Timothy Stokes Graphic Designer

A.M. Cassandre was a graphic designer made famous by his work in the Art Deco movement, he was a ukrainian-french migrant to america, where he was discovered for his talents with bold and stark colours and with typeface design.

In todays lecture we studied typography, it's history, it's uses and it's problems. To begin, lets define some keywords. Font - What you use Typeface - What you see Typography - The act of designing Type. Ascender height - The max height of an ascender ( h b d etc) Cap height - The height of Capital letters Median - The middle of the type  Baseline - The bottom of main body letters Descender height - the max depth of a descender (p q j y etc) Tracking - The gap between each letter Leading - The gap between each line Serifs - The flourishes on the ends and corners of letters. Type is viewed by many people differently, I think type can control an image, make the viewer feel things without even looking at the art but just the words, however the famous designer of Helvetica said; "I don’t think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that [th...

10 second Advert for Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman Made for Process and Production After Effects workshop. This workshop helped us work with attuning audio to keyframes, using audio to create more impact in animation (Try watching the video with and without sound to see the massive difference) and using solid frames and transitioning.

Multidiscipline Interdiscipline Crossdiscipline Synergy Integrated Hybrid Convergence Convergence is a term of ambiguity used to describe the process of change toward uniformity. Specifically in the graphics industry it emcompasses the concept that designers can't get away with being one trick ponies anymore.  The digital creative economy is becoming a crowded place, with more and more people joining every day, a single skillset isn't going to get you anywhere when you're in competition with somebody with multidisciplinary skillsets. It's not a call for designers to become jack of all trades master of none type people, but it is calling for people to be able to do much wider jobs, for instance a graphic designer that can also do motion graphics and web design is of much greater worth to a company than a designer that can only do print.

American Modernism R. Roger Remington Graphic Design 1920 - 1960 Roger Remington provides an overview and time-line of modernism in America. As a brief overview: the first third of the book contains a run up to modernism, the greatest world influences from the British Arts and Crafts movement, German Bauhaus and Futurism. The majority of the book covers the big designers and formative occasions of modernism in America. Finally the book concludes by examining the transition of modernism to post-modernism, including those designers who didn't let go of modernism, even in the era of post-modernism. The foundations of Modernism, especially in America, were established as a reaction against the aesthetic of the Victorian culture: the Arts and Crafts movement. "Modernism was more than just the name of a style. It was a philosophy, a view of life, a state of mind." Frank Lloyd Wright said, "What was most necessary in architecture was a philosophy, not an ae...

Bot and Dolly showing off the technicalities and mathematical work that goes into projection mapping. This research is for my Sense of Place project as I'm looking into creating a possible projection mapping final product.

In this workshop we went out into Huddersfield town to draw using certain techniques, my ability to draw by hand is still limited, but I found the workshop useful in honing these techniques. Perspective drawing of tunnel in Huddersfield using fineliner & promarkers.   Marker colouring piece of terrace-face in Huddersfield using pencil, fineliner & promarkers. Type in context image of Crawshaws butchers in Huddersfield using fineliner and promarkers.

Swiss style grid concert poster. Techniques used - Ruler guides, rectangle tool, text frames, CMYK Color codes. In this workshop, we had to recreate posters from the modernist era using illustrator, focusing on grids and new tools to make them look as close to the original as possible.   More advanced Swiss style concert poster.  Techniques used - Ruler guides, rectangle tool, text frames, CMYK, Rotate tool, pen tool, ellipsis tool, gradient swatches.

The futility of planning too far... Playing 20 questions where you have to write out all 20 questions before you ask the person displays the futility of a lack of flexibility in your research and plans, if you can't bend and change to the results of your endeavours you're going to find yourself wandering in circles and never getting anywhere. 

In this lecture we looked into what makes people have good ideas, and how we ourselves can keep our ideas new, original and interesting.  As someone who can often get very stuck as they often rush into a project with an idea and are broken if it doesn't work out, this part really struck me. Having a methodology, a series of approaches, techniques and strategies to indentifying and solving visual problems is a critical part of what I need to do in future with my projects to really develop great projects without having to return right to the beginning if something doesn't work out.

A pictoral sketch of my creative process.

In the first studio session we were tasked with exploring grids, I chose to explore grids in print, following examples from swiss modernist designers like josef muller-brockmann and massimo vignelli, i put together two basic posters using a grid as structure  

  Forever Peace, written in 1990's as a sequel to Forever War, written by Joe Haldeman. While Forever Peace is a sequel to Forever War, it contains none of the same characters or even storyline assets as Forever War, it takes place during a period of time completely skipped over by Forever War.   These stills provide a small insight into the design ideas of Gateway Publishing, who use a very impactful vivid set of colours and images to create a specific mood.

What if hyperfertility/over-population was a thing? Introducing SkyLife, Spacious comfortable living in the sky. In our first Seminar with James, we had to design something that fixed a weird or outlandish problem that has occured on earth. Skylife was my groups solution to Hyperfertility.