Entries categorized as ‘Inspiration’
Been meaning to post this for quite a while, ive been thinking of ways to get inspiration for my work from sources other than looking at websites and reading design blogs.
So i thought i would visit somewhere in the capital city that could maybe provide some of that inspiration, i decided upon the London Transport Museum as it’s always looked interesting whenever ive been around Covent Garden.
I found it to be a very interesting and worthwhile visit, the place was full of fascinating imagery and artefacts documenting how the city of London has gradually become the huge great mass of networks,roads,tubes,rivers that it is today.
Particularly interesting to me were some of the signs and posters from the early 20th century, i love the old fashioned typography and hand made artwork. A refreshing change from the Photoshop world we live in today, take a look at some of the photos i took ( on my phone so quality isnt that brilliant!)
Categories: Inspiration
Over the easter break i went to the design musuem in london to see the Designs of the Year exhibition. The seven categories were Architecture,Fashion,Furniture,Graphics,Interactive,Product and Transport.
I was mainly interested in the Interactive and Graphics categories but i found there was inspiration to be found across all of the categories. I was actually suprised at how much i enjoyed the categories of architecture and fashion, the designs were very impressive and its interesting to look at different mediums other than my own from time to time
A few of the highlights….
Interactive
There were a number of pieces in this category that caught my eye and a paticular highlight was the giant wall of video that i saw immediatly upon entry to the section. The wall was made up of 16 small screens and there was a video camera with a touch screen display which you could film yourself for 3 seconds and choose which one of the tvs you would be on, thus creating a giant collage of footage. It was interesting to see how people tried to link up over different screens, and an engaging experience. It struck me as being a very simple idea but people really took to it and the participation levels on this piece outstripped most of the others signifitcantly. Guess no one can resist 3 seconds of fame on the big screen!
In case that made no sense, take a look at the pictures i took below…….
This was an interesting one also, a black wall which when viewed through a digital camera or mobile phone revealed hidden images. See below for what you could see with my camera, with my eyes all i saw was black,very cool!
And finally, this website from the design studio Poke. It was made for Orange and is a never ending website, no matter how much you scroll down you can never get to the end. Users can draw or places messages along the way and add to the collection of user creations. An interesting concept, but one which loses its appeal very quickly, theres only so much scrolling one man take! Still, a good idea well executed.
Right, enough talking i think i’ll just show you some pictures of other nominated designs that caught my eye, enjoy………….
Graphics
Categories: Inspiration
Well its review week time and seeing as one of the outcomes from my previous review was to think more about my portfolio and how it should develop i thought i would post a few thoughts on that very subject.
An online portfolio will be vital for me if i want to get anywhere in the future, and having learnt a great deal this year on the web pathway i now feel confident enough to begin crafting my own site.
I would like it to be a site that combines a blog, to replace this one and also to contain examples of my work in a more traditional portfolio style.
There are many sites that i have been looking at recently with this in mind and below are a few examples of the sort of site i would be going for, if i can come up with something even as half as good i’ll be delighted!
Veerle Peters
Elliot Jay Stocks
The Things We Make
The next step is for me to start thinking about the design, and coming up with a concept. I need to build myself an identity really and that is a task i am very much looking forward to. Its my first chance to really make a mark and stamp my creativity on a site, its a big project and one that must be done right. I shall update you on progress in due course…
Categories: Inspiration
Recently i have been reading the book ‘Transcending CSS’ by Andy Clark, a very useful book about using css to craft beautiful websites. In the book he advocates the use of scrapbooks for web designers/developers, he suggests that cutting out different images or typography from magazines,flyers or anything you find really can help you when it comes to designing and may spark some great ideas that would have otherwise not been thought of.
For my first attempt i decided to put to use the ridiculous amount of flyers and promotional hand outs that i had received during the year so far, well the ones that were lucky enough to not end up in the bin immediately after being given to me!
An interesting idea, not something i’d ever really thought about doing before so i decided to give it a go and it may well become a more regular exercise.
Categories: Inspiration
Towards the end of last term we had the privilege of being visited by Jon Burgerman, illustrator/design marvel and Nottingham Trent graduate. He gave a lecture detailing some of the experiences he’s had in his career thus far and passed on some valuable advice for us students.
As the hour passed we were shown many different examples of Jon’s work and the wide spectrum of mediums that it covered. This is something that i was very interested in as i am very keen to not be tied down to just one thing for my career. Although all of his work has a very distinctive unifying style, the experience that goes with each project seems to be very different and unique each time.
The picture below is of a project he did at a Derby school, creating a large mural on the construction hoardings, very cool.
One of the things that struck me about him was the casual way he would talk about working for brands such as coke and pepsi, almost as if it were a little job he’d done for a mate, crazy!
A particularly useful section of the talk focused on his start in the industry, how he went from talented student to an in demand professional. He started by making stickers of his character work and simply sticking them around first Nottingham and later London. These stickers contained his url and a character that he had drawn, and slowly people began to take notice, his work was then featured in a few books and magazines and it snowballed from there, before he knew it he was featuring in major exhibitions and working for major clients.
Mr Burgerman was kind enough to give us all a sticker as we left and here is the one i got, a delightful little green chap….
An inspiring look at someone who has very much ‘made it’ and with the crunch time of my final year edging ever closer i will take his words on board as i look to make my first steps into the big bad world…..
Categories: Inspiration
Recently we’ve been encouraged to start thinking about developing a portfolio, and rightly so as a portfolio be it on or offline is a crucial step in securing work in our chosen industries.
I was asked to look at the following sites
……and then think about my own portfolio and how i would take things forward from here.
Currently this blog is about as much as i have in the form of a portfolio and clearly that is inadequate, the problem i currently have is lack of work to put in a portfolio and also my skills at being able to build a portfolio are not currently what i’d like them to be.
But never fear, i plan to build one over Easter after i have completed my coursework. Once that is done i believe i will be in a far better position to build an online portfolio as i am learning a lot from this coursework and my ability is improving all the time.
I have been doing some research of my own and found some examples of online portfolios, these are in the style that i would like to have for my portfolio when i finally get round to building one!
Food for thought indeed, just need to get cracking on ideas for my site and ideas for work to put on the site ha! All in good time my friends…..
Categories: Inspiration · Research
Earlier this week i was starting to panic, time was running out, i didn’t have much of an idea what i wanted the site to look like and it was all getting a bit stressful. So i decided to slow down, stop trying to force things and do some good old research.
I created this mood board of sorts, its a mixture of all the current web 2.0 styles that i am intentionally going to mimic in this project. I think this emphasises my point that its all got a bit too much? and there’s plenty more where this came from!
I have a clearer idea of what i would like my site to look like and shall begin implementing that shortly, well after the php is done, and the XHTML is validated, and the logo is designed, and the ERD diagram is done and the…. ARRRGGHHHHHH!
Categories: Inspiration · Research · Uni Work
The coursework project for this term is to create a small social networking site. There is a vast quantity of these sites already in existence, we all know about the facebooks and myspaces of this world but i’ve come across one recently that has caught my eye and is particularly relevant to what i’m learning at the moment.
The site in question is Virb, its fairly similar to myspace, and facebook, its got all of the standard features but a key difference is that it allows greater control over the editing of your page. If you are a dab hand at css then you can completely re design your page to your own specification, its gives you pretty much limitless control over the look of your page.
The pictures below show you the dramatic change that can be implemented with a bit of css jiggery pokery, something that is of great interest to me at the moment as i am taking my first steps in css design.
Here is a standard page without any customisation, it still looks a damn site better than myspace, but scroll down to see a far prettier example of what can be done.
Here is the same page, but with custom css implemented. As you can see the results are a dramatic difference.
For anyone that has seen some of the monstrosity’s that are custom myspace pages then this site should come as a welcome relief to your eyeballs. Its a nicely designed site, and gives the user the power to make it brilliant, if they know how of course…………
Categories: Inspiration · Research
The website i am choosing to talk about this week is the official premier league website. I think its an impressive site because of the amount of information it manages to display yet remain relatively uncluttered.
I like the layout of the site, the large amount of information presented on the homepage alone could have lead to a messy and cluttered layout but good use of css and ajax gives the information breathing space.
I thought i would choose this site because it is a mainstream site for a very large organisation, its easy to go out and find a cool website for a small design company or a cool portfolio site but these big heavily financed sites sometimes tend to try and be all things to all men, but this site is a great example of a good, well designed mainstream, almost corporate website.
Categories: Inspiration
Up until now when showcasing websites that take my interest i have mainly concentrated on sites that conform to web standards and are scripted using xhtml and css etc rather than table based designs. However i have recently come across this website after reading about it in an old issue of ‘Web Designer Magazine’.
It is a site for a graphic designer named Serge Seidlitz and it is made using table and dreamweaver hotspots. This is not best practice and goes completely against web standards but the site still has considerable visual appeal and it does its job well, each thing you can see in the large collage before you is click-able and opens nicely in a pop up window once clicked. This site works but it is scripted poorly which i think is an interesting problem, should we always place web standards above functionality? Something to think about maybe…
Categories: Inspiration
