Bah Humbug and the cards to go with it

"Creation Station" AKA My Room

Despite my quite negative approach to the festive season and the ties with it, I had a great idea of minimizing my spendings by taking photos, printing them and putting them in frames.
From this I started to draw some characters based around this part of the year, such as blokes in fuzzy hats, reindeer, snowman, and santas. I settled on reindeer and made cardboard cut outs of them and drew them with a fat marker.
Here is a quick guide to my creations, and my creation station.

First I used a discarded dishwasher tablet box as the cards
foundations then used parcel paper as a cover.
I then used a scalpel and some leather as an improvised
cutting mat. I glued and folded the card with an edge
of a knife as to make sure the bend in the card stayed put.
I then glued another rectangle of coloured paper as the
lining for the card, and then selected one of my
reindeer pictures that best suited the reciever.

ANYWAY, heres some of what I did make earlier. (that was confusing was'nt it?)

TYPOGATEAUX - "Amber's time to glow"

The best if not tastiest moment of my time on the course THUS far was Amber's ingenious plan to make all of the Graphic Design course to get together and make a cake. The brief and the cakes are as follows...

1. Open to any individual who is currently enrolled on the BA Graphic Design degree at LCAD (if working as part of a team, maximum team size is 5 individuals)

2. Typogateaux entries must be presented at 10am in studio one on thursday 18th December

3. On arrival you must fill in a registration card that lists the individual or teams names and the ingredients of the typogateaux.

4. Refrigeration is not available. Entries that require refrigeration after baking must indicate on the further information section of the registration card.

5. The typogateaux can be created from a bought cake that is adapted from a typographical form.

6. All typogateaux must be manufactured in a sanitary environment.

7. Judging criteria
INSIDE CHARACTERISTICS..................10 points
(Even grain, evenly baked, etc)
OUTSIDE CHARACTERISTICS..............10 points
(Consistent shape/size/surface; overall appeal)

Some of the entries:

What if i was a self evaluation?

Our problem was "Not enough students challenge their dietry habits"
This was realised after taking in our first survey, which asked people their name, age, and if they could cook or not, and if so, who taught them, surprisingly at least 50% could not cook, or had not been taught, this had an instant effect on our next move on how to approach the next investigation. Upon reviewing all of our quantatitive research the problem was refined, as we opened our survey into video interviews asking people on the spot how they would go about utilising a set of ingredients, which gave us greater insight into the verification of our problem. Which also provided us with hard evidence into how students and the general public surrounding the college go about preparing and cooking their food. (or in some cases, "... well you could just fry everything, oh thtas a bad thing to say innit really?")

We used a great deal of surveys, video interviews, and backed it up with references with cookbooks and internet sites. This was done to find common ingredients in meals to help us come up with our questions, and I was given the task to look into recipe books and suchlike in order to read through and evaluate common factors in the found meals that we could see students making, or attempt to make.

I then highlighted the ingredients most likely to be founf in the average student kitchen, replacing the extravagant ingredients with more commonplace ones, for example; instead of olive oil, use low fat cooking oil, or instead of real tomatoes, a canned alternative would be just as good. We found our topic to be of great difficulty when it came to producing a wide range of research, as we limited ourselves with our problem, but i found our methods to work well and supported our statements.

I think we would of spent more time looking into how we could make our problem blossom into more possible problems, and try out more experimental methods, but due to some students not being in the right place at the right time, it seriously injured our efforts. The posters produced at the end of the project were good, but due to time constraints and other factors, they were not quite up to par with the standard of impact on the public and to ourselves.
However we didnt use much else in terms of data collection, as our topic - as you can see - was limited in how we could resource it, on the other hand we still felt that our problem was very much real, as is shown with the groups joint effort to produce information on such a limited subject.

I personally feel that students do not go out of their way to eat healthy or to challenge their eating habits, think of all the instant pizzas, microwave meals, or even take-aways that students consume, (sterotypical, but very typical) when all it would take would be a little effort and time put into making something worthwhile to eat. Even my mother tells me and i still do that if your eating a frozen pizza, the least you can do is add some fresh cheese, vegetables, and even meat, just to make it that little bit healthier, and I do! This project had me dazed and confused at the start, and doubtful of a strong conclusion, or even a valid problem, but after all the toil and trouble, i really thought people could connect and understand this.
The 5 things I would of done differently would have been

1. look into more possible problem outcomes
2. use audio as well as video
3. make sure everyone is punctual
4. do more observational drawings to maximize end visual products
5. come to a conclusion quicker

The 5 things I have learned about the design process in the past 2 weeks:

1. idea generation has to be quick precise and concise
2. everyone has to co-operate
3. things never go as planned
4. always think visually
5. be positive, it turns out ok in the end!

"Collect... ...What If... ?" - whats it all about?

After the crit which involved a great deal of post-its and heavy confusion involving the group placements, after the post-it crit. People then had to select prominent themes within the pictures, for example, my photos had quite a festive feel due to my trip to the market, but the rest were more about urban decay. Then we were to link or create a new theme to work with from the post-it to research into more, so choosing the only 2 that went together 'food' and 'festive' (my name had more votes than all the other themes, but that would be big headed and a tad silly to research myself, no?)

Soon thereafter another good collection of research, we were placed in groups again to try to combine, or create a problem in which we had to solve by means of culminating evidence in order to support our problem.
In my group, I was working with Ian Prentice, Tim Wan, Andy Makin, and Matt Milner, our ideas were at first, quite hard to come to fruition, or even to some sort of 'real' conclusive problem in which we could "get our teeth into".

After swiftly ditching our first idea of "festive vegetarian takeaways" it dawned on us that through our first set of surveys on the latter subject, that alot of students did not know how to cook, prepare or experiment with food.




Our problem was:

"Not enough students challenge their dietry habits"

The images are a summary of our group research and work we did.

'100' Brief pt.2

After I went to the German market, I went for another walk through the graveyard round the back of Leeds university and took some pictures round there, as there were quite a few interesting textures and weird disgarded office equipment.
After this morbidly enchanting walk, I proceeded to an abandoned primary school just down the road from college, the building looked victorian and the influence of gothic architecture clearly showed, which I always find awe-inspiring.
All this picture taking did actually have a point to it, - however mundane and pointless it seemed to some of my peers, and to even myself at times, - it led on to be the basis for the coming brief.

After all our pictures had been taken and printed out at contact sheet sized images, we got into randomly selected groups and laid our pictures out on tables to "Categorise and collect..." our 'findings' into subjective and objective subgroups/genres as to use our own visual evaluation to categorise them.
Once this process had been done, the groups then had to move to a different table, then as a team had to clonk heads and try to create a cohesive informative way of showing the information gathered in some form of ordering, for example; Alphabetical, Numerical, Size, etc.

'100' Brief

The next brief was a rather open in terms of researching, and visual documentation. We were set the task of taking 100 photos that had to relate to; objects, places, people, and textures.

I decided to go to the German market in millenium square to take photos of the sights, smells and sounds of the condensed culture on show, however after taking a picture of the sausage stand, the blokes running it slammed their mighty tongs on their grill in what must of been a mutual understanding of moving on despite our lingual differences.

We then proceeded to evaluate and try to put the photos into some sort of categories that we found by looking at them and using our own judgement. Short to say it was easier said than done. After this process, we were asked to walk round and pick out subjects, or themes that were being categorised visually. We then had to select a theme to start our initial holiday research from, mine being once again a wefty challenge, was lumped with "festive" and "food"! so off I went in search for such things!

Ross's Time To Shine

After we had our light studio induction, I thought it would be rather good to put my fave pic up of the day! we learnt how to sort out an efficient and easy way to maintain the white balance, exposure and aperture by only using a light reader to make photoshoots alot easier. Here is Ross with an umbrella.

Brainstormed out

On monday, we had many a list to complete and comply with in groups. We created lists of 1000 collectables and categories in order to give us some help regarding our new brief. "What If..."

iLikeDrozd.

Luke Drozd was introduced to me by my previous course's aide, Jay, being into illustration and all things weird and wonderful in the design world, I went to look at his work, and have been a fan ever since. I love his prints, and the way his hand is not faltered at all when he does hand-painted proofs for his clothing design.

Amber's "Secret Santa"

We got set this brief some time ago now, however we could start it anytime we wanted. Taking the concept of "secret santa" like you do at school or work, where you spend a silly amount of money on something serious, or spend a stupid amount on something silly or... the variations go on.

Being a Graphic Design student, it would make a great deal of sense to create something rather than spend money on something, (being a student also means you are skint half the time) so Amber had a brief made so we could choose a person's name at random from a mixture of wrapped parcels. We then had to design a Christmas card for the persons name we got, and this is the first page in my sketchbook.

De Youff Dem

I took this photo in Leeds market one morning when shopping for some fruit and a bike pump.

It just goes to show that generic stereotyping can be programmed into use by an early age, but instead of having Nazis to brainwash the youth, it is influential, quite similar to Freud, or Fromm Theory.

This image was in a way, not too dissimilar to the photographers Jack Hulme, or Weegee, as both were trying to encapsulate everyday life in exciting or interesting ways.

Festive funtimes

Referring to the pictures i took , the group picked out elements that they thought had been essentuated regarding the subject matter in the images.

Using these topics as a starting point, FESTIVE, and FOOD, i went home and played in my kitchen, and fondled my appliances that are associated with food preservation or processing.

Research.....HATS?

We got set a new brief that was to take photos regarding texture, place

I can be dancier than you!

This video is really simple, but looks absolutely amazing, i love the stop frame animation, 

and the use of fellow students to make this, not only achieved by Jack Hyde's animation skills,

but thanks to 2 of his friends contributing to the illustration side of things, also a mentally good band

and good song.

Figures in speech

Classic example of good clean word association, a metonym refers to objective or subjective visuals making us respond in accordance, for example; crown - royalty, thumbs up - ok, bottle - drink or even cushion - comfy. I will use burberry as a modern day example, demonstrating its powerful presence in our common conceptions of the "chav"

Awwww... aint they stupid? For more hilarious chav parodies, check out www.fat-pie.com and watch devvo if you havnt, many happy times watching the antics.

Synecdochically speaking

a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, examples like "sword" with "steel", "thief" with "pickpocket" or even "hit" with "fist" or in this case "Pig" for the police.