Logo Roco

After a refreshing few days break from doing assignments, it was back to the coalface on Wednesday of this week. In the morning we had a lecture on generating logos, an area which I didn’t think had so much theory to it. After break we had another ex-student visit us, and this time it was Marc Bowers. He showed us some of the work from the Real Radio website which he creates pages for. Once again, it was emphasised that the pace of work is pretty relentless – always something to keep you on your toes. After the exam at the end of A6 I can imagine how full on it must be to do that day in, day out. I'd like to thank Marc for coming in and sharing his experiences with us.

During the afternoon we received the brief for the new assignment, A7. This unit brings together all of the stuff we have done this year, from using Photoshop to creating web pages.

Firstly, we will have to design a logo for the Ambient World record label, and present it in a vector format. Secondly, we will be developing a corporate identity and style guide to be put into a web site. Thirdly, we will choose a Fax label album, and will be creating a CD booklet, inlay, body and pre-flight document for it. Finally, we will of course be creating an evaluation on our progress through the unit.

For this unit I am aiming to bring together all the elements from previous units. For my sketchpad, I will be continuing to put in lots of examples of both good and bad design, and annotating what I find. On the time planning front, I again have created a master time plan, and will add a recorded time plan to this. This document will allow me to note down how long particular tasks have taken, so that for future reference I can plan better. I will also be adding more research to my blog and sketchpad, as well as using more non-web sources, which I will make notes on in my sketchpad. A picture of one of the album covers and how I have annotated it is shown below:

On Wednesday evening I collected around 28 album covers to stick in my sketchpad and annotate. One observation that I have made is that many of them use uppercase typefaces. I believe this could be because album covers are fairly small, and people need to be able to see the name clearly when hunting through rack upon rack of CDs. I have also notices that many contain photographs as the base of their design. I don’t think using a photograph in my design will really push the envelope much, so I’ll have to create a full range of ideas from vector and bitmap based tryouts.

During Thursday we went over what should be included in the style guide. I like the idea of the style guide, as producing documents from them takes all the heavy lifting out of the design, yet each document you create looks consistent and professional. However, actually making the guide itself and removing any ambiguity from it will be a challenge. As this has to be presented in a web page, I will have to improve my skills for creating this. I am planning on learning some basic CSS, as I think this will make the creation of the page easier. I believe I will stick to a simple, clean and functional design to make the production easier.

On Thursday evening I managed to find some samples of my chosen CD (Pete Namlook & New Composers – Russian Spring) on Itunes – I have to say I really like it, and it is already formulating some ideas in my head. The music sounds quite airy and very listenable. I can’t wait to hear what it sounds like on the ol’ Quad.

Between now and next week I will be continuing to find resources, and may do some experiments with putting different materials onto the scanner and seeing what I can do with them in Photoshop. I will also be taking some photographs for more texture ideas, and probably pictures of the garden which could come in handy for my ‘Russian Spring’ album.