2nd Year Graphic Design: this is the year i have had to make some choices as to what i want to specialize in for the rest of the course. I have chosen to do illustration as i feel the free hand work i produce has a very illustrative feel to it and after seeing all my possible options of what i could focus in on i feel this will offer me the right help to make me develop in to a working illustrator.

Building Project

This Brief was all about going out in to sheffield and finding a building that I found interesting to look at and also had a bit of history to it. I chose the Leadmill nightclub which is set on leadmill road just outside the centre of town. I chose this building because it is not only a night club, it has also been the starting point for many big bands to come out of this country as it is also a music venue. I also chose the building for its looks, as i would have to use these in my design work,and been a old mill it was full of features.

I started my design work by exploring new techniques such as aluminium etching, where you make one piece of aluminium with your own design etched on it, then ink up the metal plate and print it onto your chosen media. above are two examples of some etching prints i did of the leadmill, both about A5 in size.

In the brief i was told to create a poster with both text and image in. I then started to look

at perspective and thought about mixing both an image of leadmill i had hand drawn with a text i had hand drawn both going in to a distant vanishing point as this is how the building looks when looking at it from the end of the road.

I was really pleased with how the two elements (the Building and the text) came together as one in this piece, both going off into the same vanishing point at the end of the road. I decided to use a bright red for the text to make it stand out from the image of the building which is just the outline of it.

Buy Nothing Day

This brief was set to see how we could create alternative identities in the form of a poster to create awearnes of a day of the year called 'Buy Nothing Day', which is a day that was created to try and show the world that you can go a full 24 hours without purchasing a single item from shops.I began the project by researching certain graphic designers that use text in innovative and creative ways, such as 'Steffan Sagmeister' and 'Why Not Associates' to see if i could find a direction to go with this project. This process i feel really helped me and gave me a direction for the final poster design.

In the end i decided to go with a simple design which consisted of a child like drawing of a tree and the sun. I decided to do this as i think the concept of the buy nothing day is very simple in that you dont have to do anything to be part of it, so i thought the poster should reflect this. As you can see i used Sagmeister as my main influence for my text by copying his scruffy font which is sometimes not easy to read like a child writing. I feel this fits in well with the simple background.