Media Artifact.

My media artifact for this project is a completed cover and a few leaflets for my band's new EP. I'm actually very proud of these, the album art especially. The figure on the front is me, taken using photobooth on the mac and then imported to Illustrator. The fun bit being that I wasn't actually wearing a suit it was just a tshirt and I've added the suit over the top. Everything drawn on the cover (apart from the False Ambition logo) I have done with the pen tool in illustrator. Including making the font. that you see on the front and back of the cover.

For the leaflets I wanted two different versions, something I could print when I was on a budget (white leaflets) or something a little more in keeping with the theme of the album art.

Ciao.

Wow, 20 posts is a lot more than I was expecting. But hey, I've managed it. It's been pretty fun to have an outlet for moaning about things which I usually just do to people stood closest. Especially about the damn Tories!

I thought I'd finish with something that I do a lot and never really look at, doodling. One of those things you do but never really look over. Over the first 2 terms of Uni' I've been doodling, scenes from starwars, cousin It as a pimp and various other strange little insights into my mind. The one that seemed most appropriate though is one I drew the other day. "Concerned Rabbit is concerned with the state of this coursework." Although I'm hoping it doesn't apply here.

To finish, here's a picture of my cat floating.

Ciao.

Billboards.

Billboards intrigue me. Mostly, because no one can seem to get it right. What advertisers never seem to get is that things need to be short and snappy. Jeremy Clarkson once made the point that as you're driving past you aren't really going to notice more than a few words. Which is a very good point.

So I was looking at a billboard wondering about how I'd do it. Well I have something that needs advertising, so I thought I'd try one. It's pretty easily identifiable as something I've designed because it's very, very minimalistic. I would rather see something very simple, but very effective, than I would see something over-designed for the sake of it. Some stuff that I always enjoy is things like packaging for Apple products and WESC headphones. Very simple to the point design but it looks really good and it certainly grabs me.

Advertising for me is something that needs a lot of care and attention. But no one seems to be doing it nowadays. I mean yes the average person isn't going to notice the extremely lazy photoshopping on O2's latest poster campaign (the one with the rubber ducks) and maybe most people won't notice that on the end of the Windows 7 advert (the one with the woman in the coffee shop) she knocks the cup off the table and you never hear it hit anything afterwards, despite there being time, or where they cut off people's lines just to meet the 7 second limit. This is stuff that can all be easily fixed but people just don't take the time over this stuff that they should.

Macro part 3

This is the set of images that set me off on Macro stuff. This is one of the photos I submitted along with my visual diary. I was sat with the camera outside and actually dropped it, and it landed by my feet. When I saw it pointed at my shoe I thought it'd be fun to take a photo from my shoe's point of view (I was running pretty stumped on ideas at this point) and it actually turned out to be a really interesting shot. Helped along by the flowery shoes in the middle of the grass.

What I really like about this is the single blade of grass that was captured perfectly pointing to the shoe, and the out of focus wilderness in the background. When I see it I always envisage these printed on large canvases and presented at head height, giving an eye view of the world from a perspective no one ever sees.

With photography I find it difficult to get excited about ordinary pictures, there are some that you look at and think "wow, that's brilliant" but it's only ever a fleeting moment for me unless there's something there to draw me in. A thing I'm big on is things from different perspectives. As an example, when I was in New York we were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, something that has been photographed many a time. But the thing that caught my eye was when you glanced up the way the different cables intertwined and crossed over crating a really interesting pattern.

24 Season 8

So I'm up to 2am on the new season of 24, and I've gotta say, I'm feeling let down. I mean, yes Keifer Sutherland is still awesome as Jack Bauer. Yes he's still taking down a terrorist threat. Yes he's still using questionable methods to do so. But it just feels, wierd. 24 always has a clear bad guy, one guy that you can really celebrate when Jack straps a car battery to his nipples but so far we've had nothing, a few generic villains but nothing to suggest that the plot has anyone behind it who's truly evil.

The only real enemy we have is a bunch of generic middle eastern terrorists. Which would usually be okay, apart from the fact that it's quite obvious that if they follow through with their plan to set off a dirty bomb in the centre of Manhattan that the US would decimate their entire country in a massive mushroom cloud.

So you see my predicament, the show is following a plot that I'm not so sure is working. Usually there's an interesting sub-plot in 24 as well but this time with CTU agent Dana Walsh's dispute with her exboyfriend just seems a bit, strapped on to me.

I hope that I'm just being overly cynical and the show is going to have some massive, awesome finale to this season. I really do.

CD Art take 2

Part of my media artifact for the final posts. This is the development and (hopefully) last version of the album art I'm designing. I progressed from the last after showing it to the band and them all saying that the positioning of the text on the front was a little awkward and that it looked pretty empty in the background.

I decided that I would go for a sleeve rather than a plastic cd case, because they are cheaper, less likely to be broken and greener.

Now I'm pretty much set on this style & design I think I'll start working on a myspace design and a poster for the EP release.

Banksy.

This is one of Banksy's series of artworks where he has taken a piece of work by another artist (more often than not stuff he finds at charity shops or things like that) and then gives them a going over in his style. I'm not 100% sure if that's how Banksy has done this image but I have seen work before this that's done that way.

This picture works in the rule of thirds, the bottom third being the foreground and the top being the skyline. I find my eye drawn straight to the middle third to the corner of the house, it is then drawn down towards the figures down in the foreground and then to the cart at the front and works backwards from there towards the horizon. At first glance the image feels wrong, then the brain catches up and you realize that there is all the graffiti on the houses & cart, it feels wrong because we're used to very tranquil, ideal scenes of the country side.

Banksy's work like this always intrigues me because I tend to forget he's a real artist and can paint this well. This piece looks like an oil painting from the way the colours are layered up over each other & wiped away to mix the colouring.