brief. I felt best to form a fresh idea. So I downloaded an animation app on my ipad and then started playing around with it. With the app I found it was only really going to be possible to create a line art animation so as well as a different method of video creating, I also changed the designer.
Page twenty six [Top] Hannah Davies video screenshot showing the onion skin layer [Bottom] Screenshot from the final Hannah Davies Pastiche 1560 video Page twenty seven [Top] Peter from Peter Pan paper puppet [Middle] Alice from Alice in Wonderland paper puppet [Bottom] Mary Blair paper puppet
I then focused on Hannah Davies as I felt I could pair it with the app I was using. I ended up creating a few draft videos as it helped me get to grips with the app a little more and also helped with the process of the final edit. I found that once I recorded my iPad screen through Quick Time, I then had to crop the screen down to remove the border on the top and bottom of the screen. After this I had to shorten the video slightly because I had left the video recording for longer than needed be. My response for this project came a long way from my first stop motion idea and while I still hate producing videos it's now a task which isn't so scary.
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// Market Ready When we first got together in our group there were six of us all with different ideas about what we could produce for the Christmas Market; it was safe to say we were a bit of a mess. Ee looked up some different sayings online and came across 'gum up' as meaning to make a mess of something, and we all agreed that summed us up perfectly at that moment in time. Our group became Gum Up and we quickly started thinking about the logo and how our name could influence design. First of all we discussed the logo and for this Ee created a hand drawn logo type which looked loose and bubbly, almost like bubble gum. The logo was originally white on a mint green background with a pastel pink outline but we felt that it looked too much like we were trying to sell toothpaste! The colours of the first logo did however influence our designs. When creating postcards and stickers for the market we all agreed on the theme of Christmas and using pastel pink and mint green in our designs in order to tie together everyone's individual style.
Page twenty nine [Top] Gum Up logo by Ee Zin [Bottom] Sticker Designs by Puro Laevuo, Hannah Phillips, Cameron Little and Ee Zin. My own designs being the three dogs. twenty eight
My main contribution to the group was helping to put our presentation together for our pitch to Accelerator. To go with the pitch I also put together a costing guide that included everyone's designs and the costings that I had researched through quotes and online searches. I felt that handing out these small booklets meant we could have a minimal presentation filled with visuals and this worked great for us because we it stopped us from reading blocks of text from the slides.
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Kickstarter // Our last project for CIP took us back to the start of the year, working in our Gum Up group again. It was another bittersweet project because while we were all thankful for our last project, we had all really got to know each other this year. But moving on from the soppy stuff we actually got our teeth stuck into the brief. For the Market Ready brief we produced only stickers and postcards which we didn't feel would work as a Kickstarter campaign so we developed what we could create as a team. It was deceided that we would develop products for dogs and their owners. We then called this project Gum Pup as a nod to the first brief. The idea was each Kickstarter tier would allow a different design on a dog collar and then either a tote bag, t-shirt or bracelet. After we agreed on what to sell we met up in the park with my dog Buster and had him model a collar design and we made some t-shirt outcomes which allowed us to take some beautiful photos to use on our Kickstarter page.
Page thirty Collar Design by Cameron Little & Photography by Puro Laevuo Page thirty one [Top] T-Shirt Design by Cameron Little & Photography by Puro Laevuo [Middle] Collar Design by Cameron Little & Photography by Puro Laevuo [Bottom] T-Shirt Design by Ee Zin & Photography by Puro Laevuo
One of the other tasks that we had to think about with this project was creating a video introducing the project and the group. I felt this was the most difficult element of the brief because of my dislike of videos. However working in a group meant I could speak in the video and not have to edit it myself as there were members of the group really confident with the process.
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Thought of the Week // Kate Moross // Kate Moross is an award winning multitasking illustrator, art director, director and designer. It is clear to see why we were to look at Moross because everything she and her studio create are very much part of her personal brand. When it has come to creating this publication, I have tried to keep in mind this same idea of personal brand because our identity isn't just one piece of work but all of our work as a collective.
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// CCS CCS this year has been very different to last year because it has made us think about design in a critical way, which is the whole reason for the class. The first essay of the year for example had us create an 'Alternative Souvenir for London.' Brick Lane was the inspiration and starting point for my set of postcards as the images were selected from the street. They show the graffiti and in a quite literal sense the politics of the street. It is one of the most iconic places in London to find street art which may sound like a contradiction to the alternative but Brick Lane to me is the prime example of culture jamming and showing off political ideology through street art. The aim of my proposed postcards was to carry these ideas through to a new location. I've enjoyed thinking about design in the context of writing essays because it's helped me write about things such as letterpress in the form of a case study which has given me some art history knowledge and therefore allowed me to reflect on design and the purpose of technology and inovation in the field.
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\\ Blogging Wordpress has always been an important part of learning at London Met as the platform allows us to interact with other studients, seeing what everyone is up to as well as reflect on workshops and projects. This year I have bought my own domain and revamped my site in order to continue using my blog outside of university. I feel that the way I present things on my site helps to reinforce the idea of my own personal brand and I hope to push this idea further.
Page thirty six Home page to hnnhphllps.co thirty six
Thought of the Week // Fig Taylor // Portfoilo consultant for The Association of Illustrators, Fig Taylor, visited the studio to give us all advise on the importance of a good portfoilo. The aim of the portfoilo is to sell ourselves and our work so to do this we must show the best work that shows our voices and things we actually enjoy producing. A few things that really stuck with me from Fig's talk included the importance of a digital portfolio. I've really started to think about this as my work online is currently only on my blog and comes across only as a sketchbook; so is an idea I need to develop further. Another thing that I've tried to think about is my work and style echoing throughout the book. Keeping my Collection book mainly black and white means that it reflects my style of illustration and the folios on the page are consistent in order to build the idea of my own brand.
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Thought of the Week // Hannah Slaney // Hannah Slaney is a still life, e-commerce (commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet), and interior photographer from London, she works on a range of projects from commercial to personal but I think they are all visually her style. The photos she produces are crisp and commercial and is a look I wanted for my own book. This meant that I had to take my camera off of manual and test out different settings, which is something I'm not used to. The outcome is work against black mountboard which ties in with the overall design of my portfolio book.
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// It's Fcking Drawing Myself and Rhiannon deceided that we wanted to draw and illustrate more on the course, so we created 'It's Fcking Drawing' on Facebook and invited everyone on the course to join us. As a group we ran our own workshops and mini briefs every week for just over a month in order to encourage and help each other out. Next year we are hoping to have a larger group going and start it from October rather than the end of the year!
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Website Email Instagram Society6
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hannahphillips.co hannahlphillips@hotmail.co.uk instagram.com/hannahphillips society6.com/hnnhphllps