Week Four, Session Two

For the most part of today, we spent working on and developing our ideas in studio time. We have been collaborating well, and have so far created a few concepts for all every piece of media, the poster, flyer, free-form object and also the website. We spoke to Tristan during the class, who seemed very happy with the progress we have made so far, and also gave his input into our ideas. He really like our idea to do our free-form object as a plastic grip claw for kids to pick up trash with, as this is a really effective way of getting kids to enjoy what they're doing.

Next Monday we will have our next interim presentation, one week before our final assignments are due. We feel we are on track, although will keep working consistently to make sure we stay on track to finishing comfortably on time, which will allow us time for final refinements and critiques. We will meet again at least once later on this week, and see how our work is developing, and spend a few hours working together on the project.

Poster Development and Flyer Poster Design

After class I worked on developing our poster, following some helpful feedback from the class and teachers. I have included some developments below, looking at a couple of different options. These have been attached directly below:

Some of the feedback was to look at ways of making the trash look like it's flying our of the fish's mouth, in order to create more movement throughout the poster, so I decided to add to duplicate each piece of trash multiple times, and then lower the opacity on each one respectively, to make it appear as if they're moving at speed. I have also moved the body copy down into the bottom right corner, so it's not getting in the way of the white negative space. In the top poster, I made the fish slightly smaller, and included part of the hand, just enough to make it evident that the fish is being held and dropped into the mouth. In the second development, it is quite a large scale again, although the text has been placed on a diagonal to keep the dynamic appearance of the poster. We will continue to develop this poster following feedback we receive tomorrow in class.

Along with this, I worked on creating a poster for our flyer. The flyer will fold into a small booklet, each page being A5 size, although this will fold out into an A2 poster. Jeremy sketched up a quick drawing of what to put on the poster yesterday, so I used this as a template when creating it digitally. I have attached the digital version below:

We are looking at having the flyer/booklet more as a 'Thankyou' flyer, which then informs the participants how they can continue to look after the environment, organise their own beach cleanups, and also ways to minimize their pollution. This will be handed out to those that attend, and we are aiming for families to come along, so the parents could read and take in the information from the flyer, and instead of throwing it out or storing it somewhere they won't find again, their kids can hang up the poster on their wall. We have used the text "We did it!" to make them feel like they made a big contribution, however, in the body copy we reiterate that pollution is still a massive problem everywhere, and it's only even a temporary step towards a better environment at that one beach. We reiterate that cleaning up our environment is an ongoing process, and encourage them to attend more beach cleanups in the near future. Overall, I quite like how this poster has turned out, and feel that it's a good way to encourage them to keep the flyer by having a poster on the back. 

Again, we will get feedback in class tomorrow and then continue to make developments to each piece of media respectively.

Week Four, Session One

To begin today's session, we started down in The Pit, and had a briefing of what papers we can choose for our core studio paper next year, and got some insight into some past examples of projects. This went on for about an hour or so.

Once we came up to the class, we had studio time until 11:30, and then we had a small class critique of a few posters. During the critique, our poster was one that got picked out for being very emotive and visually appealing. We got some good feedback from the class as well, on how to develop our posters. Tonight, we will continue to work on developing this poster so that we can get feedback on the refined version tomorrow.

Tonight I will also look to digitally create the poster to go on the back of our flyer. In order to do this, I have taken a photo of Jeremy's sketch from earlier today, and I will then use this as a guide on Photoshop. We are looking at having a flyer/brochure, each page A5 sized, which can also fold out into an A2 poster. I have included some drawings of how this works inside of my physical workbook.

Website ideation

I have been researching and ideating for our website and have come up with a few concepts. I aimed for simplicity and strong colours because I believe that above all, our work so far has kept to these pillars of design.

Initially we have a very cartoon styled site, it's bright, appealing and has a certain flow. The design isn't much to call home about with it's title and navigation spreading across the top, and it's core in a narrower centered column.

The second of the ideas is more simple and relies less on the cartoon imagery and more on the information. It is slightly less stereotypical in terms of standard web design.

The best of my concepts so far, and an idea that I feel has a lot of potential is one I created using a few other modern websites for inspiration, it's clean, colourful, with a cartoony edge, but overall it's appealing to all audiences, which I think gives the design a certain merit. It's not cluttered, but it has plenty to interact with, and the aesthetic is incredibly satisfying.

More Website Ideation

Over this weekend I have continued to look at different ideas for the website. I have been trying to get a range of ideas, such as different approaches to the layout, and different variations on our style. I have attached screenshots of my two recent ideas below:

The above concept is similar to my last idea, although I have tried a slightly different layout, and stylistic approach. I had made a longer page for it to scroll, and at the very bottom was the open mouth, as it is on the current poster. This idea could have potential, although I will look to continue developing and coming up with new ideas at the same time.

I quite like the above idea, as it's quite a minimalist style, and would be very easy to navigate. It's a bit different having this style, rather than the sterotypical scroll website. This design consists more of the user using the arrows to navigate sideways, or they can also use the tab's up the top to change screen. This idea definitely has a lot of potential for development, and I feel like it is one that would be extremely effective and aesthetically inviting to the audience once fully refined.

Website Ideation Continued

Today I continued working on the website design, to try and come up with consistency across the pages. I worked on using the same 'characters' as such in each page, although developing them slightly in each. I have attached some screenshots below, taken with the snipping tool while I was working in Photoshop:

I quite like how the aesthetic is coming along... I will aim to get some of these concepts into InVision by Monday's class, so that I can test the user interaction and it's effectiveness. Once putting it into InVision it will also give me a better idea for size and what needs to be scaled up or down in order to become easier to read and interact with. Lorem Ipsum has been used in these concepts at the moment as a place holder for the proper text to be added in. I'm also aiming to develop these before Monday's class as well, so that I can get some good feedback on what needs changing.

Website Ideation

Today I was looking at whipping up a basic Photoshop concept for our website, which we will prototype on InVision. I was trying to keep the design style consistent with the rest of the work, such as the posters, free-form object, and how our flyer would also be designed. I have attached a screenshot of the website in progress, which is the first initial look at creating it digitally.

I quite like this aesthetic, and of course at this point it is very rough as it's the very first concept. The text is all just place holder text for now until it's finalised with exactly what it's going to say. I was looking to create a longer scroll page, although in the screenshot I have just included the top part of the scroll. There are also tabs at the top which will help to navigate to other pages, with more details and information them. I feel that the design style on this fits in quite nicely with our other media, although I will continue to look at developing as we go on. I'm also quite keen to continue sketching up some wireframe prototypes to look at user interaction, and develop it that way so that the user can easily navigate their way through the website without any worries.

Over the next few days, before Monday's class, I will continue to look at coming up with some more ideas for the free-form concept, flyer, and website, as well as developing the ideas I have already produced.

Free-Form Concepts

Today, I created some digital mock-ups of how some of our free-form ideas would look. We brainstormed some ideas in class, trying to choose some that would appeal to our younger target audience, and here are a few mock-ups:

First up, is a drink bottle, which features our typical human eating a fish, eating another fish, eating a wasted bottle. This time however, the actual drink bottle has been used as the initial trash consumed. I quite like this idea, and it could become even more effective once developed.

The second concept I created was a pen, which again features the fishes being eaten by one another, with the human at the top of the food chain, and the plastic bottle being at the bottom of the food chain. This idea looks quite cool, and could be a good idea to hand out for those who participate at the event. 

The above concept is one of my favourites, which could become even more effective with some extra development. It is focusing on utilizing a MacBook laptop (which has the apple on the back), and creating a laptop cover to go on the back. These laptops are very common nowadays, so this idea could be quite popular among the younger teenage audience.

Another idea I would like to digitally create is a phone case, or a phone wallet. Since this generation of teenagers seem to constantly be glued to their phones, this might be an extremely appealing concept. I will continue to look into more concepts as the project develops.

A different look at our poster

Just to get a different perspective I tried to go with a different approach on the same poster idea, however the fish looks slightly more in line with the style that we're trying to get to, targeting a younger demographic. The mouth however, we felt was not quite what we were looking for.

I also tried using the kinds of trash more commonly found on beaches.

Concept Development

Following this week's classes, I decided to head home and work on developing our idea based on some critique we got in class. I have attached the most recent development below, the text has just quickly been written as a placeholder until we work out what the text will actually read:

Over the next few days, I will continue to look at ways of developing this concept. At the moment, I really like how there is an angled visual flow, leading from the top left down to the bottom right, it makes the poster appear more asymmetrical and dynamic. I will also look to possibly change what rubbish is actually coming out of the fishes mouth, and could possibly look into statistics on what is the most popular rubbish found in the ocean and on the beach. The image is definitely more appealing and interesting once cropped in at a larger scale, as it is enough to show that the human is actually eating trash while eating the fish, the hand etc wasn't necessarily needed. 

By next week, I will look at coming up with a few basic concepts for our free-form idea, and digitally creating some of the ideas we came up with in class. I am also going to look at creating a basic website layout in Photoshop, and play around with InVision again.

Week Three, Session Two

A lot of today's class was spent as studio time, which also meant that we got some one on one time to spend with our teachers, and get their feedback on the direction we are heading with our concepts. Phoebe spoke to us about our concept, and agreed that the idea of eating trash when you consume marine life was quite an effective approach, particularly because it leaves the viewer feeling particularly grossed out, and has a strong wehi.

In the rest of the class, Jeremy and I continued to ideate and brainstorm ideas for our website, as well as our free-form idea, where we looked at the possibility of doing pens, laptop covers, or even phone cases/wallets. These options would help us to target a younger audience such as teenagers, especially considering a lot of them live on their phones and laptops. 

At the end of the class we went down to the pit for a brief introduction to InVision, where Tim was showing us what you can do using this prototyping concept. I have used InVision before in semester one, although it was for designing a phone app. It was interesting to see some features you can add in for web designs such as the hover feature, and also making the page longer so you can scroll down it.

Over the course of the next week we will continue to develop our poster, as well as come up with some concepts for our web layout. We will look to meet again before Monday so that we can see what each other has done and continue to develop from there.

Week Three, Session One

For today's interim presentation, we shared all of our poster concepts in small groups of about 6 people (3 teams), and got some critical feedback on each of our concepts, and how we could develop them. Some of the feedback was quite helpful, and it was interesting to see just how an audience reacts to our concepts (Wehi). We found which ones the majority found most successful, or which ones had the most potential, and spent our studio time working on developing and looking at these. 

The final hour of class was spent at a lecture down in The Pit, where we were told all about the Transmedia side of the brief. I'm actually really looking forward to designing the website and using inVision, as I have experience from this sort of thing from my elective in Semester One where we had to use inVision and design an app for a phone, or a website. I also quite enjoy the wire frame prototyping process, and looking at user interaction which certain sites and apps. I feel that inVision is a good program to use for this as it allows rapid prototyping of concepts, where you can mock up wire frame layouts on paper, scan it into inVision and then analyse the user interaction from there.

By tomorrow, our group is required to produce wire frame sketches for at least three existing websites. We were shown two in class that we have to do, and then Jeremy and I will do another free-choice website as an extra, so we will have four sketched up to look at.

Digital Development

Today I worked on the 'Russian Doll' idea, to add a background to the poster. Although the plain white allows the imagery to be the hero, it's not as inviting as it could be with a bright background. I decided to add in a background that looks like a nice sunny beach, in the same basic vector style to the rest. This fits in with the overall style of the poster, and definitely appears more inviting, and will get the audience to come look at the poster. The aim is to draw them initially with the bright colours, so that they then see the trash inside the fishes mouth, and how the flow on effect throughout the food chain will eventually mean the human consumes the man-made trash.

More Digital Concepts

With the first interim presentation on Monday, I decided to whip up a few more concepts to present. This way, we will have a wide range of concepts and can see which ones the class and teachers think is the most effective, and can continue to work on developing that one. I have digitally created a few more ideas that I had roughly sketched up in my physical workbook. I have attached them below with brief annotations.

The above idea is playing on the idea of Russian Dolls, how the smaller objects fit inside the bigger ones. I have used this as a way of showing the idea that trash isn't only consumed once, as it continues to be eaten by others throughout the food chain, once consumed by one animal. I quite like the concept of this, and think it is very effective. Over the next few days I will look to add in some sort of background to make the poster more inviting to the audience.

The above poster is another twist on the trash being consumed multiple times concept. This time however, it is of a person about to eat a fish, and all of the trash it's eaten in the sea falling out of it's mouth, showing that if the person eats the fish, he's effectively eating a whole bunch of trash too. I quite like how this idea fits on the page, with the visual flow leading to the text, and quite a nice, balanced feel to the poster. 

Further Poster Concepts

I created a couple of concepts to contrast Blake's style and see which direction we want to go with
Both use a much grittier and darker style but still have the same ideas that we settled on for our poster's direction.

The first plays with more of a shock factor, however I don't think it adequately gets the idea of eating trash across.

The next is a little bit more clear but has nothing really to do with humans.

Overall I think we've decided this style isn't for us, and so I will adapt to a more child friendly illustrative approach.

Digital Concepts

Today, I decided to mock-up some of my concepts, to see if they looked as I imagined them once created digitally. I looked to create some of the designs I came up with in class yesterday. I have attached them below with some brief annotations:

Above, I have created my concept in a minimalist style, as I had sketched up in my physical workbook. I quite like this idea, as it's very clean and crisp. I have played around with text in the two iterations, just looking at the placement and sizing. The first poster is clearer and possibly easier to read, while the second iteration follows the visual flow of the page, leading the viewer from the mouth, to the fish, to the bottl, and ultimately leading down towards the bottom right hand corner. In order to develop this idea, I could look at how I could make it more specific to a certain target audience, rather than a general audience.

The above concept is another idea from my physical workbook, which I decided to make digitally. I really like how this one seems an effective way of expressing our idea, that "Trash isn't only consumed once", and I feel as if it would spark a certain Wehi for the audience. The grey colour works in a sense that it gives a more dull, boring feel (works with the beach pollution theme), meanwhile the blue gives the brighter appearance, and definitely looks more inviting. Again, I would like to look at more ways to make it more specific to a narrow target audience, and find ways to develop it respectively.

The above posters are similar to another idea I mocked up in my physical workbook. Essentially, it is still dealing with the same angle/concept as my last ideas, although looking at a different style, and way of approaching it. These posters feature from front on, and in my opinion are quite effective in expressing our approach to the topic. The poster on the left was the initial digital mock-up. It was an attempt at targetting the youth/teenagers that we had hoped for as our target audience, by having an almost 'South Park' style to it. The poster on the right is a slightly tweaked poster in which we were looking at how to target an even more specific audience, if we were to go with youth/teenagers in Wellington. Since Wellington's known for it's hipster vibe, that's the approach I took on that poster design.

Over the next few days, we will continue to come up with more digital concepts, so that we have a wide range of ideas to present in Monday's interim presentation. This will allow us to take critical feedback from the class and teachers and flesh out the best concepts from a wider range, to ensure that we choose the best poster to develop.

Week Two, Session Two

We began with a lecture in the pit today, with Matt and Lee talking a lot about moodboards and coming up with different stylistic approaches to concepts in order to change their meaning and symbolism. At the end of the lecture, we watched a 15 minute video, the All Blacks supporters song called "Team Ball Player Thing" which has been created to raise money in order to help fund the research for finding a cure for Battens disease. The video was extremely entertaining and funny, and it was interesting to see how the clients (the kids) were the main source of creativity in the video, using their ideas to generate the song.

At the beginning of today's class we all put our moodboards and concepts so far out onto a table, for the whole class to walk around and place little post-it notes with feedback onto other student's work so they could find out what needed developing or what was working well. Jeremy and I received good feedback on our work, and also some helpful ideas for development.

For the majority of the class, we worked in our groups on developing our concepts. Jeremy and I continued trying out different compositions, styles, and various ways of interpreting our concepts, and came up with quite a few effective designs. I created four various concepts which are different ways of showing my concept of "Trash isn't only consumed once..." and these can be seen in my physical workbook.

On Monday we have our first interim presentation, where we have been asked to produce a minimum of 2 digital posters, printed out for the presentation. I am aiming to digitally create at least two or three on my own, while Jeremy is also going to try and create two posters as well, that way we will have a large range of ideas which can be critiqued in-depth at the interim, and will be more helpful in the long-run, making sure we have the most effective design chosen, rather than 'becoming attached' to a certain idea as mentioned in today's lecture. Jeremy and I will meet up again on Friday to see how each others digital posters are coming along, and discuss where we are planning on going next with our ideas, in the lead up to the first interim presentation.

Week Two, Session One

Today's class consisted of presenting our independent research and concepts in smaller groups, and receiving critique on our ideas. We started off by showing our moodboards, and then the 6 concepts that Jeremy and I had come up with over the past week. We got some good feedback on each of these, and the other students gave their opinion on which ones they liked the most, or thought had the most potential for development.

Following this, we did some brainstorming as a class (split into two bigger groups based on the chosen topic) and came up with a lot more in-depth ideas. Once we came back together as a class, we had 10 minutes to come up with 10 ideas, as a means of rapid ideation. However, most of the class only managed to get around 6. I managed 6 in that time, mainly because I had already done 3 pages of rapid ideation over the last week, already generating over 36 thumbnail sketches of my initial ideas. We then chose the best ideas between our group, refined them ourselves, and then another group got to choose our best idea and have a go at refining it themselves.

Towards the end of the class we presented our best ideas in front of the class. The class quite liked the idea I had drawn up of the human eating a fish, eating another fish, eating trash. They thought it was really effective in terms of it's symbolism, and they thought the tagline was very fitting "Trash isn't only consumed once".

Initial Poster Concepts

Over the past few days, Jeremy and I have continued with our rapid ideation in order to come up with some decent concepts to show in Monday's class. Each group had been asked to come up with a minimum of 5 ideas to bring along to class, so we decided that we would do 3 each, and bring them along. However, while coming up with these we have been consistently communicating via Facebook message to share our ideas etc, and to bounce ideas off of one another. I have attached our 6 concepts below.

The below three are the poster concepts which Jeremy drew:

The below three the poster concepts which I drew:

We will take these to the presentation tomorrow and see what feedback we get from the class and the teachers. When we begin to develop and refine our ideas further, it will allow us to begin generating ideas on what stylistic approach we are going to have in our overall campaign, to run across the poster, flyer, website and also the 'free-choice' media (video etc.)

Group Catch Up Session

Today Jeremy and I met up at 1:30pm in order to see where each other was at with our idea generation and thumbnail sketches, as well as meeting so we could create our moodboards for presentation on Monday. Our thumbnail sketches were coming along quite nicely, as I already had two pages worth, and was planning on doing a third page of rapid ideation thumbnails solely focusing on targeting youth as the audience. Our moodboard consists of two pages at the moment, the top one having research of backgrounds, textures and posible physical images, while the lower moodboard has potential fonts, colour palettes and some inspiration sourced from online.

I have attached the moodboards below:

Over the next few days we will continue to work on our poster concepts in thumbnail form, ad generate 5 larger posters to present in class on Monday. 

Week One, Session Two

At the beginning of class we started off by sharing our homework, which was to design two posters, for two reasonably different characters. I chose Ned Flanders and Bart Simpson, as they are quite contrasting characters. These posters can be seen in my physical workbook.

The class consisted of brainstorming about our topic, in which we had chosen to go with the Clean the Beach topic. Following these group brainstorms, we began to work on our project plans, as well as doing some rapid ideation for initial poster concepts. At 11:30am we went down to the pit to have a look at moodboards and team contracts.

By next week, we need to have 5 initial poster concepts drawn up, moodboards completed, and some research on existing visual precedents. Jeremy and I will meet up again on Friday to see how each other's research and ideation is going, and to continue to work on our ideas together.

Introduction to Koha

Today we were introduced to the new brief, which is dealing with the aspect of Koha, following on from Ihi Wehi. The brief sounds very exciting, despite most people feeling overwhelmed initially because of the amount of tasks required to complete. The project consists of working in pairs, and creating a poster, flyer and a free-choice (video, t-shirt, etc.) which will all then be included in a website. So the brief essentially consists of designing four things, all within the 6 week period.

In the class itself, we were divided into some smaller groups to begin doing a Simpsons exercise, where we get given a character and need to design a poster which would persuade them to come to an event, either a Beach Clean Up Day, or a Meet The Neighbours Day. We were given Marge, and created two A4 posters.

The two above posters are the ones our group came up with. The top poster was focusing on how meeting the neighbours will will bring more support, hence the image of Maggie crying and hands coming from one side. The lower image was showing how meeting neighbours offers support in a way that you can then share your problems and get help, as Marge has an underlying gambling problem.

By tomorrow, we have been asked to focus on two more characters and create a poster for each. We also chose our partners today, and I am with Jeremy Hall.