Timothy Stokes Graphic Designer

What happens when you're ill for a process and production workshop,  you create utter insanity! Poster Zine go! I have one piece missing, which is the whole pressing your face against the scanner and scanning it, I honestly didn't want to do it due to the fact that so many (possibly rather scummy) students having done it before! However I gave the rest of the pieces my best shot! Directly below is my student ID picture which I chopped up to enlarge my cheeks (I've put on weight!) and cut the hair and placed it diagonally on the side to look like my new hair style and also cut my shoulders out, and moved them to show I have a bigger beard now. I then did a caricature style sketch expanding on the adjustments I did on the cut and stick piece. Big beard, big fringe, super chubby cheeks! For the last piece, i didn't have spotted paper to use, so, with a photo of myself and a marker pen, I got to work on 2 hours of dotting a piece of paper...

In Aiden's class, we were asked to create a presentation template that would be used to show clients our designs and ideas. We had to create two; one for print which was A3 and in CMYK then one for screen which was 1920px by 1080px and in RGB. Here is the format I came up with, following one of my favourite swiss modernism styles using grids.  

Curriculum Vitae - A unique object to inform and interest potential clients and employers about oneself.  CV = Name + Contact details, Education, Work Experience, Hobbies and Interests, Referees. Name and contact details;- Your Name Address Telephone (Mobile) Email (Uni and personal) Web Page (Portfolio location) Age DoB Status (Only if you're single) Education; University of Huddersfield:  Graphic Design BAHons                                                  9/15 - 6/19 College:                                  A levels & Dates Skills:                                      Skills, Computers, Programs etc. Do not use grades. Work Experience ...

I rarely make things with the final result intended to be "cute".. This workshop was an exception, my attempt at animating hand drawn sketches. I present to you, Nothing like a nice cup of tea. 

Pete started the lecture running us through Project Costing, a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is fairly self explanatory and so I'm not going to regurgitate it on here but it was very interesting and something I'm going to be using I think as I research into possibly doing an EPY.

So, employment, how does it work? There are many ways for us to earn financial compense for our work; Self-Employment (Freelancer) Working on a contractial basis for other people for limited amounts of time/work. Partnerships, Much akin to Self-Employment but this time with more than one person, be it 2 or 12. The only downside to this is that everybody in a partnership is liable for all the other partners debts, corporate or personal. This means partnerships often show trust betweeen partners, displaying to their clients that they themselves are trustworthy. Limited Liability Firm, Like a partnership however people in this company are only liable for the amount that they put into the firm. A LTD firm must also publish their finances/accounts publicly by an external accountant (Auditor). They must also publish Annual Returns yearly. Annual Returns are Profit/Loss Account, Balance Sheet Statement, List of Directors and their Addresses plus any other directorships that the...

Poster Layouts We had three briefs to complete, using a limited colour pallete and no art we had to create posters with typography being the main tool used.  For the Acoustic club brief, I wanted to use the text on a path tool to make the text follow the shape of a guitar, I feel I executed it fairly well.  For the Craft Beer Expo poster I wanted to demonstrate how dynamic and culturally varied craft beer could be, so I used the word beer in lots of different languages as the main background focal. I wanted to dedicate my final piece to the works of Jan Tschichold, highlighting the font he created himself and in the style of his Konstruktivism book cover.  

Rotoscoping Rotoscoping is the art of taking video footage, cutting it out on a frame by frame basis and then adding effects and animations to those cut outs. Here is my attempt! 

RSA : Circular Futures  The Man Box A monthly subscription of mens toiletries spanning shower gel all the way through to condoms, you can customize your box for up to 6-9 items, 3 large 3 medium or 9 medium.  Utilizing waste recycling for the packaging, and using a send/take back system meaning absolutely no waste packaging.  

RSA : Circular Futures   The Freezer   A box made from waste plastic lined with temperature control material, holding 3-4 freezer draws of meat and frozen groceries. The freezer draws also made from waste plastic and are customizable to slot into your freezer easily. All items have zero packaging and the draws and box are collected by the driver on his next delivery and reused. The Freezer can be delivered to your door or to a freezer point, a delivery point close by where you can collect when appropriate for you. All groceries are locally sourced from farmers and meet fairtrade standards. This idea meets the following Criteria in the RSA brief a new product and/or packaging that promotes re-use and is not thrown away  a new business model or system that promotes a ‘take/send back’ model for a product or packaging after use  a new or repurposed product made from existing waste streams  a product or service design solution that e...

28 Briefs to chose from, 3 to shortlist, 1 to rule them all, wait.. This morning we were given an introduction for our next brief, a 6 week brief before christmas. While the actual hand in for this is march, we have another project starting after christmas so we need to get this finished before.  Brief 1: http://www.ycn.org/awards/ycn-student-awards/2016-17-ycn-student-awards/briefs/orchard-pig I've chosen this brief to develop initial ideas because of my experience creating packaging for a Guinness craft beer, I enjoy working with alcohol products and think this would suit my skills well. Brief 2: http://www.ycn.org/awards/ycn-student-awards/2016-17-ycn-student-awards/briefs/the-grown-up-chocolate-company This brief sounds fantastic, seriously. Designing a packaging box for grown up chocolate that is customizable? Who wouldn't. Brief 3: http://sda.thersa.org/en/challenge/rsa-student-design-awards-2017/phase/rsa-student-design-awards-2017/track/circular-futu...

Dealing with Demand. Two different types of Demand, Elastic and Inelastic. Elastic is where a very small change in price will drastically increase demand, and Inelastic where a large change in price increases Demand. In opposition, Supply does the opposite. (See Fig. Below) Taxes Often cause both deflationary and inflationary pressure at the same time, it causes people to have less disposable income which causes a reduction in demand but also causes a demand for pay increases. This means the cost of employment rises, which often leads to an extent of employment loss. Which increases the amount of benefits being given out, meaning the government needs more money. Taxes up? This looks like a viscious circle but it isn't, Taxes only go up by very minute amounts, and there is always slack in the system to cope with it. It is also impacted more/less dependant on what taxes are raised.  Interest Rates can be used to counteract inflation, see fig. below. We did an excersize...

I'll be honest, I'm still struggling with these lectures, I find it very hard to maintain focus within this structure. Although this lecture was most definitely better.  Super cool part of this lecture was cgi vs real, bouncy balls down the hill. It was almost like a versus match, Sony's advert vs [Insert name here] real life bouncy balls down the hill. When every scene was constructed perfectly and using alot of cgi, the video as a whole looks far superior, although definitely questionable.  The real video, while being somewhat underwhelming, was realistic, and very cool to watch, especially the melon version! The human brain has a brilliant ability to percieve what is real and what isn't, so animation has to be careful if it's claiming realism, to make sure it seems so. 

Getting feedback on my draft Today we brought our presentations in for feedback, Although I spent most of the seminar giving feedback to other people, that actually helped me in thinking about my own work and applying the feedback that I gave out. I'm going to try and keep my presentation consice while looking clean and smart. Portray the information while maintaining interest. Using only references, keeping the written information to my notes and speech.

This week with Nick we looked at hand crafting posters by cutting out letters of different types and sticking them on.  It was a really fun workshop and I learned alot about portraying emotions and meanings via typography. A reference to Battlestar Galactica, Due to content problems they changed the entire script so that every time the word "fuck" was in the script it was replaced with "frack" A reference to one of my favourite spy books/films. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The final picture is missing currently as the photo corrupted, however I will endeavour to take another photo and upload!

Buyer Behaviour Need Recognition Search Pre-Purchase Evaluation PURCHASE Consumption Post-Purchase Evaluation Results (This applies to clients purchasing you!!) (Insert slide of buyer behaviour chart in the world) Maslowe's Hierarchy of Needs, Been taught about this many times, however it's always useful to be reminded and have it contextualised for current applications.  Pareto Principle ( 80 : 20 ) Only 20% of people want the hassle of making decisions. Equally, only 20% of people will own 80% of the wealth while 80% of people only own 20% of the wealth.  Triggers of buying a product. Memory - Remembering what you want to buy.  Good/Bad/Indifferent - My opinion on why.  Long Term/Short Term - The time I should invest in deciding is relative. Aesthetics  Emotion (Hedonism/Conscience/Love?) Genetics - Men vs Women? Does it apply? Logic - Are we logical as free thinkers? Range of choice - How ...

Eyelines When elements in a layout line up, they create eyelines. Eyelines lead a viewers eye across a spread, creating what designers call "movement." It creates a sense of unity across both pages in a spread. Guidelines provide an easy way to create eyelines. A successful spread will have at least one eyeline to guide a viewer across both pages of the layout. Movement across a spread can be created in other ways, but using eyelines is the most conventional.  Impact Impact can be established in any number of ways. A good place to start is with the elements discuss above: sound typography, eyelines and white space. Sometimes, however, great photography or simplicity in design can create impact all by itself. Credit Rodriguez, K for Original Research.

Developing a research question Today in Polina's seminar we focused on developing our subject into a research question, I already had a rough idea of what I wanted to do but the feedback really helped to refine and develop it. My subject, if you have been following this branch, is Layout Design, specifically in Research Documents. How does layout design affect an employer's/client's opinion of your research documents. Splitting this down, we have the origin subject, Layout design, and the refinement, Opinions of research documents.  Post feedback, I broke the title down and reformatted it. Layout: How Impactful is it?  Bold, broad, simple. A good Title for the research, but we still need a more indepth research question. Is the Impact of good Layout small or large when it comes to the opinions of your content? Easier to answer, with more opportunity to explore. Not too niched. Much better.

Typesetting With Aidan this week we took a closer look at typesetting. I found this workshop really interesting because of my general enjoyment of layout design. “Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and other symbols (called sorts in mechanical systems and glyphs in digital systems) are retrieved and ordered according to a language’s orthography for visual display.” Some of the main points were to utilize kerning, tracking, leading, rag and cropping to create metaphorical emotions, portray meanings and display thoughts.  

Typography - Good Layout Habits. Contrast Contrast is a fundamental principle in typography. It can be achieved in a number of ways, including size, weight and proportions. Having contrast in typography often means using two or more fonts. One rule of thumb is to use sans-serif fonts for headlines and serif fonts for body copy -- but this, like most rules in design, is often successfully broken. Readability Legibility is critical in typography -- the point of type, after all, is to be read. Some fonts are legible in all sizes, and others are designed to be displayed only in large sizes. These are called display fonts. Other fonts are designed to be legible at small sizes, but don't look good when displayed large. One font that is both legible at small sizes and suitable as a headline font is Helvetica. While admittedly done to death, it's hard to make Helvetica look bad. And it's still the go-to font for designers looking for a legible but attractive cap...

Names names names names names.. Lifeatar Avatāra Avatarati Lavatar Symbol Simbol  Symbod Cast Symbio I'm getting a real feel for Symbol at the moment! It feels bold, easy to remember, flexible, and is a Synonym of Avatar so fits with the project theme excellently.  

This morning's seminar feedback for my ideas, specifically lifeatar, was as follows; Sims Wii's  Xbox avatars Security problems with anonymity How am I going to fully portray the advertising campaign.  Why cartoon avatars?  Name?!?!?! Hopefully will have a post up later/tomorrow with my next development based off this feedback!

I've finally come to an Idea that may actually be ready for final development and then production! Lifeatar, which the idea is currently named, is a new social media platform designed around promoting anonymity. My idea for a brief is to create a series of posters advertising and promoting this new platform, making sure that the poster content can be easily transformed for use on web and smaller print ads.

Ideas, trying to define them.. stay tuned..

Initial mind map of wandering thoughts, not much notation necessary!

There are two types of research, primary and secondary. We need to understand these so that we can decide when it's relevant to use them. Primary  Quantitative Qualitative The  clipboard type questionnaires  in which lots of people are asked lots of questions in order to create statistics. Geographic- based on where you live Psycho-graphic- based on how you think Socio-economic- based on your class and money Pros -detailed -gives statistical information -objective Cons -costly, can be £150,000+ -complex and difficult to organise -needs careful control in order for questions to be understood and answered correctly The  interviewing of a focus group  which is a group of people that have a lot of knowledge in the area you are researching and therefore can give you the answers you need. Pros -cheap, you only need to pay for one days worth of work, no mass of paper questionnaires etc -easily organised -offers a holistic view Cons -it doesn't give statistical...

I came into this lecture with higher expectations... Last week the lecture was on Animation History, It really didn't relate to much I was doing, I didn't particularily enjoy it, infact, I really didn't. This week was Graphic design History, Hey, Thats a topic that relates to me and I might be able to engage with! I was wrong, ontop of repeating ALOT of content from the history of Graphic Design lectures we had in first year, there was nothing to engage with, most of the lecture blurred together of this person did this, this person did that, some of it kinda worked, some of it didn't work, it all happened far too long ago to actually impact modern design.  With one exception, Graphique Moderne. Graphique Moderne is a style that first appeared in futurism, 50's italian style. It's not a label that existed at all back then though, in fact, the label itself has only just popped up on our radar. Graphique Moderne is about how even if you're just des...

How does Layout Design Impact the opinions of Client's/Employer's about your Research Document. This morning with Polina we looked at creating a title, last week she asked us to pick a subject which we would like to research over the year, and I picked a vague topic of Layout Design. Throughout the Seminar we talked about research and presentations and how to effectively do both. A large portion of my enjoyment of making Layouts is when making research documents, and so picking a title was fairly easy for me, I wanted to find out how important Layout design was for the back end of a graphic designers work. How much of someones opinion is gauged from the front end and how much on the back? Is messy good? Is clean and sharp good? These are things that I intend to find out. I also think that this topic will be a real help to me over this year, my placement year and my final year due to the importance of research and presentation throughout.