Letterpress / Typesetting

I love letterpress, it just makes me sad (as a very impatient person) whenever I remember how long it takes. I had done some typesetting in my elective and really enjoyed it, but felt that there wasn't much scope for creativity. Again, as with the screenprinting workshop, I was shown a different side! Even though time consuming, you can be creative with layout, alignment, fonts, weights and point sizes.

I choose a lyrics from The Specials song 'Too Much Too Young'. It is the soundtack to my life... as if I was singing. Makes me happy to be who I am, and can we really ask for anything more in life?

Printed on cartridge, newsprint and tracing paper.

Grids and Type

20.04.10 - Maths with smiles
I am pretty set on chosing to specialise in type next year and so I was really interested about the classes with Lorenzo. In the first session I measured type and learnt about ems.

• Pica em - the size of a letter m at 12 pt in any typeface
• em - the size of a letter m at any size in any typeface
• ligatures join awkward letters such as ff

To measure the size of any letter, go from the top of the ascender to the bottom of the descender. Then to measure the leading go from the bottom of the descender to the bottom of the next lines descender.

Front cover of chosen magazine and colour coded hand drawn grid.

3 column layout uses green columns.

4 column layout uses blue columns.

5 column layout uses yellow columns.

Speaking from experience - Week 1&2

19.04.10 - So many scotch eggs

The brief I have created is aimed at the 2010 first year BA (Hons) Graphic Design students at Leeds College of Art. I hope to create a range of graphic products about the unwritten rules of the studio, course and tutors.

22.04.10 - The unwritten rules...

Part of my primary research was to collect the unwritten rules of LCA Graphic Design. I did this by asking students through emails, Facebook and face to face in the studio. Here they are!

1. Spare time only exists in Hollyoaks
2. Never draw a penis
3. Don't draw with a pencil. Fred will snap it... and then give you a Sharpie
4. Fred time
5. If you have better shoes than Fred, then you're not spending your money wisely
6. If they ask for 100, they mean 100
7. If it is in your head, it doesn't exist
8. Don't pull your face at Amber
9. There is never enough print credit
10. Never use hyphens, widows or orphans
11. Pica ems, ems and ms will make your head hurt
12. A break is not a holiday
13. If you want to be lazy go to Leeds Met
14. You can never listen hard enough
15. Type is sexy
16. Posters aren't the answer to everything
17. Students aren't always a valid audience
18. There is never time for time management
19. Fred is right, so don't bother arguing
20. 9:30 means 9:15
21. If you're not a Labour supporter, your opinion does not count to Fred
22. Never use green and orange together
23. If you leave a coke can in the studio, Amber will draw a face on it
24. Never eat the cakes at the tea party
25. No news is good news
26. Dogs, hats, or dogs in hats is the best subject matter for a project
27. If you don't come in, they will kill you
28. There is no colour called purple, only violet
29. 4pm is not home time
30. Colour theory will make you afraid of colour

26.04.10 - Product

Today I tried to decide upon one product which I could create a range from. I needed this starting point to get the ball rolling. I have found that I need to be more decisive, critical of my work and also create work which I like!

Initials brainstorming sketches of ideas.

Through my brainstorming I seem to have a strong idea of creating individual pieces for specific objects. Here are some examples...

Rule #4. 'Fred Time'

Create a sticker which goes over a clock face on a watch or clocks around the college simply stating the rule in a clear typographically appealing way. Clearly aimed at GD students through the standardised style and 'Fred Time' phrase.

Rule #20. 9:30 means 9:15

Design and produce another sticker to go over level 1 inside the lift near the GD studios in a recognisable style stating '9:30 is 9:15' as students are most likely to be using the life when they are going to the studio and rushing, due to being late.

Rule #3. Don't draw with a pencil. Fred will snap it... and then give you a Sharpie

A sharpie costume for pencils which makes them unrecognisable so that Fred cannot snap them. However if you do want a real sharpie do not use.

30.04.10 - Type

Over this week I have been looking into how I can balance the interests of my audience with my ambition to use primarily type in my design. I created a questionnaire which a limited number of Foundation students completed. I asked the Foundation students to answer this as I knew some of them going into Degree level in a few months and it would be quicker to get their views rather than finding outsiders who were coming to degree from other areas. I found from my questionnaire that illustration was a big interest along with a preference of handcrafted over digital.

Due to these findings, I believe that handcrafted type would be ideal. I can deliver a message clearly whilst having a prominent illustrative feel. I have researched hand crafted type and currently am pretty interested in using woodblock type, manipulated after printing by hand and then digitalised, to create my own typeface. It would be created by hand but would need to be digitalised due to production requirements. My favourite illustrative typographers which I have looked into this week are Lodma, Justin Thomas Kay and Geoff McFetridge.

Back in Black. 
Justin Thomas Kay.

I created a crit information board which should have given others an idea on what I intend to produce. This was not as clear as I hoped as I didn't include my sketchbook alongside. Comments have been posted to my PPD blog. The board included mock-ups of my strongest original ideas for my products (which were created before my design research).

Mockups created of potential stickers... photograph of location, sticker created on Illustrator, then overlayed in Photoshop. 

Crit information board.

OUGD104 - What is a Line? (Final)

20.04.10 - Nothing goes to plan

I choose to do my final piece in black and white so that the colour did not distract from the content of the images.

I was intending on coming back to College earlier in the Easter break to print and finish all of OUGD104 before deadline day. However, due to family issues, I decided to stay another few days. This put more pressure on me to complete my work in a shorter amount of time. To add to my difficulties instead of rotating my photographs in Photoshop, I placed them as I wanted them to print in InDesign. When I tried to print the InDesign files at college they would not open. I went home and exported them as PDFs. Deadline day arrived and I again tried to print this PDF, however it had vanished from my external hard-drive (it was there!). I did not have time to layout all of the images again or edit them again. I have had to resort to making a video animation of the photographs in a similar style to what I was going to do with the flip books... To add to everything the videos are missbehaving being uploaded onto this blog! I am very unhappy with the final piece produced. I have a ticket booked back home again today at lunchtime so there is no way I could re-do any of my desired work in time. I am really annoyed at myself for not printing everything sooner and think all the issues with files must be karma! I will make the flip books before the weekend as I think they would work really well. I do wish I stuck to one idea and developed that instead of branching out all over the place. I would have really liked to experiment with a flashgun as like Harlod E. Edgerton.

- Clockwise

- Dark/Light

OUGD104 - What is a Line? (Easter)

Beginning of Easter - Still experimenting
Well... I carried on experimenting over the Easter break with what timline I could document and here they are...

- What is a Line?

- Hello. My name is Patrick.

- Hello. My name is Becki.

- The paths we choose

End of Easter - Seriously, what is a line?
After all my experiementing, I thought it would be even more appropriate to make one final sequence based on lines and travel. Lines to reinforce the theme of a continuous event and travel as many of my sequences seemed to use this. I also wanted to add time into the equation and have a final piece showing all of these. I was also interested in creating it in flipbook form, instead of a digital animation.

For all these reasons I decided to photograph all the fixed vertical lines in my room (items which are always there). I went round my room in a clockwise motion to encapsulate the time , as seem on a clock face. I wanted to make 3 flip books (however only 2 would upload at this time), all with the same images inside, drawing upon what I had leant in Visual Language and demonstrate that things can look different by frame and format. Unfortunately everything seemed to go wrong the day before submission...