Finished films!

Sevgi Love Hotel Stop Motion

Refugee campaign!

Story Board Stop Motion

Ok, this is our story board of the stop motion film, and tonight I'm going to take some sample photos at my desk at home. The film will only be around 13 seconds, so we need to work simple with angles and movements. We are thinking of using 3D cardboard letters (a couple of cm thick), covered in different materials such as for example red silk and fur etc, to give the different letters different personalities. We will also add music to all this. The letter couples will dance with each other and the huge "I":s symbolizes walls, as they were in different hotel rooms. The letters will be backlit by a huge lamp in red light, to make the shadows dancing along with the letters and to get a passionate feeling to it. One of the "I"s will eventually fade out, and there will just be the letters saying SEVGI, added by our tagline. I'll show you what I mean with more visuals tonight. 

I didn't know I would love doing stop motion this much, but I think it's the combination of  planning it all out, the setting, the lights, measurements, photo that moves, photo shop and create the right atmosphere. Wow - what a project! I think I'll try to make a stop motion movie at winter break!

Daniel, I would love to do a stop motion film together with you some day - maybe when you are here at summer break! I think it would be a fun team work thing with a lot of planning and laughs too <3 If you're up for it, write down all ideas of it that crosses your mind, and let's see what we come up with!

Folio, poster and presentation!

I have now worked the whole weekend and I am up to date - feels wonderful!

I recently made the symbols folio out of what I posted in the symbols blog folio, and I'm about to print that out tomorrow. During one lesson, the teacher showed us the symbol of kkk and asked what it is a symbol for. The first thing that got on my mind was the Vodafone logo, haha. See how similar they are! I just HAD to have this as my cover.

The A2 poster is coming along well and for Thursday I'll print it out in black and white just to look at how the text is working in a bigger version.

Also, I just grabbed some screen shots of my progress in my Frameworks presentation.

Later I'll show you the story board of the stop motion film we're doing for our love hotel, and also show some screen shots of my process book in Typography, together with some pics of my printed out brochure with the Giants of Typography.

Studio Practice inspiration

In class -inspiration for stop motion movie

What's up?

Now it's starting to get a bit stressed again. There is a lot of assignments with final due in about four weeks. This is what's on the schedule, to keep you updated on my projects:

Studio Practice:

•  We have just got the final brief, which is really fun. We will create a stop motion film of 15 seconds (about 24 photos per second) that goes with our brand style and that could be used as a promoting device for our Hotel! Today we brainstormed within our group, and next Monday we'll bring cameras, paper and other stuff that can come in handy for the project. I am really looking forward to get started on this one!

Symbols & Distribution:

• For next Monday we need to publish five more pictures of a specific kind of symbol, onto our Symbols Blog Folio. Additional to this we will print out all the pictures and text, and create a simple symbol folio to be handed in to the teachers. 
• Distribute our symbol in Hyde Park to "celebrate" that Sydney is multicultural. This is another approach in getting people to not reject the refugee problem here in Sydney. We'll film it all and present it in front of the class!

 

Frameworks of Design:

•  The presentation of our brand with the creative process behind it (for example include all stages of logo ideas from the sketch book), background research, idea for a launch event together with mood board, invitation and a produced give-away gift that could be used in the fictional event, a 1000 word script to back up the presentation to be handed in to the teachers as a leave behind after the presentation. The leave behind will be a CD with print on it, and a cover that will also match the brand. Also, the presentation itself needs to be included in the CD leave behind. Fun project!!
• In the project, there should be some references of design studios that we like. We got a paper in class with a lot of interesting suggestions of good design agencies to research a bit further, and I thought I could include some of them here to show you!
• Lotta Nieminen 
• Mash Design 
• Greedy Hen 

 

 

Typography & Context:

• The Letter in the environment poster I showed you before
• The process book of 42 pages, printed and bound as a professional book ("It needs to look so professional as if your mother picked it up in a book store, she would never imagine that it is made by you"). The book should include everything we have done during this semester in Typography and Context, including photos and things we have learned at the lessons, and the printed A2 poster.

Sevgi Love Hotel Press Kit

Presentation slides

Production week

FINALLY I’m going surfing tomorrow with Eduardo from class at Manly beach. If we are lucky we’ll be joined by Malin and Niklas in the afternoon! The rest of the week I will work on my projects, get some stuff printed, practice for a presentation on Monday - Studieo Practice, listen to some jazz with a friend from when I stayed at a hostel and maybe go to a party I was invited to Friday. Good mix that will make a good production week!

Some ongoing projects

This is my finished booklet that I handed in last week. I’ll take some photos on the actual printout when I get it back form the teachers.

Spread three and back cover

Our next assignment in Typography and context is as I described before to make a poster in two colours, for the fictional show “Letters in the Environment”. These are the pictures I will pick out the three best ones from. On the best one of them I’ll start play around with the typography we have been given to be included at the A2 poster.

Frameworks of design
These are some sketches of my leave behind CD for the final brief in this subject.

Last weekend

Hi everyone! Still got some troubles with the internet connection and uploading posts on my blog… but here’s a little update from the weekend.

This is Eduardo in class. I just love this pic since it in a funny way shows some applications for our box branding our Love Hotel.

I love this logotype! I went out dancing last weekend.

Barbecue with the lovely family! From the left: Jacob, Martin, Daniel, Amanda, Niklas.

Our new roomie Agnes made us happy!

Work in progress & our blue house!

I can give you the advice that sometimes it’s much more fun to work with someone rather than sitting by yourself, even though you don’t work with the same things. Yesterday Niklas and I stayed up working until 3 am, so I didn’t get that much sleep, but I was so motivated to work on the spread for the Giants of Typography - brochure! Here is what I have done so far, and during the Easter break I will make two more spreads, a front cover and a back cover. I really tried to reflect what Jan Tschichold stands for in my layout using the grid in a different way, but at the same time make it easy to read and keep the reader’s interest. There is a LOT more to layout than I thought from the beginning. I am starting to fall in love with it, guys. Today I got really good feedback on this spread, which made me very happy since I have worked so hard. Now I just have to work with the text a bit more and then try to keep the rest of the spreads consistent.

Typography & Context

This project is in progress, with a lot more to do, and produce, but I felt like showing you in which direction I’m going with my press kit for Istanbul love hotel. I have to work more on integrating cultural influences a bit more, though.

Studio Practice

I have come up with some patterns that will go with my brand, but I don’t feel like posting a picture of the rest of it yet. I don’t know why but with this assignment I want it to be finished before I show it to you.

Frameworks of Design

I had a wonderful day today despite my loss of sleep, starting with the good feedback at the Typography & Context - lesson. After that I felt I needed to do something else than work and Jakob (I’ll hopefully post a pic with our collective family after the weekend) told me that we have access to a pool in the garden next to our collective! Perfect, and I went there. I haven’t been in the sun since I went surfing two weeks ago (which I’ll hopefully do more of this Easter) so it felt wonderful just lying there. After that I went for a really intense run - wonderful.

 

When I came home something happened that made me clean the whole bottom floor; kitchen and living room. I washed the floor by hand, washed all the carpets and towels, cleaned the shelves and the desk so that everything was shiny. I was like a tornado, finally blowing in to the shower before I could relax.

After that, I felt complete, and ate some good food from yesterday combined with some wine. It’s important to have some moments of joy every day, even though it’s a Thursday liksom. And some dark chocolate...

Now I have a date with my love at Skype. God, I love both you and Skype, Daniel.

New briefs

Hi guys! Hope you’ve been good. I’m so glad so many of you are reading my blog.

Of course there is problems with the internet at the hostel, why I haven’t written in a couple of days, and I am so looking forward to move now! Just ONE night left!

Monday I got a lot of new briefs and I’ll try to describe what we are about to do.

Every fifth week we have something called production week were we have no lessons but work on our own projects. Last week was production week and the first week after is always the one where we get all new briefs.

Symbols & Distribution:
Take a photo of five teachers in school and make a pixel portrait of them on the computer, for example Photoshop. I don’t have any example to show you yet but you’ll understand what I mean. It’s supposed to become a bit like an exaggeration of the person.

Also, I’ve been sketching on some symbols for our brainstorming ideas about the refugees stuff, which I will explain later on what we have chosen to do.

Typography & Context:
I have come up with a theme, on the “Giants of typography” - booklet bout a typographer, that motivates me a lot and I’m still in the sketching process. Also, I’ve started to think about the layout of the final book for this course.

Frameworks of Design:
It is harder than I thought to come up with a logo for your self… still sketching but it needs to be at least 90% done Tuesday. In class yesterday we practiced layout on business cards,  the hierarchy of all the elements and some creative examples on themes. Also, to create harmony between the rows of info, for example the row:

“Address: 178 George Street NSW 2034 Sydney”

don’t match with the appearance of the row:
“Tel: 040 298 79 47 because it is not visually pleasing. One thing you can do here is for example to spell out the word “Telephone” or arrange it in a better way to make the rows more even. You can also work with tabs doing this.

Studio Practice:
Press kit + event with invitation to the event of your idea (love hotel). Produce the kit for real! Even though we are a group we are asked to graphically design our own ideas with the correct measurements and pitch it to our group with good arguments to make them convinced. Our target audience is only married couples in Istanbul I’m planning the fictional event to be a mad up wedding in Istanbul. Maybe the invitation can be inside the wedding cake?


Yesterday I went to this event to relax before starting the week for real.

So, back to work!

On the rooftop

Monday wasn't a very good day, therefore I didn't have any inspirations to write anything. I had slept way to little. We had our presentation which went pretty well.

In the evening I way to late went to the printer with my information demographics. We had to re-print 5 times. It took about 2,5 hours and it was really one of those situations you feel that you don't want to be in when working as a graphic designer. I tried to look above this day with hawk eyes and realized that I have to go through some printing problems in my life, why not start this day? So I did, and I finally got happy with it.

I went home to Malin, packed my bags and took a cab to the hostel – totally worth it. It was extremely sad to know that I will not live with Malin – we got along so well. Of course we will se each other, but anyway. It was nice to find the dorm I was about to stay in was a very un-party-room with sleeping quiet girls. 'Cause this will be my study – home for three weeks. I felt like a ”bratpacker” with a lot of stuff, my own pillow and blanket, and especially the evening after this day when Niclas and I drank some wine with cheese to go with it. Not very backpacky at all. Anyway, I slept enormously good that night and back in school the next day I was ready for new briefs. When I got home to the hostel again I was curious about running in Hyde park and so I did. Beautiful place!

This is our new briefs briefly:

Studio practice: 

* Continue in our groups and work with same concept (we made a love hotel) but focus on marketing it with for example an event or something that goes well together with your brand. After that we will sketch and make mock-ups for packaging etc.

Symbols and distribution:

* In class we got an assignment. We got a document with fictional road sign names (not allowed change) where our task was to make up a “world” where this road signs would fit it's context. Since I'm really into feet for the moment, I named my world “Feetland roadsigns”.

* Also in this course, we are getting a task every week, to take 5 photos of different symbols that the teachers have talked about. For example religious symbols, clothing symbols, symbols that have changed their meaning etc. This is published on our own symbols blog. 

* What's more, we have a really tough group assignment to work on for couple of weeks. We get to chose to do an environmental course or a course for the refugee problem in Australia. We are actually going out with our campaigns, and our missions is not to make people change their minds, but to inform. I haven't really chosen subject yet but I'm leaning towards the refugees thing, since I don't know much about it and since the rest of the world is trying to do different environmental things. 

* For this we will come up with a symbol, both to represent each of our groups, but also the two winners to represent the two different subjects. 

* In the end of the whole course we will make a symbols folio with all our assignments = book

Frameworks of design (my favorite course):

* Continue on branding our selves in the design business but now head more to the visual applications of our own brand. We will design our own logo, brand repeat pattern (wallpaper), business card to be printed for real, website mock-up, example of pdf based presentation that matches our brand, portfolio briefcase. This is going to be so much fun!

Typography and context:

* Continue creating a logo for a made up publishing company. 

* In the end we are going to produce a 50 pages book about our course, our assignments and our experiences. We will need to print it and bind the book by our selves. Fun!!

Next week is called production week. We don't have any lessons and the week is not for holidays but to continue working at our projects.

Right now I am in a really good mood. I have been training the whole morning, eating and I just found a spot on the roof of the hostel where I can combine being in he sun (beautiful day) and working on my computer!! I will work until late this night, and tomorrow we have one class in Typography were the logos need to be made.

Bookbinding - Tutorial: A5 lanscape

There is a lot of ways of binding a book, and I guess that the first thing that comes up in your mind may be sewing it with needle and thread. That's a really good way I haven't learned yet. The way I'm going to show you is pretty quick and relatively cheap than letting some other company bind it. What you need o know before hand is that this make take some tries before you are happy with it, and also that you need to be really careful and picky! So, let's make a book!

You need your printed paper, included your cover. Make sure the numbering of your book is correct BEFORE you print. It is trickier than you may think. Ask your printer or google it! You also need a cutting pad, a knife, metal ruler (long one) double sided tape and card board (bendable). You also need something to make the paper fold where you can't fit with your finger (I'll show you later on). if you have hot glue, that's just a plus, but normally it's enough with double sided tape. Cut all your  spreads carefully with knife and ruler. Everything needs to be exact. Then measure and cut the hard paper according to the measurements I have posted below. 

 

Above is the tape you need to have for this. Glue the hard papers onto the cover/back (that must be one total spread and not cut). Make sure you're gluing on the right side! After this, you may want to have a nicer paper on top of everything, before you glue the spreads. Use something to make "folds" between the gaps of the "cardboard-stripes. Fold the book the way it is going to be folded, before you glue your spreads.

After cutting your spreads and made sure they're in the right order, make them even and put them between something that keeps them together. Then, start putting stripes of double sided tape to make the spreads stick together. Make sure you do this on the right side so that you are not gluing the side that is supposed to be opened i the book. When everything is done, glue it quickly! 

Finished!

If you have any questions or I forgot something, just send me a comment and I will try to explain.

Assignments

Yesterday I allowed myself to do nothing and it all ended up with me and Malin laughing for hours. Between our laughs we got stuck at this website. I bet every graphic designer do that once in a while.

Today we spent the hours before lunch in the class Frameworks of Design. This weekend I started to collect all info i got from my focus group, and started to come up with some creative demographics, with my favorite theme; from the perspective of my feet. Here is a rough sketch. Right now I understand it makes no sense to you, but I want to show my process in two steps.

Draft

Small kalas for a couple of guys here in Sydney

Rest of the day I spent with my "Istanbul Love Hotel" group. We try to start wrapping up, and tomorrow our goal is to look up and send it all to print! It'll become a A5 book. Tomorrow the day is all dedicated to the Istanbul project but one hour will be with the Santa in school, having the course Finishing skills, with no pressure at all. To this class we bring our assignments and he help us finish them up. For example in a couple of weeks he told us that he will show us how to bind a book by hand!! That would be perfect to have tomorrow actually. Anyway, tomorrow, "Santa" will have tutorials with how to draw with copic markers.

Run, run, run!

Wonderful to run in the park even though I felt like a stone.

Following projects is what I spend the whole of my days working on, from like 9.00-23.00 (to make you understand how my days look like. This is totally a lifestyle)

SYMBOLS & DISTRIBUTION
In school we are right now talking about symbols, which could be politics, warriors, clothes, well everything you could think of. One of our missions is to reflect upon these and photograph five different symbols for next week. I have already posted some things at my "Symbols-blog"

TYPOGRAPHY & CONTEXT
We are also designing three different logos for a made up publishing company called FACE Publishing. Also in this course, we are making our own typographic self portrait which I will soon post here.

FRAMEWORKS OF DESIGN
Another project, which is my favorite, is the creative demographic charts about our self. If it turn out really well I can actually use it when applying for a job = as a presentation of our selves.

STUDIO PRACTICE
Project Istanbul will be a Love Hotel for Locals :P This week we need to decide which printing agencies to use and yesterday evening I sketched at some logo ideas combined with research about their religion, culture, women, men, family life and so on. Really interesting!


Soon I'll look at an apartment before heading off to school. Still haven't found any and it's so expensive! If you pay around 6500 kr per month you barely get your own little room to sleep in! That's just too much. And living outside town will take to much time. Also, at almost every apartment you decide you want to rent, you'll have to pay a bond to secure your place, and that can be as much as a several months would be =a lot, and you don't get them back until you move out. If I can just spill out some more words about this, most re viewings of the apartments take place around the same hours of mid day only Saturdays, which means you have to have all your papers about you (everything you can think of) ready and printed in like 20 ex, and you barely have time to go from one place to another 'cause they're all spread out so that means you'll have to take a sweaty expensive cab everywhere that aligns with your plan and schedule. So, now you know what my plan is for Saturday.

This is what occupies my head these days. Hope I'll find something soon, 'cause the 28th I have to move out. Exciting days!

Time management!

Hi guys, I'm so happy to see that people are reading my blog, that makes me so motivated to continue.

When I think about it I see myself as a really good planner of my own time, but I never thought I would end up in a situation where the time management is this hard! At the same time I like that the school is trying to similate the real working life afterwards and that it will be crowded in your calender. I love the assignments and as I said before I already know that I will be learning so much from this school. I haven't reallt decided what to aim for in my future career and I hope this education will open new doors. What I pretty much know for sure is that I would love to work as a photographer, illustrator or graphic designer. Maybe I could combine the three? Well, that will show.

Today we continued with our "branding an Istanbul brand" - assignment. It all ended up with my group feeling so pressed to come up with ideas that we just sat there blank in our heads. I guess this is normal for the process of a group 'cause this made us realize that we were not happy/ didn't feel motivated with the subject we had chosen to go for = airline. It all ended up with us, a little bit late but aniway a important decission, changing subject to .....you'll see. So I better get home from school soon to start some research!

Next lesson today - Symbols and Distribution - we got an in-class assignment that will soon be posted on our so called "symbols blog" I mentioned earlier (for the teachers to check out). The assignment was to build a face, an animal, a thing from inside a house, a human movement (like a person dancing), a tree/flower and a vehicle of some kind just using following symbols (can't put in any symbols as I'n not by my own computer, but the whole thing is called a tangram: triangles in different shapes, a rectangle sort of thing with cut edges and one square shape. I'll show you later.

Need to get goin'

Ongoing projects

In two days a LOT have happened, and I'll try to update it all. The sun is Autumn-shining through the open window with light Sydney-sounds at the street outside. I'm sitting at Malin's bed where I've sat since I entered the yellow door a couple of minutes ago.


STUDIO PRACTICE 
Yesterday we started with the course Studio Practice. We'll behave like we are working in a real studio and that the teacher Daniel(!) is our Creative Director, CD. We work for him but the relationship is loyal. Our first mission/brief got everyone to open their mouths and at the same time forget about it. It's too long to be submitted here, but we were more or less divided into groups of 3. All groups got a city to market with a brand. To market a whole city demands a LOT of investigations and research, especially since my group got Istanbul which we don't know a lot about. So fun! Our mission is to chose and develop a brand, could be the Airline, Bookstore, Pub etc. We haven't chosen yet, since we want to do the research first to find out what kind of areas Istanbul would need. We need to present a style guide containing Logo, Tag line & brand essence, Color palette, Primary & Secondary typeface, Applications (like t-shirt, postcards). We have to make up a time line, book meetings for printing. We will present it all in front of a couple of designers. Wow, a HUGE assignment, but so much fun. We're a group consisting of a swede, a Brazilian and a Tazmania. Today I sat four hours doing research about Istanbul and tonight we'll have a Skype meeting together.

SYMBOLS AND DISTRIBUTION

The second subject will more or less be about symbols and the manipulating power it can give. Daniel, it's like social experiments (film #2) and the well known guy Henrik Fexeus (sorry, film #1 in Swedish), extremely good at manipulating others. I went to one oh his shows a couple of weeks ago in Sweden, and it all ended up with me at stage in front of 600 people calling a friend up using my speaker. Haha, don't ask. At the lesson we got an assessment. We got to choose from an amount of symbols and put them together to depict the story told below the empty boxes. We could not use anything else or change the story, just build upon it using elements of storytelling with help from these signs.

We also got an assessment to take home with us. We need to create a blog, a simple one, for the teachers to read, where we post symbols and signs we find in our everyday life and add a little comment about it, evaluating it. We need to think as creative as possible and never use pictures from the internet. I'll start the symbols-blog tonight I think.


Today we had
FRAMEWORK OF DESIGN
where in this course it will build upon us promoting our own brand, designing our own business cards and website, everything that builds a brand. Our values, influences, personality, what we want our personal brands to stand for and express. We got two exercises in class to get in the right mood and you see them here. This course will be amazing, where one of our missions is to set up a focus group for our selves to find out about our selves from people who knows me. We need to document the focus group where I ask the questions, and after that we'll collect info and fun stuff about our selves to gather in  different demographic charts creatively planned and easily understood.We need to look for role models and market our selves. It all ends with a great presentation!

Hard to chose your business values...

Exercise

Select 8 things that have most influenced your life. These could be anything, like experiences, a book, a person, an object and so on. Place your items on the circle diagram to represent how important the item is to shaping your life. The closer the item is to the core of the circle, the more influential it is. You can represent them as words, drawings, symbols. Be creative!

This above is my demographic chart. We got 15 minutes, so I decided to provide the circle as a cut tree, symbolizing my growth in life. What the symbols symbolize I won’t tell you here at my public blog, but each insect also represents the influence I mean.

We also got a book tip: "How to be a graphic designer without loosing your soul" and I'll start reading it on my way to school when I'm not looking for signs to document.

Hope you're all all right!