Retro is the way forward!

I've decided not to post my work in progress for the Penguin Design Award competition. Obvious reasons really. I'll post the finished version when it's sent off and entered :)

In other news, I have been working on my sustainability posters, in particular the mobile phone one - persuading people not to upgrade their phone when it works perfectly well, for the sake of the environmental damage that new phones cause during manufacture.

I'm going for a retro feel here, the idea that vintage/retro is cool and so old phones are cool too. Just been doing some drawing and some initial ideas and....

Cassettes! Space invaders! Old Nokias! All the best things ever. I have discovered that I love drawing cassette tapes ^.^

So this is the starting point. Imagine pixellated text, retro colours... good times. I'll update as I progress, I have a good feeling about this project :)

Self Promotion woes and stumbling upon nice things.

Every so often I have one of these days on the internet. It's quite strange. I'll be researching something or other, an article or artist or whatever, and it'll take me on this crazy ride of following links all over the place. A minute ago I had 20 tabs open purely just because everywhere was taking me everywhere else. It's exciting. The cyber version of opening a door which leads you to another door and another one until you fall off the moon. Or something. Anyway, right now, this is entirely useful because I am currently trying to devise my Visual Identity. I capitalised that because it's such a huge thing that I feel it needs it. It's a scary thing, right? How exactly to capsulise ME in a nice little branding package. Business card, CV, Letterhead, Postcard. These are requirements for this module (of course it's a uni project, I'm glad of it, it forces me to do this.) But me being me, I also want to apply the 'rebranding' (omgzzz total like corporatementalness there) to this blog, and I want a website too. A real one. That is all www.lookhereIamisn'tmyworkwonderful.co.uk. Haha.

I've been stuck for ages, so I just thought, I'll do something, and work from there. So this is my first little idea. It's not a huge leap; ink, graph paper, hand rendered text. I want to have white space definitely because my work gets so cluttered that I need to move towards involving white space. Because I like it, and it does look better rather than 'everythingeverywhere' which is the approach for me in the past :P The font here is called 'Sketch Rothwell', and I'm not going to use it; I want to actually draw my own type (I'll probably end up tracing Gill Sans or something lol, totally obsessed with ol' Gill at the mo). But you get the point.

And yes, this isn't the best dimensions to be applied to....well any of the things I have to produce. But it's a starting point.

What I really wanted to blog about was Keri Smith. She is the author of The Guerilla Art Kit and Wreck This Journal and other lovely things as well. She's basically a pretty cool illustrator and human person. I like her, she did a nice post the other day that has gone some way to pull me out of my unmotivated/overwhelmed/ohmygod the end is nigh mentality of the past few weeks.



This is the coolest thing. I want one. Go check her out :) The other thing she has done is this PDF, of 100 ideas to do. I've just printed it out and I'm definitely going to do some, or all of them. This is my problem you see. I'm a creative person. But I never bloody create. My journal is pitiful. Keri is like, Queen of Journals. And I always say, oh I'm going to draw every day or collage once a week or whatever but inevitably I get sucked into doing Uni work, and when I'm not doing Uni work I'm enjoying my last few days of studentland and crying on people. Haha. It's not that uni stuff isn't creative, it clearly is, but it's always for a deadline, always for a purpose...always now now now do something quick before your tutor calls you a failure. Lol. And ultimately, sometimes I'd rather curl up with a film after a hard day at the Macs instead of drawing my telly or something.
Does that make me a failure to the illustration profession? Hmm.

On the subject of drawing, here's one I did of a not so happy snarly wolf:
Copyright to me, Rachel Lewis please. That goes without saying but I don't trust the mintynet *squinty eyes*
that one is straight from the scanner, levels are a bit off. Actually looking at it now, the eye is a bit weird too. Noted. It's for my book cover for The Secret History; of which I don't have a jpeg to post of what it's looking like currently. Man I need Photoshop. At least Ps Elements or something :( sigh. But as I don't believe in any form of digital piracy, and I have no money, I have to go to uni to experience that delight.

I'm off to brainstorm myself. No, really. If I'm going to Visual Identity myself then I need to know what myself constitutes, in spider-diagram form.

ChickenOut! Label Competition - My entry

This has taken me a while to post this. Anyway, the charity Chickenout! and Compassion in World Farming ran a competition a few weeks back, to redesign the Standard Chicken label for Tesco.

"Pick up a standard chicken in most supermarkets and the package is unlikely to tell you much about how that chicken was produced.

Around 90% of chickens in the UK are farmed in intensive systems in conditions like those shown in the video here.

By law, egg boxes must be labelled with the farming method and this has decreased sales of battery eggs. So why can't chicken be honestly labelled too? "

That was the basic premise. Come up with a chicken label that depicts honestly the lives of the chickens that most people buy: the standard ones. This is so that consumers can make a more informed choice about where the food they eat comes from; but making sure it's not a high-horse 'you should eat free range you're so bad' type of thing, because some people (myself included, being a student) can't afford to eat free range chicken. I wish I could, and I aspire too, but it simple is too expensive.

This was my entry :) It's not the most amazingly beautiful piece of work I have ever created, but I think it did the job.

Anyway I didn't win. You can see the winning entry here. There are also some 'highly commended' ones up there. I disagree wdith the winning choice for 'best design work' but there you go... design is opinion after all, and just because I didn't like it, doesn't mean I'm right I suppose. That's not the point really, the point is to get the message across to Tesco, the other supermarkets, and eventually you and me, exactly how our chickens are kept before slaughter, so are choices are clearer.

It's catch 22 really though because as I said earlier, I can't afford to buy free range all the time. I'm a poor student. But if everyone bought free range, there'd be more demand and it'd be cheaper. Something to think about... consumer deman can be a powerful thing. It's just getting that message across to consumers that there are alternatives to the fast-grown, barn-reared chickens that most of us eat - it's sad, when you see it, they have such poor life qualities. Watch this video, it's only a couple of minutes long, but it explains exactly what I mean:

From the Chickenout.tv website

And that's the job of design, I think. That's our responsibility, not just to design stuff to sell to consumers, but to design stuff to make consumers more aware. The power of design is huge and it's in our hands to do something about causes and topics such as animal welfare. The same goes for environmental issues and sustainability - I wrote my Dissertation on this exact topic, and it's so important that designers and artists of all types recognise their responsibility when it comes to environmental issues. We are probably in a greater position of power than anyone, including government, to change attitudes towards the environment - images and words can be extremely powerful things.

I want to post more about this subject in the future - possibly bits from my dissertation, and my opinion on the whole environment/sustainability debate. Watch this space (or blog ;)

On the subject of competitions, I'm entering the Penguin Design Award again this year, so I'll be posting my work in progress for that this weekend I hope. It's going well ^.^