February 2016 – Level 2 Design

February 29, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Research for Picturebook

After researching some illustrators briefly, I decided to narrow my focus in finding an artist whose style I liked and wanted to inform my own work. After searching through examples on pinterest and google image search, I came across an Illustrator called Anita Jeram. Jeram is an illustrator of children’s books and some of her work focuses on simplistic flat colours with heavy hand-drawn characters, the style I found was something similar I wanted to replicate which I felt was achievable despite my own abilities within illustrating to be lacking.

Overall the illustrations seem simplistic, whilst maintaining an element of design which can be conveyed easily into telling a narrative for children, so I feel as though this is the most appropriate for the style I’m trying to achieve.

February 29, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Initial Character Development

For the second brief of Semester B, we were tasked with creating a children’s book dealing with difficult themes, yet making it digestible and not too heavy for children. For this brief I played around with some different character designs, my first was a snake, but after choosing my theme I found it difficult to apply the character I designed.
The next sketches I made were some general facial expressions along with some sketches of wolves, to make these I drew them by hand, and scanned them with Adobe Capture. Capture allowed me to turn hand-drawings into instantly editable vectors compatible with Adobe Illustrator, from here I tidied them up and made supporting graphics to go along with them.

February 29, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Logo Design Applications

After creating my finalised logo I decided I wanted to try and apply it to some mock-up merchandise, to do this I downloaded copyright free PSD files and added my logo to some T-shirts. The logo’s are vector files which means the applications for them are limitless, I was able to shrink the logo down and make it applicable to t-shirts and other various outputs without a degrade in the overall quality of the type or graphic.

I created 2 designs for both male and female, using 2 previous iterations of my logo so the development wasn’t wasted. Overall I feel as though seeing my designs in a practical format makes them visually stronger than just by themselves, it’s also a nice exercise to run alongside development, it can inform design choices but it also give an indication as to whether the logo works or not.

February 27, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Adobe Muse – Website Mock-Up

After I had created the logo and finalised my design I decided I wanted to try and apply the graphic I made to a functioning website, in order to see how well it worked in a practical application. To create the website I decided that rather than code from scratch I would use Adobe Muse. Muse is a great tool to make a quick professional website, with operational buttons and hyperlinks along with having support for the files I created like the SVG files and Vectors which have transparent backgrounds.
After experimenting with some basic layouts I decided I wanted to keep the theme of using circles as a throwback to my very first logo. Whilst the website is very much bare bones at the moment it’s a great start to document the progress I’ve made with it, so far I have the index page, and a page linking to merchandise, the merchandise page will show some previous logo iterations and concept art for the game which can be bought.

For this website I aim to make all pages operational and link them to my work on the project. The development button links to this blog, the Entropia button will link to concept art for the game, and Awards and Review will link to a mock up page of the accolades the game has achieved.

Overall despite the website being in early stages of development I feel as though it’ll be a nice addition to other output formats which can be used to navigate through the project as a whole.

February 26, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Picturebook Development Plan

During the workshop of week 6 the group was given a new brief simply called “Picturebook Brief” the brief requires us to create a minimum of 8 pages regarding themes which children may find hard to deal with, the idea behind this is to get us to think about how we can deal with diffcult subject matter, and make it applicable through illustration and Typography making the topic more digestible for children.

Before setting out and creating the brief there was an obvious learning curve of what’s expected from us, and how we can tackle this. There was obviously an emphasis on some components which at first seemed somewhat commonplace and easy to overlook, however paying close attention to what’s expected, I now know that there should be a lot of attention paid to Typography and Colour, focusing on these two elements gives the book more visual coherence and overall makes the end product a lot better.
During the early stages of the brief I will focus on colour palettes and typography research, this should help inform the end product and make it a lot more professional. One final element I will look at will be the ability to rework and change ideas, a lot of the time designers think what they’re doing is final and good enough to submit as an end product, this is something I want to avoid unless I’m 100% certain of my own ideas.

Development Plan

The development plan for this brief will detail a time schedule of all the elements I’m working towards and when I want them completed by. I feel as though time plans are a good tool to use and stick to so as you understand how to spend on each component.

Week 6 – Research/Project Planning Stage

Name for the PictureBook
Research on inspirations (Artists, Authors)
Look at examples I want to influence my work on
Progression with the Design/Overall Branding

Week 7 & 8 – Concept art and further ideas development

In-depth picturebook research (What conventions do I follow, examples of how to compose a narrative for kids, how to make the end product look/feel thematically appropriate? )
Rough sketches (Concept art, Character art)
Experiment with Typography (how does it look/feel with supporting illustrations)

Week 9- Further Illustration Exploration

Finalised Title (Reach a point where I know what I can improve for the cover/title)
Typography evaluation, new choices from old, variations and how well it works
Further Character concept art, Settings for the book, Environments Etc.
Upload Sketches – Evaluate Likes/Dislikes
Further develop environments, showcase potential settings for the character

Week 10 & 11 -(Easter) Final Tweaks

Finalised Illustrations (What character am I using? What Environments/Themes?)
Room for improvements (Are the sketches representing of the book enough positively? Room for tweaks?)
Finalised Colour Palettes

Week 10 onwards – Polishing final output

Have a finalised booklet 8/10 pages
Character development finalised uploaded to blog separately
Colour Palette and supporting work uploaded to blog
create final Pdf for the semester, uploading both projects.

Research & Source Material

https://uk.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=illustration&rs=typed&0=illustration%7Ctyped