Re: John Dyer Baizley

For those of you who that have gotten to know me within the past few months (or have at least managed to read my 'so what's to know' section like any normal person would have done in the first place), you will have probably come to realise that music plays a rather large part of my everyday life; be it playing drums within bands myself or just having a general mooch about the local music scene to see what's going on.

With this in mind, I thought I'd post this post about a particularly influential designer who's work I have really admired over the past few years and first came into contact with through my passion for music and in many cases the packaging that accompanies it.





Being a part of a band called Baroness, Baizley's work is often the subject of their packaging and merchandise designs and anyone who has had a keen enough eye will have noticed the Darkest Hour shirt that I have worn on a couple of occasions was designed by him as well. This goes for numerous other merchandise and packaging designs which are viewable on his website if you take the time to have a look.

For me though I just really love the fine detail that goes into the illustrations themselves and the way in which the texture of various papers play an active part in the finished product overall. Even if some of the content within his images are not ideally suited to your preferred taste, I hope you can still appreciate the skill and commitment that has gone into the work. I think it's increasingly amazing with every new piece that I see.

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Links:

John Dyer Baizley
Baroness

2w + 3t = 1t + r3

Friday. Good ol' Friday. End of the working week and also the end of an on-going two week brief that has required me to design a typeface (A to Z including the glyphs ! ? £ @ : .) to represent the personalities traits of my given partner. This being the arguably unlucky Lauren.

After some initial interviewing the words that I felt described Lauren most accurately were cynical, devious, good-hearted, hard-working, indecisive, informed, messy, pessimistic, vacant and in a somewhat light-hearted manner; alcoholic. Naturally all of these words didn't fit together in a nice coherent and non-contradictory manner; so I divided them into separate groups that I thought would allow for the best outcome in the long run.

Working with the resultant notion of a "messy and vacant alcoholic" I got to work on some of my immediate ideas involving a hands-on approach with stencils and Indian ink. The base font I chose to develop my unique typeface from was Helvetica in it's boldest format. This was selected in order to convey the bold, out going and 'in your face' side of a happy alcoholic.


Although these results proved successful on many levels, I opted to continue the progression of my ideas through digital means. In doing so, I defined a series of brush presets that allowed me to create a more uniformed font; a font that achieved a sustained house style if you like. This is what I settled with...


From here I took my work into my crit session looking for some supportive feedback and ultimately some outside opinions on what needed to be improved and perhaps developed further. It was suggested that I needed to convey the sense of 'vacant' on the same level as the other two traits and to also experiment with what materials I decided to portray 'messy' and 'alcoholic' through. Back to the drawing board I went.

With this feedback in mind, I set out solving the problems raised within the crit. I got a coffee. I got a fine liner, and off I went; to the lightbox that is. I decided to see what could be achieved through contouring my pre-existing typeface as in my own mind this would directly portray a sense of vacant. The letter forms themselves would be empty inside and I would be left with a hollow shell. Perfect. I additionally wanted to make a conscious use of the negative space within the counters and bowls to distance my typeface from the norm and to also gain an even stronger correlation to the word messy via an abstract approach. This time I thought I had something that worked.




However, as I could only produce one finalised typeface design I opted to go with the contoured series of letter forms as I felt they worked more cohesively as a whole and would be much more readable in a bigger body of text. As a result, I spent the next couple of hours honing the presentation of all of the letters an altering some of the ones that I wasn't particularly happy with; i.e the J and the G which either looked awkward to the eye or were purely not legible enough.

Once completed my next port of call was to produce the deliverables stated within the brief; a name badge for my partner and an A1 sheet of trace that housed my entire alphabet in one uniformed space.




In regards to the name badge I chose to present Laurens name as the abbreviated and slightly informal 'Loz'. This was done in reflection to the alcoholic trait that has many informal connotations attached to it and also because it just worked. It sounded messy, vacant and alcoholic all in one.

Come the final crit, Lauren was largely pleased with what I had produced in regards to her personality traits and said that I had reflected her character well; despite the claims in front of our group that she was in no way, shape or form an alcoholic. Brilliant! On a more serious note though, it was pointed out that the outline of my letter forms could be weighted heavier as to stand out more from a distance. Alternatively I could produce my typeface as white on black in the future which would similarly give out a strong, contrasting finish. Not bad at all then!


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Manuals 2

As the title suitably suggests today was another day spent in the faithful and somewhat legendary print workshop; this time working with the manually driven print process of screen printing. A true classic. In opposition to the mono-printing I got my hands messy with last week, I was pleasantly surprised at how clean and dirt free this method of application was; which was enhanced by the fact that the ink was 70% water based and therefore came off of my hands a damn site easier than the oils based inks did last week! Amazing.


First of all we began with a base layer of processed Magenta that was applied subsequent to our screens being exposed to black and white positives made from our mono-prints completed last week. This was then given a second coating of ink over the top using a processed cyan and alternative black and white positive previously manipulated (and exposed to a separate re-claimed screen) using permanent markers and tippex.




Once both layers had dried our final prints came out as seen above and I won't lie; I'm really happy with the way they turned out! (Note that only the top image of the three is my own work).

Overall however, I'd really like to explore the possibilities of this process with a full CMYK print and some design work that I have put more time into developing. Other than that, sweet as a nut!

Enjoy! x

Tight is Right

Just another quick post really to share a piece of logo design I was asked to complete for a friends band Darkest Before Dawn. They're from Leicester and will definitely be a band to watch when their recordings hit up the internet in December.



Completed this badboy using Helvetica and a pretty damn tight kerning. Winner.

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The Theory of Colourtivity

After working with black and white for what has seemed to be an eternity, it's safe to say that Monday just gone was a full on eye burner. This was largely down to the fact that everyone within the group had to bring in 10 collected objects that were of the colour assigned to them at the beginning of term; mine being blue. Joy. At least it wasn't yellow.

Once we had established who had what, where, when and why etc we separated into our respective groups and began focusing upon the categorization of our colour regarding various sub-categories such as hue, saturation, lightness and darkness.




As you can see it was actually pretty interesting visually once everything was arranged together within one collective space. (It was also a little less harsh on the eyes than the mother of all PowerPoint presentations that Fred unleashed upon us first thing that morning and later on that afternoon!)

After this we subsequently took it upon ourselves to arrange our objects in what was officially dubbed as The Line of Destiny; which in my personal opinion made it a lot easier and a lot clearer to order our objects via the sub-categorizations. In fact, it was so good that the Purples (Violets) decided to join onto us to form an active three dimensional gradient.



From here things then seemed to get a little out of control. Before I even had time to grab a trademark coffee the entire spectrum of colours had joined onto the trail and formed a complete colour wheel that went in one end of the studio, out the other side and all around the landing where we had initially set up our Blue objects. It actually looked amazing to be fair, so as you do; I documented it and made this nifty little video that I am really pleased about. (It's the first one I've ever done by the way).

To finish off the day we concluded with an exercise that focused more specifically on how colours impact with each other when juxtaposed together. This consisted of arranging compositions with sets of complimentary coloured objects (for me it was my blue ones with some of the oranges provided by Chris, Mitch and Westy) and documenting them via photographic methods. After about an hour or so of messing about I think I had something close to 100 photos of various results; some of which are vibrant to say the least! Anyway, as per; here are some of the best ones. See what happens when you stare long enough at where one colour meets another; it's nuts!





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Manuals

Well well well, print workshop induction on Friday. Messy. Messy, but fun! Except to say that my nails are still looking fashionably grim and ridden with dirt. Kind of attractive, but only if you're going for that look? I don't know. Anyway, I have to admit that it was pretty much the first time that I have used manual print making facilities to create mono-prints and maybe as a result my experimentation with the process could have been a little more creative and daring. Either way I am still pretty stoked on what I managed to achieve for a beginner and as they say on reality TV; here are some of my best bits...




To start off with we were limited to the processed colours of cyan, magenta, yellow and key. Simple but effective! Although throughout the course of the day many people chose to exploit colour layering to it's maximum potential and got some visually interesting prints. Personally I chose to keep my approach more structured and often to one single block colour (particularly that magenta as it was to die for!). What's more I had a good mess about with using both the positive and negative parts of the stencils I created from lettering devised within the previous brief. Overall I had an absolutely awesome day, probably because I just love to get my hands dirty and create something with a bit of depth and personal touch behind it. But yeah, more photos to come soon once I pick up my finished (and dried) prints.

Out. x

Yeah Yeah Sunshine!

Was having a quick look on sevendaysmakeaweek the other night when I came across a cheeky little link to http://www.spvz.net/ (the work of Adam Valentin) in the bottom right hand corner of Week 19.

Anyway, this image caught my eye purely for the fact of how simple it was presented and how clearly it conveyed its message to the audience.


Sexy, no?

As a result I thought I'd give myself a little mini brief of attempting the same sort of thing that at also managed to house my name within the layout; this is what I came up with...



I used CMYK for the colouring of the typography as it cunningly allowed for the first half of 'sunshine' to be presented in yellow and the second half (my surname) to be presented in key (black). I then used a pantone grey for the background as in the words of Phoenix:

"Grey helps show a truer colour than white or black (or so that Mac Suite induction dude said)."

True story, but I also went for a white finish non the less; just to explore what it might look like to the viewer.

So yeah, nothing ground breaking here but I thought I'd just like to share with you something I had fun messing around with for 20 minutes or so. Bo.

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All lucked out... Fire Do Or Kee P Shut

So for the past week it seems as if my fate has been decided by the dreaded creation known as The Randomiser; a terrifying machine designed to completely shake up a students life and claim their soul just when they thought it was safe... With this in mind Monday morning saw the birth of a new briefing; Alphabet Soup. This required the creation of 10 brand new letter forms at an A6 resolution, all of which had to convey our own interpretation on the word that we 'luckily' plucked from the jaws of the Randomiser. My word turned out to be 'Duplicate'...

"That which exactly resembles or corresponds to something else; another correspondent to the first; hence, a copy; a transcript; a counterpart."

Not so bad really?

So after a few coffee's (as standard) and a succulent bacon butty, I cleared my head and got to work on drafting up some initial ideas that I hoped may develop into some ground breaking design.



Off the bat I primarily decided that I wanted to work with the letter C as I thought it had a sufficient amount of potential to develop other letter forms from and also because I was truly sick to the back teeth of working with the letters 'L' and 'O'. Some might say I was off to a good start.

However, things took a turn for the worst when Thursdays workshop marked the return of the Randomiser; 'Hexagon and Square' was my lucky pick of the day. With this I firstly had to visually record my findings from around the college and subsequently present them on the wall of fame along with everyone else's coveted treasure; I was pretty taken back at how much work was produced within a simple 20 minute exercise. (A sample of my own observations can be seen in the lower image).



From here the fate of the Randomiser truly set in when we were briefed to create our own printed alphabet made up of only the two shapes we had selected earlier within the session. Low 5. Despite this, I similarly got to work with drafting up some immediate ideas and eventually produced what I consider to be a pretty good effort given the short amount of time. I have also included some of my favourites that were devised by other students below.





Anyway, back to the soup...

Come Friday I had progressed with my ideas and discarded the ones that were in danger of becoming polished turds. All was well. I had a variety of solutions ranging from literal stencil duplications and mirroring, to working with letter forms created by impacting one letter onto another. So with this, I set about producing my final 10 responses to present on the wall of fame.






In the end I felt pretty accomplished with what I had achieved as I managed to explore a range of ideas that I would never have normally chosen to have done; especially if I had not been given this brief. Never-the-less my crit feedback suggested that some of my letter forms presented an unclear interpretation of my given word and could have easily been created in response to terms such as dissect, edit, layer, copy or hybrid. As a result, should I be able to modify my ideas in future instances I would make a specific effort to address this aspect and build upon my letter forms giving them a more clear and concise purpose.

Either way, the final wall looked like this. Enjoy.


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Re: H.N Werkman

With everything that's been going on recently (aka: moving to a new city, filling in a forests worth of paper work and generally adjusting to a new lifestyle) I have kind of been feeling pretty numb on the design front - mainly in the way of remembering anything that has inspired me over the last year or so. It has ultimately felt like a dose of amnesia chased by a heavy night on the drink where everything that may or may not have happened in that time of intoxication appears to be a complete blur when trying to recollect the next morning.

However, luckily for me tonight brought a mild sense of relief when I managed to stumble across an archived disc of my college work from last year. On it was a series of pictures by a relatively unknown Dutch designer, typographer and printer named Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman. You may have seen his work, you may have not. Either way, it was something that I personally became almost obsessed with last year and therefore thought I would like to share with you all now.



Although these aren't the best examples of his work I just really love the way in which he experimented so thoroughly with different styles of layout and seemed to effortlessly combine type and blocks of colour in such an aesthetically pleasing manner. This goes for numerous other designers really; Marinetti, El Lissitzky and Tristan Tzara to name but a few.

It was just such a shame that the majority of his works were destroyed by a fire that broke out when German troops were fighting the Canadians in his town... not to forget that he was also arrested and shot dead by a firing squad under the orders of Adolf Hitler just three days before his province was liberated. What do you say to that?

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