Speaking from experience

I began trying to find days which had something significant to the course such as presentations and typogateaux i was going to fill the book with tips on how to cope with the first year workload but it wasn't about that so much is was more giving them a visually more interesting aid to learn there own time management and organisation skills as I struggled with this and I believe that when you have just signed up for a graphic design course and the first thing that is handed to you is a boring black business type diary with no colour or inspiration puts me off entirely!

Speaking from experience

This brief is about designing something with my knowledge of the first year graphics course at leeds college of art for there upcoming first years! immediately this sounds to me like I am creating an almost survival guide how to get through the year and letting the students know what to expect as it is a course with demanding deadlines and hard work must be given at all times! I began thinking about all the things which I had difficulties in and took a while to get to grips with. Here are the things I was outlining::

• Making friends
• Directions around university
• access to workshops when and where!
• Time management
• Directions to get to university
• Where to eat
• Cheapest food stores
• How to get the most out of freshers
• Getting on with flat mates
• Bus routes
• Train timetables
• Getting organised
• Where to get help(student services, advice clinics etc)
• Taxi numbers - which ones are cheap!
• Food takeaways
• Handy websites help with research and inspiration
• Shops with student discounts!
• Cheap nights out in leeds
• How to do the washing and ironing
• Housework
• where to purchase art materials
• How to save money
• Where to visit on research week
• Good museums around leeds
• Cheap days out
• Choosing best accommodation
• Booking times in print room and workshops
• Accessing digital cameras video etc.
• Talking to the I.T people in he bubble!
• Missing home
• Organisation
• Blog!

With this in mind i then wanted to exploit all possibilities for a product I don't want to just create a poster and packaging BORING! and typical of what a new graphic student expects to see and I thought it would be much better if they got given ideas that the course is more than just designing posters! Its about innovative design and thought process and most importantly designing something which the client needs or can make use of.

With this in mind I went on to think about products:

Deck of cards- I have got this idea from students who when they go out often " Pre drink " and most of the games need a full deck of cards! Yet my set would be useful as a deck of cards but on the back have achievements or things they have to find out, which they have to target and there will be on for every week 52 cards 52 week in a year!

Website/ Blog- Students can visit give each other tips and ideas about the course where they can purchase things blog where the cheapest hardware for graphics such as wacum tablets etc.

Book- Food recipes with only 3/4 ingredients, cheapest place to purchase them.

Bingo chart- Has challenges and activities to complete around Leeds Hand in to the student union when collected things from different sites and win a prize E.G festival tickets, concert ticket, free entry to clubs.

Trading cards- With tips and tricks to make first year easier only have a set of 10 each with a poster that contains numbered boxes need to ask others there tips to fill in the poster! making friends and helping difficult situations such as software problems or where to buy things

Shopping List- From food/clothes/art materials

S.O.S fresher pack- Must do's and dont's in your first year different sets in the pack uni, accommodation, nights out etc.

Diary- Use a diary yet on the pages have tips to get on to get through each week and be able to record deadlines and organise there time.

Cards for wallets and purses- cards with comical hints where NOT to spend/ Waste your money!!

I have chosen to go with the diary idea because when I started in first year everyone was given a diary which was something I have never used to this day and my organisation has got better due to a colourful white board which is hung on my notice board. I believe this is because I can interact with it it is a check list that i can change what is read on it. The diary that I received from the college was a plain black boring thing no colour I thought I had enrolled onto a Business course not a design! I researched into diaries which are currently like the one I wanted to create for inspiration and just to see what is out there. I soon came to realise there wasn't any like mine only things that people had drew onto the pages just for fun yet wasn't practical enough to sell as there was no space to write onto. Also I decided I wanted Just to do the months of a student not the full year! So therefore was immediately grabbing my target audience.

Things may include in the diary:

Funny comments overheard in the studio:

1. Wonder what soup it is today?
2. Food is awful in the canteen don't know why i keep buying it!
3. Right im deffinantly going to start making dinner from now on I cant afford to buy it everyday!
4. Anyone want to go for chocolate?
5. Cheese and onoin pasty again for dinner £1 from Ainsleys! NOW COOPLANDS much to my annoyance !!
6. The walk to uni still kills me!
7. Printing is far too expensive
8. Print to the libary colouerd printer much cheaper!
9. Buy your own paper and do a paper feed in the mac suites much cheaper!
10. Signing in at half nine is stupid were not kids!
11. Anyone got a pen?
12. We get far too much work for first years!!
13. My pic for the year wall is awful
14. Did anyone see a certain someone from the year always nod off in fred monday morning briefings?!

Illustrations for diary

My illustrations i drew all in a sketch book and had them dated so it would be easier to place onto the template with the diary pages on! Yet when i have scanned the images in they have this gloomy grey around them and this was an issue for me as i wanted them just to be clear silhouettes. I photoshopped many of them but was having difficulties with the ones which i had previously coloured . Therefore decided not to use them and instead on the black and white ones fill them with digital colour this gave a really nice effect joining illustration with digital techniques. They appear quite large on here yet i was planning on reducing there size due to the pages only being A6 and being the nature of a diary would need somewhere to write!

Book Adaptation.

Here we were asked to bring into the lesson an old book which would be able to cut into and effectively destroy I chose a ring binder instruction booklet I wanted to get away from the original old novel which i was sure to a lot of in the lesson I thought something bigger A4 size would create more of a challenge. The booklet was instructions for some see machinery it had images of cogs and bolts and screws therefor very industrialised i immediately thought of an interaction book something which you could learn from and turn things etc. As the rest of the group was cutting there pages up i wanted to create tabs which could be moved to represent this interacting with the book as if you would reading the instructions.

Communication is a virus

Nightmare when screenprinting!!


Experiments with logo design the top one is the final one we decided on! our logo we decided on yum yum as it relates directly to food and is something which I remember saying as a child it is happy and lighthearted as are the colours plain and simple we didnt want it too complicated as a child would be refering to it.


Our designs with the eyes on the fruit and veg


Final book pages

I was really excited to start this project and i preferred the method of choosing who we were going to work with. We created an advert to the type of designer we were seeking to be a part of, theses contained five of our skills and 5 attributes and then the same that we lacked in and would be complimented by our partners to be! My partner was Ellis and I knew we would be be to develop something which would be successful we got started straight away getting all our ideas down on paper on the questions which we were willing to explore deeper. after doing this we decided to explore the question ‘ Getting people to try something new’ We wanted to aim this at children and eating habits There is a lot of things which purposely advertise to children the importance of eating 5 A Day fruit and veg yet we wanted to do this yet make it a more fun activity through the exploration of previous campaigns and child psychologists we discovered a lot of key things which we had to include such as not referring to food as good or bad this is why we dont mention the words "healthy/ healthier" foods anywhere as we wanted to make the eating activity fun not good or bad thing to do! children connect more with objects that have eyes. After our first week of researching and producing ideas we had another member joining our team which was Roz this was good for the group she takes leadership roles and really pushed our ideas into reality in a week we had all our ideas generated and a series of products. We had created a pack for children which would potentially help them to enjoy meal times the pack contained: Reward Chart with Velcro fruit and veg, Stickers, A chefs hat, Wooden Knife fork spoon, A picture recipe book, Novelty Key rings. I am really impressed with the outcome by far my best project yet!!

The research for this bri

ef i did on jamie oliver and super nanny finding out how children learn and how they feel it easier to interact and do things by themselves as they are growing up! here are the design boards we created for the crits:

Week one:

we got the communication is a virus brief yet we had to work in pairs for it. It wasn't as simple as that though we had to try and find the perfect potential graphic designer in the group so we had a range of tasks to do the first one was to write down:

Five skills we have:

• Surface pattern
• Illustration
• Confident speaker
• Researching
• Generating Ideas

Five personal attributes of mine:

• Friendly
• Open minded
• Hard working
• Happy
• In decisive

And then we had to write down what we want in another designer:

Five skills in them:

• Software skills
• Crafting
• Making products professional

Five personal attributes:

• Friendly
• Easy going
• Decisive
• open minded
• Punctual

After this exercise everyone was told to go and make an advert of the information we had just gathered I chose to do an illustrated advert to show what I am interested in . When we had completed this we stuck them up onto the wall and had some post its which we put our names on and then stuck them onto the posters which we would want to work with.

My poster had three names on: Gemma, Ellis, Will

We needed to arrange to talk and see if we would want to work with the other person Ellis had come to me because I had a post it on her poster and I needed to see her aswel so we decided after a chat we would do the project together.

We were all given a sheet with 10 statements on we would need to choose on to base the project on the statements were:

• Get people to try something new
• Get people to talk/communicate more
• get people to read more
• get people to tell the truth more
• get people to use public transport more
• get people to live healthier lives
• get people to recycle more
• get people to give more
• get people to use their vehicle more responsibly
• tell a lie convincingly

I suggested that we brainstorm at least three that we were interested in taking up so thats what we then began to do started with

Get people to try something new

Get people to read more

Tell a lie convincingly

Week 2:

Me and Ellis then went away to do further research into each subject we covered and both came back on monday with our ideas and both had gone for try something new and wanted to aim it at children linking funny comments to try and get them to enjoy meal times more and potentially eat healthier at the same time Ellis came up with little comments and tasks the fruit and veg would say in a book such as Peas: try and get me into your mouth without rolling me off your plate!

I really favoured this idea of fruit and veg being a character more research into this shown that if you put eyes onto an object children relate more to it! which was perfect we brainstormed things which we could also include in a fun pack for kids

Fun pack includes:

• Reward chart- velcro fruit and veg need five to get a prize
• Velcro veg and fruit
• Key ring fruit/ veg ( potentially be a collectable)
• Chef hat
• Wooden knife fork and spoon
• Recipe book
• Packaging
• stickers

As we were just talking about what we were going to do Roz came and said amber had told her to join her group which was exciting for me because I knew she had the software skills and was punctual which was to of the attributes I was looking for in my partner. She began looking at the brief and we went over what we were trying to achieve with her. She pointed out that we musnt forget the mandatory requirements state that we must use 2 colours plus stock. So we then began deciding what fruit and veg we could use.

Week 3:

Making of the products Roz suggested we got to work straight away woth the making process as we wanted to produce so many different products. Roz had began making the fruit and veg on photoshop and putting eyes on them which looked fab!! I booked screen print and began trying to get hold of a chef hat well a lot incase they went wrong! We developed the logo so i could screenprint onto them. The tasks in the recipes book started coming together and we ll decided to do everything together rather than going off and bringing designs together as we wanted everything to look exactly the same as it was being put together in a pack we needed it to be all the same. We had booked our print time for monday so needed to be finished for then we thought then if something goes wrong we could redo it for friday! something which I probably wouldnt have done if I was doing this project on my own!

Week 4:

We had decided to screenprint the packaging well all the products as I went down to the print room and began exposing the screens and things I started printing yet just didnt look professional enough! NIGHTMARE!! so Roz decided to upstairs and do the packaging digitally she booked digital print for the stickers and packaging. I said we might aswel screen print the hats with the logo because we wouldnt be able print digitally on them so thats what we decided to do. By the end of the week everything was produced and it was a matter of crafting the final thing.

Book Fair

For the book fair my subject began with objects in threes and had to be horizontal in the center of the frame. Then after brainstorming I began thinking of other ways which i could encorporate the number three into this. After thinking about this i began thinking about other threes and looked at time and watches recording watches when the hans faced to the number three. I then illustrated them and created the hot dog dog fold.

Experimenting with dog fold

Experimenting with dog fold

These were experiments with the Hot Dog fold how you can change and adapt the original fold. I am doing this in preperation for the Book Fair as w have to use this design in A4 or A3 size papers. I have just tried to adapt what i have done with the book as what type of paper I have used and I let this affect what I was going to do with it. I enjoyed doing this and was surprised how much I was able to get out of it. Quick easy and effective LIKE IT!!