Alphabet Soup - Illustration Design

We where asked to use Illustrator as a tool to create 26 final alterations of a single letter form. 

I first decided to try out some ideas before putting together my final set.

I liked the look of some but others i felt didn't work as well. This helped me decide upon my final 26.

After choosing i came through with these. I used warps, shadowing, direct alterations and effects to create my panel.

No News Is Good News Mail Shot. Update

So the mail has arrived and i find myself looking at a whole new level of re-design with the postal service damaging the item quite heavily and having to include their own sticker to make sure it didn't damage anymore.. . .

 As you can see from the above the design has faded, ripped and genuinely been made to look shabby.
This in my opinion is a big fault as if the mail-shot doesn't stand and look good how can the viewer at all think the message inside is worth listening too...

In conclusion i again stick with the being able to use more than one substrate would have been beneficial to me to enforce my design and make a clearer item.

No News is Good News Mail Shot.

We where given an extra part to this project being that we would produce a mail shot to correspond with our posters. The goal was to create something which again used only 2 colours including stock but make it sendable and have ten people to send it to which it would be effective.

My concept stayed the same. I was informing people about the actual failures of the police in response to 999 calls.

I strarted the ideate stage witht he knowledge i had researched from the previous task.

I wanted to make people think about whats going on in the police and try to subtly shatter the image they have of them.

My first idea took the form of a 6ft typical robber vector. I would print it off and fold it up in such a way that the stripey jumper would look like bars showing through the envelope. When the viewer unfolds this large item the criminal would stand there holding a sign saying " There going to be an hour. What shall we do? " ...

This would be an actual 6ft image.

The problem i thought up with this idea was that if i sent it to anyone abit too small to hold up something 6ft the actual feel of the piece would be lost. This meant i had to re think my ideas and quite quickly.

Secondly i thought up of following from my poster and creating something which looked really official.. something which many Leeds people had seen and are used to seeing. Create a Form which would be presented and seen as a parking ticket.

This would mean the anger which people feel from receiving one would pick up before they had even had time to open the letter. 

apon opening the form you would notice it says " 999 request form " at the top and then corresponding details to the viewer to be placed below. at the foot of the letter " please allow upto an hour to receive a response to this application". 

I felt this would be a really good idea but something i had already created in the past task and wanted something abit more tricky. 

Thirdly i decided to create a die cut image of a blood bag. I imagined most people are familiar with the shape and function of a blood bag so if i left the middle section cut away it should still have the same message.

I started with an image of the blood bag and vectorised it. removing the section which contained the blood and replacing it with a sort of greece proof paper looked fantastic. It gave the piece a sense of plastic and made me feel it was achieving the goal whilst still sticking to the brief. 

A sticker officially labelled would be placed ontop of the greece proof paper to look like a description to what blood was inside. This would be used to write the address of the receiver onto.

The red paper would have the information written onto it so as you pull out the item it looks likes the blood is being drained.

So after presenting these to the group via a crit. It was an obvious vote towards the blood bag idea.

My problem was that i could mix stock. Which made me have to rethink the design. After afew tweaks i came up with having the sticker part of the uncut part of the bag. This worked well but after putting it together i cant help but feel disappointed with the design as it doesn't quite look as professional as i like to set myself.

They look quite dull and im unsure if they really communicate the message.

The back of the red looks like this:

The typeface is kept the same as the posters to show a link between them both.

 I have grew to think these look nice but i just wish i could produce them with photographic qualities so that they really look something special.

It came to think about who will be receiving this mail shot and why. So i created a quick illustrator document with a list of people who i think would benefit from this.

1. Neighbourhood watch HQ

I decided to include this because if it could be forwarded to areas which they know are not protected by the help of others in their own neighbourhood then it would help push the message.

2. Police HQ

This was an obvious place to forward in my opinion as its a fact that the police need to see and something needs to be done.

3. Mr + Mrs Smith

Through Research These take responsibility for checking up on residential homes and homes of the elderly within a section of Leeds.

4. Leeds City Hall

The city hall has a very used notice board which many people would look at. If this mail shot could be left near or anywhere within the hall people could respond to it and the message would have been delivered.

5. NHS

I thought that this would be a good place to send it too as if any injuries where taken to hospital it would be them whom have to sort it out.

6.Tourist Center

I would send it to here yet i feel it would be better if it was taken in secretly and placed as it would paint a bad image of the police and leave anyone who reads it questioning the professionalism of the Police.

7. Opal One

8. Liberty

9. Sky Plaza

i figured it would be right to send this to the student halls as many students forget that people could easilye nter the building and take or steal things and if confronted they could use violence. So i believe it would be an effective way to try and make people think.

10.Welsh Police Office

I thought i would send one to the Welsh police near the home of the girl who was killed and how this project and story was based upon. I think it would let them know people are still thinking about it.

In conclusion to this:

I havent really enjoyed this side of the project as much as i thought i would have. Alot of my ideas where stopped by limitations stated by the brief. I think i need to start taking in the requirements more before rushing to note down ideas as it leads to things not looking professional or to a standard i would like it too. 

My end product i feel has a strong way of communicating the message but was faulted by a bad visual design which wasnt upto scratch.

As mentioned before I feel that if i could have used as many colours as i would have liked the image would have been photorealistic and would have looked alot nicer. 

Alphabet Soup Amendments

So we where given another few days to crack on with our designs and instead of following a few of my classmates i decided against just creating a lowercase or uppercase of the same type and structured a paragraph of text along with a list of the five words i had from the beginning of the project. 

I really like how thin yet perfectly readable the words are.

I also created a document showing the classic " The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog "

Alphabet Soup

Alphabet Soup

We began this project by being given a partner. We both sat with each other and followed a quick sheet to answer afew questions to begin to know the person abit better than we already do.

After the initial sheet had been completed i felt i knew abit more about Lisa than i originally did and was then given the chance to find out abit more about what Lisa liked in a more design orientated question.

I began by asking some basic questions like:

• "whats your favorate colour"
• "any inspirational designers"
• "favorite art movement"
• "do you prefer uppercase or lowercase"

And i quickly got an understanding of what Lisa as a design appreciator was about.

Following on from this task we had to decide on a five adjectives to summaries our partners up. as a team we decided upon:

1. Elegant
2. Soft
3. Caring
4. Modern
5. Positive

This kick started the research into a typeface which i would try and adapt to meet something which i felt communicated Lisa as a type. I began by brain storming each word and trying to find some mutual ground of which everything could be then further developed but it wasn't as easy as i would have hoped as the words may sound similar but they all had a very large difference in terms of design.  No matter how far i searched the word Elegant i would always be faced with a scriptive and very curly type which i felt didn't work. I wasn't going out to create a typeface that a young chav could then have tattooed on his wrist, in my opinion the scriptive typeface began to give the design a more young and chavvy feel to it.

I collected some typeface together to analyze trying to link them to my words:

After looking closely at each design i found that the more elegant of the bunch was the Helvetica neue. 

This was due to my interpretation of elegant. Yet i decided to still develop each idea into sheets and have a better look at if my opinion would work as a design:

I experimented with the curves and cursive words aswel as thin typefaces which also inclided the flicks and curles. From the development I went and produced this to a select few classmates in a crit and recied feedback that they all agreed with my idea of elegance being made chavvy bu the flicks and over the top aspects and that for me was enough to go with my plan.

So I decided to steer away from the typical curves and flicks commonly representing elegant and went for a more elegance being the fact that the type is so thin and delicate... The fact that it looks like if you would rush creating the typeface it would break and become useless in my opinion that is more elegant than a giant swirl leaving the ear of a lowercase g. I decided to stick with this being my bases for the type i would create for Lisa and began to work with the rest of the letterforms.

Looking back at my words i noticed caring and soft which made me choose lowercase over uppercase. To turn Helvetica into my own type i used Illustrator and deleted parts of the font to make it look abit more modern and added a tear shape cap on each end of the new strokes i had created these where very smooth and gave a sense of movement to each end of the letter forms the way the stoke would fold back on itself would feel very caring.

This is how my final typeface was presented I feel that laying them out like this almost lost the soft elegance i had tried so hard to capture by spacing them so far apart lost any delicate tracking and kerning used when producing a word. On the other hand i was very happy the legibility of the type created.

This is how i would like to print out the final on A1... I would like to use a light 10% black background and then print the letters in both gold and silver metallic ink to increase the elegance i was previously speaking of.