Slide 1: At the beginning of summer I set up my website carolinehenson.co.uk. I just used indexhibit because I wanted to get my work online quickly as I thought it would help me to get a work placement. I set up my blog on my website as I got fed up of using blogger and personally found this system to work better than separate blogs. I have kept it updated frequently with work I have done, things that inspire me and occasions when my work has been mentioned on other blogs. Surprisingly, I got the most feedback on some cross stitch pieces I did quite a while ago and the only place I had these uploaded onto was my flickr. I’ve missed cross stitching and bought loads of supplies over the summer. Unfortunately I never got round to actually doing any but hopefully thats something I can bring into my projects this year.
Slide 2: My dissertation is on the subject of grids and asks the question ‘is design ruled by the straight line?’. To prepare for this I read these 10 books over the summer. As you can imagine, this took quite a bit of time! Especially when it came to fishing out the important bits to note down. I feel quite prepared to start on it now as I have loads of notes on many different aspects of grid-based design. I looked at grids in their most obvious sense like in books, posters and so on but then I also looked at things such as painting as the ‘De Stijl’ movement heavily featured grids and lines. I found reading about architecture to also be really interesting. I got out ‘Towards A New Architecture’ by Le Corbusier. He had a strong interest in grids and even invented a modular method of measurement.
Slide 3: In terms of primary research I’ve contacted Antonio Carusone - founder of the famous Aisle One design blog and The Grid System website. He has agreed to be interviewed for my dissertation. A designer at Purpose who helped me with my portfolio and someone at my work placement have also said that they are willing to help me out. I’m now looking for someone involved in architecture to contact as I’m interested in how grids have affected the design world as a whole.
Slide 4: Over the summer I had a look over some really old ISTD briefs. One that caught my eye was called ‘Red, Green, Blue’. It basically asked for the creation of a journal of some kind based on the colour red, green or blue and black. I chose red as its one of my favourite colours. I used this brief as just a chance to play around with type and illustration rather than anything serious. I called it ‘When In Doubt Wear Red’ as quoted by fashion icon Bill Blass. It is comprised of facts, quotes, song lyrics and short stories all linked by the colour red. This was just a fun little thing to do but I think this brief could be taken a lot further and I may re-do it sometime this year.
Slide 5: I’d been looking at lots of bold geometric type on some design blogs and decided I wanted to create some myself as I’ve never actually tried to create my own font before. I came up with the idea of using triangles as counters as I thought this could look good. I sketched it out but when I tried re-creating them in Illustrator I felt that some of the characters worked well such as the c and the n but others were too thin and stick-like such as the p, the r and the y. So I redid the ones I wasn’t happy with. I then created a quick poster with it because my InDesign had a major breakdown and nearly destroyed my macbook. I named it Trinity because of the 3 points of the triangle. Its ok for my first ever font I suppose but I do think it looks a bit crap. I think I’ll stick with utilising the fonts of others, rather than creating my own.
Slide 6: Another thing that inspired me was paper cut type. I’d seen some that used layers of paper, something I hadn’t really seen before and wanted to have a go at doing some of my own. Layering creates a slightly psychedelic visual so I chose the word ‘dream’. I used both the cuts and the cut offs to create two different interpretations. The blue and white relate to cloud imagery which is often associated with dreams. I think this experiment worked quite well as its a very different style of paper cutting than what most people do.
Slide 7: A large chunk of my summer was spent emailing many many companies around Leeds and Sheffield for a work placement. Even though I did start in May when we were told to, I was crap at following people up. I did get quite a few replies from people who really liked the work in my portfolio but didn’t have any room for me in their company. Eventually, around mid-August I got a reply from a guy called David Hatton at BrandNew in Armley. I’d liked what I’d seen of their work on their website and decided that it was relevant and close enough for me to spend some time at. I then researched what Armley was like, found out there was nothing there apart from some old asbestos factories and scared myself into not wanting to go there for fear of death.
Luckily I got an email from ICM in Headingley. This seemed ideal as they did lots of print work, were only 15 minutes walk away and I could go to Shaky Jakes every day. However once I had an interview there I was left feeling cold and was only wanted to go for the daily milkshake. They also had several other applicants so I thought I might not get it. A week later I had an interview at BrandNew with a guy called Adam. The people there were so friendly, they were really enthusiastic about the work in my portfolio and took loads of time out to show me examples of things they had done. They immediately asked if I could start and I accepted. Turns out I got the place at ICM as well but I didn’t really care.
I liked how there was such a variety of work at BrandNew. It is part of massive company called Logistik who have loads of different departments including their own little sandwich company. Within BrandNew there was a web team, coding people, 3d & motion people and the print team who I worked with. They do work for clients such as Bupa, Marks & Spencer, Yorkshire Water and they recently did all the rebranding work to turn Kabuki sushi into Sesame who have a shop in Leeds Uni.
Slide 8: During my time there I did a lot of moodboards. I found these to be really useful when coming up with concepts and visuals for projects considering we didn’t have the long time scales for research like we do here. Adam even asked me to come with a concept for the new website animation and print campaign for BrandNew. Moodboards helped me a lot when I had to portray my ideas to members of the other departments. Thank god for the 3d and motion team, whose presence meant I didn’t have to go anywhere near After Effects.
Slide 9: The first project I did was for a new inhouse company whose name was yet to be decided. BrandNew put an emphasis on sustainability and that was one of the qualities of this new company. I had to design logos and storyboard animations for two of the chosen names and show how they would work on business cards, leaflets and websites.
Slide 10: I did this pdf for Martin House, a charity for bereaved children. This info pack was for teachers informing them how to deal with recently bereaved children and where to find helpful resources. This is going to be put on their website as a downloadable pdf and was one of many live briefs I did. One of the things I liked about my placement was that they were constantly busy with work so instead of giving me past briefs like some places do, they always gave me things that would be sent to print, shown to clients or would help them in some way.
Slide 11: I did these stylesheets for The Pearl Club and Women’s Business Forum. These serve as identity guide lines so if any designer needs to do work for these companies, they have to use the swatches, fonts and logo styles that I have used here. This was a good exercise for me and I think that doing some worksheets in a similar style for my future projects will help me to be consistent in everything I make.
Slide 12: These are some winner envelopes I did for a Yorkshire Water awards ceremony. I think they look a bit cheesy but its what they wanted.
Slide 13: I also did some artwork for Marks & Spencer to show their sponsorship at the British Cheese Awards. Doing this brief and the Yorkshire Water brief showed me how difficult it can be to work with clients as they often don’t realise what a designer needs to be able to make something look good in large formats. Both companies didn’t bother to send over proper versions of logos so that meant either hounding them or improvising, luckily they liked the result both times. It was especially important on these banners as the pop ups were going to be 2m tall and the hanging ones 3m wide. Marks & Spencer were also quite confused as to what they wanted. At first they said they wanted the stacked logo with their special ‘heroic green’ colour as a background and then they said they wanted a black background with the Your M&S logo. The email system they had in place at BrandNew showed me how important constant client contact can be.
Slide 14: On my last day I had to come up with some colour palettes to be used on a redesign of a website called Wonder. I spent about 4 hours creating loads of colour options for a client and when she came in she just completely dismissed them all saying she wanted ‘steely metallic colours’ like the blue they used on their logo. The way she said it made my morning feel like a total waste. She could have bothered to tell us this earlier when she was briefing us. So I had to re-do everything. This experience taught me how difficult it can be to work with clients, especially when they are so headstrong like this horrible woman. But overall I had a great time there and Adam said he would add me to their list of freelancers and that I would even get paid next time.
Slide 15: When I finished the second year I had it clear in my mind that this year I wanted to focus on publication design and after the summer that is still very much my aim. Researching grid-based layout for my dissertation and working on several layouts as a part of my work placement has solidified in my mind that this is the direction I want to go in. My work placement has also increased my interest in branding as I like being able to see something through from start to finish and branding seems like a good way to do that. They also told me that thats where the big money is. I have strong skills in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator as those are the main things I will need to work in design for print I will continue to build upon my skills in those programs. I am still slightly interested in web design and working in the industry has shown me how much work there is in that area. I will try to develop my skills in Dreamweaver and web design but not at the same level as the other programs I have mentioned. I’m really excited to start the 3rd year and hopefully my work will develop in both quality and professionalism.
