Monday morning's tasks finally gave me a chance to the listen to the CD, Lucid Dreams. After listening to the CD I soon found out it was defiantly not the type of music I would normally listen to.

The album focuses around the act of Lucid dreaming and features voice overs and exerts from case studies from the institute of psychophysical research in Oxford.

Although I wasn't really a fan of the music it did provide me a lot thoughts and feelings which I was able to use when creating my minds and mood boards.


I have never used the idea of creating mood boards before but I have found it really interesting and I feel that they will be very useful for the remainder of the project. I will be able look back at them and remember my first impression of the music and the thoughts and feelings which it provoked.

Logos
Looking at logos this week as shown me that it is often the very simple logos that we most recognise and are the easiest to remember; a few examples of this are below.




All of these logos use the company name as the main focus of the logo and only use simple shapes and colours to make them stand out from the crowd. Some are even made purely using type, such as; coca-cola, ebay, google.


This follows through to the logos used for record label and more specifically ambient and electronic music record labels.

During the Easter break I am going to:

• collect more examples of logos and annotate them
• read the A7 assignment and build up a list of questions about it
  
• continue to develop my mind maps and mood boards

Lucid Dreams takes you on a journey through dreams and allows you travel into a world brought to life by your imagination.

Recorded and mixed at Square Centre Studios in 1995, Lucid Dreams offers a blend of deep thoughts and relaxing sounds to provide a soothing yet thought provoking album.

Narrated by Celia Green, each track delves into a different aspect of lucid dreaming and, with the aid of case studies recorded at the institute of psychophysical research in Oxford, immerses the listener into world of possibilities and intrigue.

The case studies provide and insight into the power of lucid dreams and the experience of other lucid dreamers. Each case study provides a different viewpoint and due to the underlying background sounds and tones you are able picture each intricate detail.

Providing a backdrop to the narration is the range of unusual sounds and tones that help transport the mind to numerous locations such as; a London tube station or the side of a river or lake. These are constant throughout the album and this means with each track you a re taken to a different place both mentally and emotionally.

This album contains deep and powerful lyrics that will have you listening over and over again. So sit back and let Lucid Dreams take your mind on journey only limited by your imagination.

When I first read the assignment sheet and I found that I had to do a presentation I was immediately apprehensive about this. I wasn’t very confident that I would be able to perform the presentation effectively knowing that I would be getting grading on my performance. The presentation I did on the colour red I feel went well but I knew it wasn’t going to affect my grades so it did not carry with it the same level of pressure as the typography presentation.

After learning that the typographer I was presenting about was Erik Spiekermann I was keen to learn more about him and the typefaces he had created as I had never heard of him before. After carrying out some research I found a wealth of information about his work and his passion for typography. Seeing is his passion for typography really inspired to continue my research and in the end I think I spent too much time researching and not enough time documenting the evidence of my research.

The finer details, of typefaces, are something I find really interesting. I am now constantly looking at type in newspapers, magazines, adverts and I am trying to identify the typefaces that has been used and often using service such as ‘What the font’ to identify ones I don’t know. Through this I have learnt a larger number of typefaces as, I previously only knew the names of a small number of typefaces and many of these were the web safe fonts.

The design of the presentation was something that I wanted to keep quite simple and clean so that it would have the professional feel that many of Erik Spiekermann’s typefaces have. After seeing the FontFont website and the FontBook I was really impressed by the use of two single colours, black and yellow, to create a clean and professional look that really catches the eye. I used this as inspiration for my design of my presentation and I am happy with end result.

My presentation didn’t go as well as it had during my practice attempts and this was due to nerves. I rushed through some of the slides and this caused me to be under the five minute time limit. My confidence was boosted after the presentation as I answered all the questions correctly.

The questions after were something I was apprehensive about and before the presentation I keep thinking that I would freeze and forget all of the terms and their meaning when I was questioned about them. This, however, was not the case as I was able to answer the questions quickly and confidently.

I was interested by the prospect of the timed tasks as I have never normally placed myself under a strict time constraint when designing. They also presented the challenging of forcing me work under or near to industry timescales. To complete the tasks effectively I knew that my micro planning had to improve and that I needed to think in more detail about the design process that used.

The first timed task, to create and a paint tube for a range of Winsor and Newton called ‘Hokai Oriental Gouache‘. This presented the challenge of designing for a very small document size and ensuring that all the information was correctly and easy to read. I enjoyed this task but looking back now I would change the typeface I used, for the name ‘Hokai Oriental Gouache‘, to something that portrayed the oriental feel. In the end I choice Myriad Pro but this was down to the fact that I didn’t leave enough time to choice a typeface and in the end I had to go with something I knew which had a professional feel to it.

This was the one main reason that I rejected this piece when it came to the final hand-in. The Hokai task was one I enjoyed but because it was the first real timed task I did my time planning wasn’t as effective as I would have like. This didn’t allow me any time towards the end of the task for alterations and experimentation with different typefaces.

To create an advert for a job at Vodafone was second timed task and I felt that this went really well. My time planning was effective and I had around 25 minutes at the end of the task to make alterations to my final design. I am happy with the final result and the only thing I would change about would be to reduce the thickness of the lines from 1pt to 0.5pt.

The Jonathan Gee timed task was the first time I properly thought about designing the layout using a grid. This meant that the planning stage took a lot longer than I expected as I had to think about the measurements more precisely. I decided to create a layout using 8 columns and then splitting the text over tow columns of three leaving a column of space either side of the article. I felt that this allowed the design room to breathe and it also draws the user’s eye.

I like the design as it is something I haven’t seen before in magazines or articles. One thing I would change is that I would add a drop cap to the first letter of the content to lead the reading into the content of the article.

The final timed tasks I really enjoyed. Planning the grid without seeing the content meant that I had to create think about all the different aspects, of the grid, in much more detail. I decided to go with a three column layout as I felt that this provided the enough flexibility to manipulate the look of the document whilst it still maintained a high level of structure.

As well as creating the grid a masthead was also needed. I decided to use a serif font and after experimenting with a few I settled on Bernhard Modern Std as I felt that this typeface represented the jazz theme. When I received the content I was able to create a number of possible layouts and I felt that the column widths suited the amount of text provided very well.

I have really enjoyed this assignment and learning about typography. My knowledge of typefaces has greatly improved on a technical level but also with regards to the face that I can know recognise a lot more fonts than I previously could. This will help when I planning in the future as I will be able visual what the piece will look like using different typefaces.

My presentation skills still need a lot more work and I am eager to receive the feedback from this task so that I can learn from and improve. Overall, I am happy with the standard of work I have produced for this assignment and I feel that I created five pieces of work that are of a good standard within near industry time scales.

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