Timothy Stokes Graphic Designer

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.

Time for some background research into Layout Design. This video is a quick timelapse of how a magazine cover is made for a magazine called Macworld. It's a great view into the work that goes into making a magazine cover, especially the 30 second section showing the actual digital creation of the cover. 

Transitional Animation Process and Production Today in our Process and production workshop we worked on creating animation transitions and compiling them together into one animation. We learnt a number of new techniques and I personally really enjoyed experimenting with these techniques to create new things. I often enjoy the After Effects classes, but this one particularly stood out as being packed full of industry level techniques and information.  I decided to go with a very simple duo-chromatic colour scheme of red and black, the stark contrast really helps bolster the impact of the transitions. I also considered using white instead of red, but ended up preferring the red myself.

The Dilemma of Internet Persona's versus Real Persona's. I got feedback about the topic I chose for my first studio brief after my varietal research today. My original topic was an Impersonal version of what is titled above, a vague and wide subject, how people differ between real life and the internet.  I received two important parts of feedback on this. Impersonal, the project may function far better if I use myself as one of the comparisons. This is an interesting switchup but also a scary one, do I want to document myself heavily in both of these "worlds"?  The second piece of feedback I recieved was simplicity, my thoughts were on doing a series of infographic posters, which is a good idea in itself, but is it actually challenging enough to push my limits and force me to go outside of my boundaries to learn new techniques or discover new things about myself? With this feedback, it's back to the brain based drawing board to work out how to com...

The business process when working within a company. When working within a company there are many connections that will maintain tension with you. Finance, Marketing, Production and R&D will all want you to make their lives easier, and while actually doing your job, you will have to balance the tensions of being pulled and tugged in all different directions by other sections of the company. This is often not the case when working in a smaller studio, or freelance. Although these aspects will still exist, they will pull and tug at you in different ways, whether it be world technology rather than your R&D department and your clients budget rather than the finance department.  Pete's lecture's are always incredibly engaging and interesting and actually make me look forward to mondays!

The Zine For our first drawing production class, we developed miniature zines. Made from folding (and a little cutting) an A4 piece of paper.  We designed the original piece in light pencil, photocopied it in case of mistakes and then moved on to inking the zine using fine liners and thick black markers. Here is the work I produced;    

First brief of the year, Cybernetic Self. Immediately on receipt of the brief, two big things came to mind.  1. The Turing Test 2. Catfishing/Fake personas.  The Turing test, for those of you who don't know, is a test written by Dr. Alan Turing, which is used to verify the legitimacy of an android. The point of the test is for a human being to communicate with an android and be unable to identify that the android, is in fact, non-human. Catfishing/Fake personas are a devastatingly common thing across the internet at the moment, from very slight differences in somebodies personality between real life social interaction and internet interaction all the way through to 40 year old men/women pretending to be teen's and even children in order to meet up with them/groom them.