BSBDES302A

Monday, May 31, 2010


Chaos and Control
I've done the same theme for both chaos and control. One room is ordered and equal whilst the other is not ordered and not equal. The floral mugs are my own.


Heaven and Hell
For heaven I researched other culture's beliefs of heaven and made a composit of different symbols including: cloudy sky (my own image), a path which represents the path taken to heaven, Chinese Zhou Dynasty Oracle script for Tian, the character for Heaven or sky, Deva (gods in Hinduism), and hands reaching up to the sky, offering their soul.
For Hell, I chose to do something personal, what would be hell for me. I am terrified of spiders so I thought I would incorporate them into my image, being the dominate theme. If I were to go to hell this is probably what it would be like - being tortured by big black scary spiders. My own image here is the background and the girl (my sister) lying off to the side, being attacked by spiders.


Dissonance and Harmony
For harmony I included calm, happy images, including people holding hands, laughing and smiling. I believe we can all have harmony if we embrace others regardless of what race, religion, gender, etc., they are. For Dissonance I went with something more literal, less personal, with a green island in the middle of a desert where it doesn't belong with the sand and the scorpions. The pattern on the scorpions are actually from a photograph I took of some pomegranates outside in our garden. I chose to do this because the pomegranate symbolises fertility, something you wouldn't associate with a desert. The cracks in the image are just to create some chaos.

Serial Cut

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
I found the Serial Cut website really interesting. I'm not a huge fan of 3D but I liked this website because of the way the designers have used type in their work as both the image and the information - the type isn't separated or isolated from any of the images; it brings the image together and it works. The photography in some of the pieces on the site are very strong as well and it adds a conventional element to the radical treatment of type and other elements. Their work is convincing as both an advertisement and as a work of art and this is why I like it so much.

These are the ones I liked the most:

I like this because of the composition of all the natural elements and the way the type works well with them - the colours are soft, low-key and natural and the typefaces used aren't over the top or too decorative.

This has a very cool, very enticing feel about it and it captures nightlife perfectly with the use of colour (the colours you'd usually associate with nightclubs - neon blues and pinks) and glass effect.

Like the image above, this captures the feeling of a nightclub with the glass effect and also the sensual red colour and curvy, curling shapes.

I love the colour combo of orange and blue together. This is very easy to look at. It's fun, it's simple and it's bold, and the fuzzy texture makes it look friendly - if you threw one of those blocky letters at somebody it probably wouldn't hurt.

Fruit Juice

Sunday, May 23, 2010
We were given the task to come up with an abstract juice logo and then create colour palettes for certain target markets. We had to have a 2 colour palette and then a 5 colour palette. We then had to choose five different typefaces to go with the particular market and colours.

Young Children - primary school.

Teenagers - high school, up to 19 years old.

Young Adults - 20-28 years old.

Professional - doctor, accountant, lawyer, HR, teacher, manager, CEO.

Tradies - plumbers, electricians, builders, cabinet makers, tilers.

Mums - parents, grandparents.

Organic Greenies - knit your own muesli sandals.

Childcare Centres.

Travel industry - airlines, rail, coaches, highways.


Here's what I came up with:

About my logo and collection of products:

For this assessment, I chose to do debt collectors. I chose this business for a few reasons:

I thought it would be a challenge to create something that was serious, clean and clinical, but also something that was creative and unique. I also had never actually seen what a debt collector’s logo or what other items such as brochures looked like so I wanted to explore this because it would be new to me.

When I started doing some research, it was difficult to find businesses on the net that had a logo on their website - most of them had the name of their company in a nice, mostly serif, typeface on the banner - so there wasn't much to go on. So instead of choosing something else I researched some lawyer’s logos, which gave me a good idea as to what my logo should look like. Most of them had cool, low key colours, usually with a nice image with it. One in particular, Addison's Lawyers, used a dark blue with a white detailed swirl so I thought I would attempt to do something like that.

My first attempt at a logo had this swirl and circle pattern and the colours were dark purple and grey and to be honest, it was bad and I wasn't impressed with my effort - it looked like it belonged to something like a classy clothing boutique - so I then decided to make up some colour palettes to draw inspiration from. Black and grey were two of the colours I chose to use because they were both low key and always work quite well together. Green, red and blue were the three other colour choices I had to go with the black and grey.

Before I gave the debt collection company a name, I started work on the new logo. I still wanted something that had flow, that wasn't straight up-and-down, something that wasn't too curly or too playful, so I decided to look at some display typefaces I had to see if I could get anything from there. The one I decided to look more closely at was called Parchment (a little bit horrendous), where all the letters were done in this style that looked like an abstract form of Old English - you couldn't really tell half the time what the letters were supposed to be. My logo ended up coming from a section in the letter M. One side had two wave/curls which were uneven and spaced apart so I fixed that and brought them together. I sharpened a few of the edges as well so they weren't so rounded.

Here is the character I used:


Next I added the circle to add another shape and more interest to the logo - whilst it looked interesting enough on its own; I believed it needed some colour and something to soften it so it wasn't just a solid black shape.

When I looked at the finished design for the logo, I was a little worried that it looked too oriental, but it was still interesting and I'm sure I got the unique look I was going after for the logo - it worked as well as a serious but creative logo. Once the logo was completed I named the company "Murrumbidgee Debt Recovery Agency" and chose to use the typeface Cambria - a simple serif that has elegance about it without being at all fancy for busy.


Next came working on the other products. I designed the letterhead first because it was going to have all the contact details on it that I could use for the other products. I didn't want to just have the logo and information on these products (most of the letterheads I looked at had some colour down the bottom, usually a slope or block), so I decided on a theme pattern that I could use on everything and it would still look good on a different size and shape. The theme I came up with was a coloured slope - it started at the bottom left corner and came up to a slope which ended on the right hand side. I achieved this by making a vector rectangle that sat at the bottom of the page and then had a vector oval which was the same colour as the page that I put over the top to get an even edge and the slope I wanted. After I looked at it for a while I decided to add a black border to the slope - it looked too flat with just the one colour and I wanted to tie it in with the logo at the top of the page. I copied the vector oval and made it black and placed it underneath the other oval, bringing it down slightly so it was visible. I also rotated it to get a different width running along the border. I copied this to all of my product bases and added the logo and additional information afterwards. I did these all in blue, green and red versions, but finally decided on the blue because I believed it looked the nicest with the light grey and black and it made it look more serious that the green and red - the red made it look too oriental anyway. Afterwards, I added a very transparent logo in the background of the bookmarks and business card after deciding that these pieces in particular needed something else.


The critique:


On Monday May 17th I had my collection critiqued and I was nervous about getting up in front of anybody and presenting it, but I was proud of what I'd come up with. I was really pleased with the outcome in the end: over all, everyone liked my work which made me feel really confident and even happier about my work. However there were quite a few improvements I had to make:


-I had to adjust the alignment on some of my products. On some of them, such as the business card, I had to make sure the distance from the edge to the logo was the same from the edge to my block of text/information. This had to be done on my business card and my brochure. The pages on my brochure had to be swapped because it isn't the same principle for the inside pages as it is for the outside - instead of making it 3, 2 like you would on the cover (4, 1) you make it 2, 3.


-I had to make the bookmark a lot thinner - it was too fat and probably would have taken up half of the book.


-I had to make the coloured curves on the bottom of my products a lot more shallow. It was pointed out that it looked like a bit of a skateboard ramp, and i was inclined to agree - I got a little too over excited and made them a little bit too steep, and it was especially evident on my with compliments slip and letterhead.


-Fix the transparency of the logo on the business card and the bookmarks. On my laptop they looked the same, but I had forgotten the percentage I had set the opacity at on the business card and guessed for my logo without checking back. Lo and behold, when I looked back and checked on the original documents, one item was at 5% and the other was at 10%.


It was also suggested by some of the members of the class that I should try and simplify my logo, such as having one wave/curl down the side instead of the two or try and make it into an M so it looked as though it was related to the company name. There was also a lot of joking about my logo looking like it was for ninjas and that one would jump out at you to take your money if you didn't pay it. The blue dot was also said to look like an eye - it was the daunting thing about my logo; you saw the blue spot and you knew exactly what it was - it was watching you. Possibly the best part of the critique.


The critique was a great experience and I enjoyed it a lot. I gained a lot from hearing the positive feedback from everyone.


The changes to my products were easy ones to make. I made my curves shallower by rotating the vector ovals and placing them down further on the page. The alignment adjustments were just a matter of following the rulers more carefully, and I just had to bring the opacity down on one of the products. I did have to build the bookmark from scratch again but that wasn't difficult. I also had to remake my brochure and reorder the pages, but it was definitely worth it because now it looks ten times better than it did. I also changed the text on the brochure so the boxes of text looked better on the spread out page.


Simplifying the logo was the difficult part. I tried reducing the wave/curls to one, but I had to resize it and it looked really bad because it was a lot wider than the stroke on the opposite side and making it a lot thinner made it look cheap and nasty. Making it look like an M made it look honestly ugly and more complicated than before. I did just have the two wave/curls and the blue spot rotated so it was a long logo, but it just wasn't the same, so I decided to leave the logo as it was - I'm confident it works and I don't think it can really be changed.


I am now really happy with my products and I'm looking forward to doing more of these in the future.








Logo Assessment - Debt Collectors/Debt Recovery

Thursday, May 13, 2010













Childhood Toy - Rocking Horse

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Night - Front Door Step

(extra) Close Up - I See You

Urban - "Classy Graffiti"

Black and White - Fireplace

High Depth of Field - Moving Forward

Portrait - Blending In

Low Depth of Field - Wild

(extra) High Angle - Top of the World

(extra) Portrait - Iron

(extra) Berries

More Logos

Thursday, May 6, 2010















Type Experiment

Monday, May 3, 2010