Timothy Stokes Graphic Designer

A great new lecture being introduced in year two is a business lecture, where we learn how to work within the industry. This lecture contained help for people who want to work in small studios, big companies, and freelance.  The first topics of the lecture were as follows; Orientation Product- I make this product/ Where is my market? Market- I have these assets/ What can I do with them? It's important that we take a wide variety of possibilities into the original orientation, much like when doing research. Economy Firms -manufacturing -sales -management -finance -marketing Markets -competitors (other firms) -suppliers -customers -clients National Economy -geographical entity- a country -private sector/public sector -government law Global Economy -the world is made up from all the previous assets There are many things that can affect the Global Economy such as Technology, Social Change, Politics, War and National Disasters. We need to understand them in order to se...

In the final week of our after effects workshop we had to create a video to be put in a montage of undersea effects, Using Illustrator I created vectors of a fish, background and seaweed. Then using the Scale position and rotate keyframe tools I made the fish move around the screen.

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;  

In this session with Stephen we intro ' d Cinema 4d, We worked on turning vectors into 3d objects and creating effects using shapes. We looked at applying gravity and rules to objects, and fired lots of sheets of paper into the air and got them to fall to the ground. I then took vectors of my current project in foundation studio and turned them into 3d objects and played around with lighting and the camera to create the final piece.

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...