The only thing I’ve really struggled on is finding the right information, as culture and the way a studio is organised is a relatively new thing. The belief that the way in which a designer works and how it can influence his or her design has always intrigued me. The book above – “Studio Culture” by Adrian Shaughnessy & Tony Brook, has been a huge help, and also a really interesting read. He interviews a number of different studios, finding out how they work, how they organise themselves and there views on the studio.

The second book that I have been reading and that has a lot been a big help is this one – “The Transdisciplinary Studio” by Alex Coles. This has proved little bit harder for me to read, but I’ve slowly got my head around it! The book in a nutshell -

“We have entered a post-post-studio age, and find ourselves with a new studio model: the transdisciplinary. Artists and designers are now defined not by their discipline but by the fluidity with which their practices move between the fields of architecture, art, and design. This volume delves into four pioneering transdisciplinary studios—Jorge Pardo Sculpture, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, Studio Olafur Eliasson, and Åbäke—by observing and interviewing the practitioners and their assistants. A further series of interviews with curators, critics, anthropologists, designers, and artists serves to contextualize the transdisciplinary model now at the fore of creative practice.” 

He is currently writing the second volume, but even though I won’t be writing my dissertation, I still may purchase and read it as I’ll be interested in what else he has to say on the subject.

So that is what I’m working on. If you have come across any useful articles or interviews, please don’t hesitate in letting me know!

The award brief we were given was to create a campaign that makes people want to have a pen pal. I worked with Amy on this project, and we decided to create a video, as we hadn’t really done anything like that before.

Our campaign is called ‘The Power of Pen an Paper’ It showcases the massive impact just a pen and paper can have with a traditional pen pal.

-Covering huge global distances to learn about culture.
-The powerful emotions and friendships that are created.
-The beautifully handcrafted memory that can be cherished.

We’ve shown this with friendly video completing an illustration of a conversation between two penpals. The information is shown to represent the world, with the different typefaces showing the diversity of different recipients accross the globe all encased in aimple heart to hgihlight the friendship that is created.

Above photos by Tasha. We had already done a test piece to try it out, so we used an over head projector to project our previous one on to the studio wall, so that we could sketch it out in pencil.

The video would be played at places like Kings Cross station where a lot of people come and go, and are traveling from place to place.

I really enjoyed this project and it’s made me want to do something on this scale again!

I finished my group magazine project, and it went well. I was very happy with my spreads, and even happier when my magazines got sent though the post to me! I got them professionally printed for the assessment, but it’s also quite a nice keepsake too. I contributed quite a lot to the magazine, designing the contents page, contributors page, three articles and the introduction page for the group photography story.

‘era’ magazine brings the reader up-to-date with the latest trends and issues in culture and technology. In this months issue we have looked in detail on the impact technology and social media can have on anything from buying habits, jobs and experience, both in a negative and positive way. Our design ethos is built on swiss design but with a twist. As a magazine we look at trends and what is ‘up’ and ‘down’ and what we think about it. We feature a lot of strong angles and diagonals throughout the pages.

The contents and contributors page. Each member of the group wrote a bit about themselves and their contribution to the magazine.

These were my spreads from my article about forensic science, and the advances that we’ve had that have made an amazing impact on how we solve crimes. I found it really interesting, and I thought it put a nice spin on the magazines theme, technology.

This article was about the top ten inventions we can look forward to in the future. Everything from domestic robots, to hydrogen powered cars, some of which are being achieved today. I chose to ‘slant’ this article to fit in with our angles theme throughout the magazine.

This was a short article on people that do silly things because of relying too much on their sat nav. One story was about someone from a town twenty minutes from me, a Taxi driver in Kings Lynn who drove into a lake. Sat navs can be dangerous things! Or maybe some people just need to concentrate a bit more?

This was the group photography story. We decided to focus on the society as it is now and highlight the issue of the situation of extreme opposites. We called it ‘Finding the Middle Ground’.

I’m putting the final touches to my latest project, ISTD, and will blog about it onces it’s ready! Here’s to a good year, and a brilliant and hard one to come, with a holiday to look forward to, starting our business and graduating! Cheers!

I recently bought some bubble wrap and some syringes off the internet, as I saw someone post a project on Behance that I found really interesting, and wanted to give it a go. The project was this one, which I’m rather jeleous about because I couldn’t get mine to work! I think my needle that I bought was a little bit too big, and it didn’t seem to fill the bubbles up very well. Quite naturally (for me) I got annoyed and frustrated and squirted the ink all over the top of the bubble wrap… which looked kind of cool.

Happy accident? I then decided to add more colours.

It might have been the fact that I was using gouache paints mixed with water, but it kind of looked like a gel like substance once it was over the bubble wrap. It was also really nice where the paint drops landed just on top of the bubbles, as in certain shots it almost looks as if the drops are floating.

This was probably my favourite shot. It also worked out that I’m going to use one of these as the front cover of my magazine! So I’m glad that I did it. I’m lso enjoying using my camera a bit more… which I should also do more often.

We wanted to highlight the issue of ‘finding the middle ground’ in society. The UK is living in a situation of extreme controversial opposites- graduates are jobless and footballers are earning £250,000 in a week. Families struggle to put food on the table whilst a culture of image obsessives buy into expensive shortcuts of supplements and surgery. We thought this was a very current problem in our society, especially with the economic climate the way it is.

So for each situation we are taking two contrasting situations. Here we’re showing the difference between someone who could afford a lot of fruit and eat really well, and the other will be someone who doses up on vitamin tablets. We bought rather a lot of fruit that day, and had to cut it all up and make it look presentable! Me and Amy did these shots at home in our kitchen. This was just to show how much fruit we actually had…

It all looked so bright and attractive! We also tried to stick to autumn colours to keep it seasonal.

It was then a case of trying to lay it out nicely in rows, and getting the colours to compliment each other. Some of it was really hard to get into straight lines too! There was a lot of frustration, and seemed to have taken us forever!

Amy taking the photos. These are all behind the scenes photos by the way! All the originals will be shown after the deadline… mostly because they haven’t been finished editing yet. So next was the vitamin shot, where we used a mixture of cheap vitamins from Wilkinson and some sweets that could pass as tablets.

I really liked how the Cod liver oil capsules glowed. I think these were even harder to get into lines, and once you moved one, another would just spin and knock all the others out of line. So a ruler came in handy with this!

I was getting the hang of it towards the end. So these two were contrasting shots, as you can hopefully tell. Another shot we did was of two plates of food. The lower class meal, beans on toast with a cup of tea, and the upper class meal, salmon and spinach on brioche with a glass of wine.

We managed to get near on perfect shots of this comparison, so we were quite happy! It was nice to do something a little different and get away from the computer for a while, even if it was a bit frustrating at times!

Our magazine had to be current, to do with the 21st century, and have room to expand into other things. We decided that technology is a big importance in the 21st century, so decided that ‘technology and social issues’ was going to be the theme of our magazine.

We were made to work quickly; on the day of the briefing, we had to get into groups (of six), come up with the name, theme, and what content will go into the magazine (all in 3 hours!). This was quite a challenge in itself, as I’m quite a slow idea producer, but it was a good idea to do this otherwise a week (out of four) would have been spent trying to work out what it was we wanted to do.

So we decided to call our magazine ‘Era’ as it’s in keeping with the times, get it? We have three sections to our magazine, Advances in technology, News and Travel and Style and Culture, and we’ve all produced articles and spreads to go into at least one of these sections. Our style of the magazine is quite simple, with the use of angles and simple colour, we’ve incorporated a swiss style.

I don’t really want to show it off just yet… that’ll have to wait until after the deadline I’m afraid! But I will show a photo from the shoot I did for my ‘Froensic Advances’ article, just as a taster!

But on a final note, I have collectively with two others set up a blog page that follows our journey of starting our own design business straight out of University (exciting)! So if you’ve got the time, take a look Form and Function

Our group was made up of three third years (including me), one second year, and three first years. At first we were going to make skulls to put in the window like everybody else, but then decided it would be much more fun if we did something like… I don’t know, baked a cake?

We decided to split the mixture up into three and make a multi-coloured cake. Yellow, red and blue.

This looked pretty cool! Although it is a shame it never comes out that bright once it’s cooked! The team wanted to put a headstone onto it, so we baked another cake that we could cut up, then cutting a groove into the cake, slotted it in. Then we basically a case of smothering it in icing so that it would hold up!

This was my little skull I’d made to sit somewhere on top.

The finished cake…

… and the inside.

So overall quite a fun day! It was nice to get away from our project work for a little while, and also nice to meet new people of cause!

I created my museum experience around twelve items that were swallowed by prisoners in the early 1900′s. The most important thing for me to put across in my experience was the suffering that the prisoners went though to have wanted to commit suicide.

This is my layout. As you can see there are three rooms that make up my experience. The first room hosts a small prison cell, so that visitors can see the kinds of conditions that were lived in. Also in this room is an interactive timeline; allowing the user to find more out about the year they are interested in, and what laws were passed to do with English prisons. The final thing in this room is the virtual tour, which allows the user to navigate there way through the building as it once was, using a control pad. There would also be sounds in this room, of prisoners shouting and prison doors slamming shut.

(Interactive Timeline)

           (Virtual Tour)

The second room is a simple room displaying means of torture and punishment. Screens would be placed on the walls showing visitors the kinds of punishment that prisoners would get if they did something out of turn.

The third and final room is where my items are exhibited. It is a very quiet room, where the items are held in glass cabinets that almost signify gravestones. I wanted to make the visitors feel respectful towards these people that had died. It would also be very cold, by having air conditioning units installed onto the walls, making it uncomfortable.

These two visualisations are my favourite, just because I think that the darkness of the room with the spotlights really puts the atmosphere across that I wanted to create.

So that’s that. What are they going to throw at us next guys? I hear a rumour that it’s Magazine Design… fingers crossed!

For those of you who don’t know, the penguin award brief for this year are now up!

It certainly doesn’t feel like a year ago that I completed this as one of my second year projects, but it sure is. Last years book was of cause ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, which you might remember I posted about once upon a time. This year however, it won’t be given to us as a university project, so I’ve decided to do it off my own back.

This years book is The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Apparently it’s like a crime/ mystery novel, but I haven’t started reading it yet, so will have to see what it’s like. Of cause theres always the Puffin Award too, which I may have a go at this year, which is The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

This is what the cover looks like now, which I quite like. It’s got a Saul Bass look about it. Definitely going to give this a go…

I was meant to be going to Derby Gaol, but when we got there, it was closed for maintenance work. This was rather annoying as I had drove all the way there for pretty much nothing! Could have displayed it on your website that you’d be closed guys.

We instead back-tracked to Nottingham, and went to the Galleries of Justice Museum, which I’m basing my exhibition project around. This time, instead of looking around the free exhibition, we took the tour which included a walk around the caves.

I didn’t think I would, but I found it quite un-nerving down here. I think it had something to do with the fact that if you touched the ceiling it was like crumbling sand…

Also, quick update on my project! It seems to be going quite well. I’ve been using Google SketchUp, which I’ve never used before, so I think considering I have no idea what I’m doing, I think this looks alright!

This is just a basic look. I’m currently taking it into Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to start putting things together and make it look like an exhibition. Deadlines on Thursday… so wish me luck!