Timothy Stokes Graphic Designer

The final lecture of the year was a combination of a recap of some points made earlier in the year and a good lesson on properly ensuring your ability as a graphic designer continues to improve in quality. These points are especially important to remember and utilize during the rest of the degree if I have any intent of grading highly. 1. Define-  understand what you are being asked to design. What are the key elements? What message do you want to convey? When is the deadline and how can I make sure that I meet it? Why is the design needed? Who is the audience? 2. Research- understand how other designs have been successful. Primary (research such as questionaires done by yourself) Secondary research (research done by other people) Qualitive (facts) Quantative (statistics) 3. Ideate- begin designs These will be informed by your research but not controlled. Produce ideas. Avoid preconceptions.By the end of this process you will have a rough visual languag...

We watched the documentary on the Helvetica typeface, created by Gary Hustwit. The typeface is a modern/Swiss design that is used through design, mostly in the 'everyday'. It has no detail and no meaning which allowed it to be completely neutral. This means that the viewer doesn't see the typeface, only the word that is written.  As you may have noticed, Helvetica has also been the font I have used throughout my blog this year. It's simplicity and neutrality made me feel like it would be ideal for a blog as it's the content that requires the focus, not the prettiness. There are many large companies that adopted Helvetica into their branding, here are a few examples;  

Sarah's lecture today was on utilizing drawing within animations. Hand drawn images can be vectorised and seperated to then be manipulated and animated within After Effects. The pieces can end up very unique and personal. We looked across a bunch of different animations which were all quite different and interesting, however my favourite one definitely had to be the music video for Forest: Just one Day.

Messages have been changing over the decades, attempting to create reactions and interest.  1960s -radical and revolutionary decade -birth of teen culture- advertising was directed towards the youth in order to influence them -icons included The Beatles, Twiggy and Mary Quant -ITV was allowed to advertise so they used this to their advantage over other TV Channels 1970s -Britain developed their own design style rather than copying or mimicking the USA -it was a decade of freedom and nudity -there was a number of economic and political issues as well as the oil crisis and the IRA -it was the movement of punk and the Sex Pistols which has one of the most iconic album covers. 1980s -there was a huge divide of the poor and the rich and advertising picked up on this so chose to appeal to either one rather than the everyone -a number of new TV channels emerged creating a new platform for digital advertising -it was huge design decade with a lot of money invested i...

Everything is a Remix Nothing is completely unique 'Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing' In today's world everything has been done in one shape or another, so how do we produce new and exciting things? We tweak, we spin, we adjust.  We watched a documentary called Everything is a Remix in today's lecture, and it was very enlightening. We found that as designers we need to create covers, not copies, take something that has been made before, adjust it and change it so it becomes yours and not a blatant copy of the original IP.  We re-use ideas because they trigger nostalgia within us. 74% of movies are based on books and games or are a continued sequel because react to what we already recognise.  Kate Cullinane said 'it's the measure of a designers ability to reposition these in the most successful way for the audience that determines the effectiveness of the piece'

We had a visit from Johnny Ford, Creative Director of Finger Industries. This company is known for their brilliant characters and animations. They have done a number of adverts for Lloyds Bank and other big customers.They focus heavily on their ability to uniquely portray characterisation and colours in their work, here is their more recent show reel.

This weeks guest lecture was two guys from a Leeds company Brass ALT. They do a number of different work but their main job is to create advertising for social media. They work for clients such as Haribo, Lucozade, Maoam and Ribena.  This is one of my favourite pieces by them, which they did for Haribo.

In recent lectures, coinciding with the current studio project, we have been looking into visualisations of sound. Visualisations can be listed under 3 categories, which each split into smaller ones but I won't cover that. Graphic Notation -pictures/symbols/illustrations -a language that represents musical notes Graphic Interpretation -album covers -marketing techniques -font/typeface developed from sounds -the meaning behind the song Graphic Experimentation -elements of the piece of music can be exaggerated -timed motion -physical prints/painting  James's seminar went over alot of the work he did while at university for visualisation of sound, one piece hit me specifically as being really innovative and awesome, here it is;  

Deceptions of the eyes, great design or just weird coincidences? We had a lecture on perceptions and Illusions, focusing on the science behind how our brains interpret design, I found it very interesting and learned a lot about how our eyes see things. Here are some fantastic examples of illusions within design;  

This is a combination of two seminars we have had on Genealogy. These seminars focused on utilizing knowledge of genealogy and using abstracts within our writing. A genealogist looks at pre-concieved notions and studies the phenomenom that   what  "we tend to feel is without history". Which is a summation of the seminar. To Summarise some of the keywords used; Root= eternal truth Dissipation= scattering and disregarding Identity= Foucault's subject. Method= the way of doing something Methodology= the knowledge behind the way of doing something When writing an essay, don't look for the root, only for the relevant history of your subject. And when you find it, write an abstract about it. 

In this seminar, we looked at how data is presented and where you can make it more informative easier to decode as someone viewing it. For instance, using colours to define ranges.  Unfortunately it was raining heavily on my walk back home after this seminar, which soaked my rucksack through and ruined the work I had done.  I focused however, on using circles to define how impactful people/things were on my life as I grew up. I would fill the circle to a certain level with entirely full meaning it was very impactful and not very full meaning not very impactful.  I coloured the circles differently depending on what emotions the impact had, whether it was joy (Green) Anger/Challenge (red) or Sadness (Blue).

Monday Seminar was on Typography, creating new type and how it looks when lots of people all create the same letters to be compared. We each were given 3 post it notes and 3 letters to design, and then all the letters were put on the table for everyone to examine and take pictures of. I enjoyed the project and was happy with the final product everyone made. 

This lecture covered briefly covered the timeline of Graphic Design from the late 1800's through to modern day. From William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement right through to futurism and things such as Dada, the differences (and similarities) were stark. It's interesting to see design both follow and lead different pop culture times, with design following suit in the early 1900's to crazy and wacky design movements taking the lead and changing pop cultures themselves in the later 1900's right through to the 2000's. One particular similarity that I found interesting when studying was Dada and the punk movement, alot of the punk design styles seemed to take alot of inspiration from Dada, presumably due to both being centred on anarchy and the law of entropy.

Our Guest lecture today was Ian Anderson from Designers Republic, an incredibly large business in the UK.  He started out creating album covers for bands when he was at university and posters for gigs he did as a DJ. People started to love his work and came to him about making their band covers and he ended up creating Designers Republic. They have done some large jobs, working with The People Bureau, Coca Cola, Flesh Pure Holy Cow, Swatch Watch, and the Wipeout game for Playstation. http://www.madenorth.co.uk/ian-anderson-the-designers-republic/  < Here is some of their work.

We travelled to Yorkshire Sculpture Park as part of our research for Sense of Place, It was a fantastic trip where we got alot inspiration and a broader understanding of alot of art. I took alot of photos, but they were phone quality and bad (oops) and so I've with permission used another students photos as they were similar to the ones I took. Following this trip I had lots of ideas to work on for my sense of place project, and really enjoyed the flow of slightly less generic ideas I had.

What is Reflection? -an ongoing process -a record -a way of gaining new perspectives  Reflecting on your work, at all times, before, during, after, is imperative. It helps to realise your ideas and how they can change/improve in the time ahead.  This blog is here for me to be reflective after the fact, It's a way for me to look back on my work while documenting it and be able to focus on what I could have changed. Following this I am going to endevour to keep my blog up to date regularly and really try to reflect on my work through this.

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...

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...

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.