bbc olympics ad

I really like the animation created by Marc Craste, I think this is because of the style of the animation. One of his more famous pieces of works was "Jojo in the stars" This won the 2004 bafta for best animated short film. The bbc ad could be useful towards the research I am doing towards my Professional project at the moment.

Bloom Box.

I have been doing some research for my professional project, and I found this on the national geographic. I found it a fascinating innovation and I was wondering how I could tie this in with the project I'm doing...

advertising research

'Anyone who hears butterflies laughing knows how clouds smell.'

Novalis

The name of that ad was...

This is the advert I was trying to talk about in Dr. Anna's session last Monday. I would like to write something on this sort of ad campaign?!

Learning agreement hand in

I would say today was quite an intense day to end a pretty intense week. I finished writing out my learning agreement which wasn't to hard to be honest, there was just a lot of copying and pasting which took time.

So my idea for the Professional project is to brand/do an identity for a campaign, and make an factual animation promoting this. I decided I wanted to keep this brief as open as I could so it would give me free reign on the type of thing I would like to do. So I resolved this by putting an ecological issue.

After finishing this and handing in, I was anticipating the weeks ahead. One of the objectives which will be key in my handing in, will be my time management. I created an intense, week by week plan, so hopefully I will be able to do a good job of it

Looking forward to the next week I will have to show my organisational skills which will help towards my hand ins:

• Monday I have the PPRD hand in
• On the same day I have to have my essay question ready, with possible images.
• The beginning of my time plan, for professional project starts Monday to.
• I will also need to fit in some space to work on the lastminute.com brief for DNAD.

If I can keep on top of these then I should be fine.

A little inspiration

Aquent talk

Emma Barrett from Aquent came down from London to speak to us today. I was quite excited about this talk because I knew they were one of the largest creative recruitment agency. She said on average they are employing 3500 people per week, which I think is quite a few.

Emma explained that agency's have changed and it is rare to get an agency that does a bit of everything, so most agencies specialise in a certain area. She spoke highly of agencies such as Fitch and Landor who specialise in branding, which influenced me to find out a lot more about these people.

Through some research I found out they had worked for some of the biggest brands in industry and they were just a couple of the top agency's in design today.

She also spoke about Kino the people who designed one of the concepts for the London 2012 logo, they also have a contract to work with apple.

Here are a few points I learned from the talk:

• If I'm looking for magazine work, know my publishers and look for the art director so I can contact them.
• When showing my work to potential employers, have a good use of type, a strong layout and relevant work.
• Keep doing self initiated projects and enter competitions such as DNAD because it is essential for a good portfolio.
• Most importantly use your contacts, cause they can get you places.

I showed my portfolio to Emma after the talk, the feedback I got was helpful and she gave me some names of employers to send my portfolio to, which was promising. I said that I saw my future being somewhere in digital. She gave me the names of 'BskyB' and 'proximity' who were a digital agency. After today I left feeling inspired to go out and do something with the advice I had been given.

Anna Steinberg talk...again?

Today a freelance illustrator called Anna Steinberg came in today to talk to us about working in freelance design. Even though I am a graphic designer, it was interesting to hear how being a freelancer could effect how we work.

So a bit of background to Anna is that she graduated from a general graphics course in 1994. After graduating she went to work with the AOI aka association of illustrators.

As an illustrator she spoke about ways of promoting herself. While promoting herself in commonly known ways she said a way to go out and get work was through trying to find the art director of a company, for example in a magazine, she said it was important to speak on 1st name terms which would give the conversation a warmer atmosphere. I particularly enjoyed the step by step guide of how she did the guardian brief 'pushed into work.'

Anna gave me the inspiration to get organised before going into the real world. The way in which she did this was to encourage us to create a log which dated each live project we had done to help us find dates easily, see what company I was working for at the time, when money was sent and received.

I don't want to speak negatively of this talk because she was interesting to listen to, and had a lot of useful things to say, but she came in last year (when I was in first year) and did pretty much the same lecture, so it was a bit de ja vu so I decided to take this as a positive and see it as a refreshment session as I don't think I recorded it well last year.

A way this could have been improved was by letting the first years get involved with this talk too.

All Anna's work can be found at: www.annasteinberg.co.uk

Essay start...

Today was our first tutorial about our essay for second year. An unfortunately I was completely unprepared. Dr. Anna wanted to hear about what subject we had picked to do for our essay, and I hadn't even started to think about it. So I tried my best to think up something on the spot, which back fired...

For next weeks session I will hope to have a solid idea of what I want to do...

flash animation?

I found this flash animation on Miles Donavons blog, I really liked the style of the animation (and not cause it had something about Pepsi in it.) Over the next few weeks I'm going to start writing my essay for this years unit. I think it will be quite interesting to write about something about this style of animation...

Learning agreement presentation

Today I did my presentation for the learning agreement. I hadn't really had many ideas before, but I came up with the idea to create a brand and the promotional material for an animation. Unfortunately my idea was shot down, and I could understand the reasons why it wasn't going to work.

I generally hate presentations so having to do one and then sit through everyone else's till 5 o'clock took way to long. Because we had just got the project, I think a better way of doing this would have been to have small tutorials, this is because it would have helped ideas a bit more.

The feedback I got from the critique was ok, but I feel I could have got a little more direction. The next step for me now is to push the ideas I was given from feedback, and see if I have any interests within them.

DNAD blog

I have been reading through some of the more recent posts and have found a lot of interesting and relevant posts to my study's at the moment:

DNAD blog

Are logo's dying?

'Brand worlds explain themselves globally. They intrigue, excite and offer flexibility. They are a campaign, useful and engaging. They are everything a logo is not. Which is why the logo is dead.'-Simon Manchipp

I was reading the metro yesterday and came across this article about the branding of the euro 2012 championships. Simon Manchipp is a founder of the London-based design company 'SomeOne.' He used the euro 2012 logo as an example of how logo design was changing. He was amazed by the selection of backgrounds, textures, illustrations and ideas that support this logo.

The main inspiration for this logo was the authentic early 19th art form of wycinanki which was paper cutting both popular in Poland and Ukraine.

My question is...is there a way I can incorporate this into my professional project? I was looking at creating an identity, I know that I wanted to do something that could reflect an industry standard piece of work. Over this year I have found myself enjoying more screen based work. So maybe creating an identity concentrating on how I could make a logo that inspires creatives?

dnad tutorial

I had to come in to sign my work for our fundraiser that is happening on Wednesday at 60mill. Unfortunately my work wasn't of a high enough standard to be shown in the exhibition as they wanted six identical prints (which i didn't have).

I was really disappointed about this because I had put a lot of effort, and spare time into it. I really wanted to put something towards the end of year show as part of my contribution.

I forgot that I had double booked my tutorial for DNAD with work. So I spoke to Neil and asked to re-schedule for another day.

I think this has set me back on my progression with lastminute.com and my professional project. So hopefully during the next week I will be able to find some space to do it.

Dnad-last minute

I went to Jacks today to discuss the brief we had decided to do for dnad. The night before we came up with ideas of our own so we could talk about which ideas we could develop. Most of the day was spent looking at lastminute.com and researching ambient media. Most of the good ones we found on youtube.

From our meeting I felt I gained a better understanding of the brief and a better direction for the work to take shape. I think the hardest bit was because lastminute.com covers such a big area of leisure time. It was difficult to home in on a particular part.

We decided it would be a good idea to set up a meeting with our tutor on Monday to discuss our ideas, to see if we were on track with this project.