Have just submitted this to No Doubt’s band logo competition! Check out more here, and vote if you like!
Kylie Typography – You’ll Amaze Me
Another photo + typography piece I made based on Kylie ballad lyrics – this lyric from “Flower” an unreleased ballad that she performed during her X tour – and one that has always been a fan favourite (definitely one of my own). The type was handdrawn and then illustrated by me – the image used does not belong to me, and is from her X 2008 tour, available on DVD.
Kylie – White Diamond
Digital design and superimposed concept for the packaging of my alternative, ballad Kylie album – White Diamond. Have just ordered some cd digi trays to attach on the inside of this cover (which I think is going to be a card fold-out). Experimented further with combining the fragmented Kylie imagery with my white diamond logo, and the existing white diamond type.
Oh, and in case you wondered, the track listing’s;
White diamond,
Made in heaven,
The crying game,
Put yourself in my place,
Where the wild roses grow,
Stay this way,
You are there,
Finer feelings,
Everything is beautiful,
(Instrumental/intro to Somewhere over the rainbow)
Somewhere over the rainbow,
Flower,
I believe in you,
Dreams,
If you don’t love me,
You’re the one,
Stars,
Better the devil you know
(They’re all either album tracks, b-sides, unreleased ballads, previously performed covers or alternative ballad versions of hits, a couple of which I’ve envisioned)
Categorising People – Exhibition Piece
The final exhibition/show piece for my project on stereotypes and categories of people.
Kylie – White Diamond
Have just started a new project inspired by those song lyric + photo pieces of design that are pretty common online. These pieces were firstly inspired by “White Diamond” – an unreleased ballad track by Kylie – which I decided would be the perfect title track to an alternative Kylie album of ballads, from album, b-side and unreleased tracks to reworked hits such as “I believe in you”. To develop this idea as a design project I started experimenting with imagery and typography, which I hope to expand into packaging and promotion design for my “White Diamond” album concept.
The photo used is from an exclusive poster of Kylie from inside the “White Diamond” documentary DVD, which I photographed using shards of mirror to create an abstracted, fragmented diamond-like image, complimenting the similarly style “White Diamond” text used on the DVD. As well as my own minimal diamond logo concept, I started designing typographic elements using lyrics from different tracks, the “I believe in you” type based on a found font, which I experimented with decoratively by hand then re-created digitally – one of my first developed attempts at hand-drawn decorative typography made digital, which I’m actually pretty proud of (however much my hand aches from incessant pen clicking in illustrator).
Categorising People – Campaign Branding
As part of my final major project on stereotypes and the categorisation of people, I decided to explore creating a campaign – allowing me to be able to group a variety of outcomes I have been developing into a clearer body of work (in the same way I’d been questioning the process of defining people – I didn’t really want to define a single outcome for my work, which had developed conceptually in a number of directions).
Inspired by the origin of the term “stereotype” – a printing process, I decided to explore ways of reproducing a kind of branding, probably logo, that would tie in nicely with my theme. Inspired by my research into categories, boxes and categorising tick-lists, I developed a bold, confining square (or box) image as a representation of the act of stereotyping – (that being the image that some of the work I had developed used overlapping images of people, denying their identity) – which, with my intention of questioning and, hopefully, breaking some of these ways of categorising, I visually broke. The broken box logo worked pretty well, but the process of stamping the logo created quite a more interesting kind of image – one that wouldn’t ever be identical. Conceptually, I kind of like the fact that, like people, the identity of my campaign was changing and subtly varied (once you start to consider it more closely, at least).
Categorising People – Exhibition concept
So this is part of the concept for my exhibition/campaign piece on categorising and labelling people – developed from my final major project theme on stereotypes. Inspired by the use of categorising and stereotyping in graphic design and advertising (from toilet gender symbols to Lynx adverts), I decided to question the process of categorising other people, and even ourselves, and how such a process could be considered to undermine identity as far as it attempts to create it.
The first exhibition piece was inspired by the type stamping/printing process that the term “stereotype” originates from, questioning the application of name labels to people, and confronting the viewer with the idea of labelling themselves (the centre image will be a mirror). The last two designs were inspired by tick-boxes and drop-down-list forms that deconstruct our identities, intended to be more subjective, questioning and interactive – created as a hand-out postcard format.
Belkin – Branding by Wolff Olins
Browsing through some different branding projects and logo designs, and once again I’ve come across another Wolff Olins design that I’ve become a little obsessed with. This is probably the least conventional identity for a technology brand I’ve seen (though maybe not aesthetically – it looks sleek, modern and technological for sure – the dots of the icon do feel like a familiar technological image) but the combination of the stylish image and the concept behind it communicates really well.
One of Belkin’s main approaches has always been to design people-inspired products, and so the branding, though essentially being used to promote technology, is based around this connection between the company, the people, and the products – with the technologically styled human image, possibly the cutest character-based logo I’ve ever seen. (Just saying that I feel incredibly guilty for the Panda – well played WWF.)
Check out more of the branding project here.
Breaking Stereotypes – Final Project: Help Needed!
For my final major project in Visual Communication, I’ve decided to tackle the theme of stereotypes. Inspired by a range of artists and designers, most prominently Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, behind the fantastic photographic collection and publication Exactitudes, I’ve been considering the role of stereotypes within graphic design and mass media – and their social and psychological effects. The concept is to question the kind of categorization of people, seen as vital in advertising especially, that is not necessarily in the best interest of the individual.
To do so, I’ve started by collecting images of people, in a less constructed-appearing process than Exactitudes – simply asking people to submit their own head and shoulders photos. From this I will begin to design pieces empowering the individual over categories and stereotypes. So I’d really love your help for the campaign (which is purely for educational, non-commercial purposes) – which will be used in my final exhibition. All it takes is e-mailing a photo that you’d like to be used, like the photos above (smiling and plainer blackgrounds are preferable) it would be greatly appreciated!
You can e-mail them here: r.devine@students.ucreative.ac.uk
(Or you can just comment on this post with a link)
Cheers!
Just came across this branding project by designer Sebastian Gram in Denmark, and just love seeing the development sketches for the logo design (too many glossy, finished logos in design portfolios, in my opinion, account to the preconceptions that logos are just whipped together and made pretty). Though some conceptual development would make it even more interesting (if there was a whole lot), the logo drawings are quite powerful have a clear modern, technological feel, and a nice rather abstracted typographic feel. Well applied across different forms too, the CDs and website especially.
Deviner Art 