Coding Crash Course!

Me and James have scheduled ourselves the challenge of learning to code this week before we go back to Uni on the 25th. Or at least get a basic understanding of the elements that make up a webpage. We've found a brilliant tutorial online that shows the basics of building responsive websites, ranging from small screen sizes (mobile devices etc.) to larger desktop displays. We've watched about an hour of the video today; so my plan is to sit down at my computer, go back through the process, and make material for my own comprehensive website. Here's a link to the video we're referencing, and below is a photograph of the notes I took:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBK_1WrM294

Templates, Drafts & Planning!

PLAN TO SUCCEED.

PREPARE TO FAIL.

FAIL BETTER TO IMPROVE.

Today I've been in college again with the sole purpose of creating my brief templates so I can hit the ground running on September 25th. I've taken the default provided template, altered slightly to make it more appropriate and applicable to myself and I've formatted in a way that not only reflects my attitudes as a designer, but functions better as an important document.

I've also had the opportunity to talk briefly with our Tutor about the specifics of writing briefs with the intention of a final year based heavily around collaboration and studio based work. It's great that myself and James have cleared up that we need to approach any work we credit to our studio from our own perspectives, and clearly deliver a recognisable, individual portfolio to cover ourselves in case of changes to any plans. As much as we're serious about [ B R A C K E T ], we need to personally develop as designers as well and make sure we're both individually hitting programme criteria if we want to do well this year.

Here's a look at the brief template I've designed:

The Beginning of the End.

Or the end of the beginning, I suppose it depends on which way you look it at. Over the past couple of months, myself and James Horrocks have been discussing at length our plans for when we graduate next year. It has been my intention for a while now to launch my own studio, instead of just joining a studio as a junior designer and ending up being another cog in someone else's machine. My motivation? The studio's I'd otherwise be applying for had to start similarly, they all took the plunge and did something right. I want to the same. We've decided we want to go ahead at making our studio a reality, and launching this year as a test run. Last year as part of our PPP we made the hypothetical plans for:

[ B R A C K E T ]

A collaborative creative studio that boasts a wide range of creative solutions to everyday design needs. Today we've been drawing up time management plans for the next three weeks prior to enrolling into our final year. We've also got basic plans as to which briefs we'll be tackling this year, the nature of them, and any potential clientele & collaborators. Tomorrow we've scheduled creating a template for our briefs, as well as fleshing them out fully with more consideration. Here's a quick look at some content I've been emerging myself in to prepare myself for what to expect:

4 Deadly Mistakes Most Startups Make When They Launch from Ross Simmonds

Top 100 AngelList Startups to Watch in 2014 from Stinson

As well as that, I've personally been continuing with my research for my dissertation concept. I've been into the library and taken out some books that I think will be a great starting point for justifying my field of interest.

COP - Making the Publication

There were a lot of parts to putting together this publication, from the printing, cropping, binding etc. Here's a few photographs of certain parts of my process and how I went about doing them:

I've learned the importance of always remembering to print colour bars, crop marks, and registration marks. It makes for much easier assembling at a later stage.

I used a long folded spare sheet to wrap around each individual spread before using the bone fold to get precise folds, this essentially stops the publication getting marked or shiny from the folding process.

I fashioned myself a make-shift 'horse', so that I could properly poke holes in the pages.

Binding was a long and tedious process, but with patience it came out pretty well in the end, and serves the versatile function of separating the sections of the book which was my original intention.

COP - Tear-Out Poster Artwork

This is the piece of artwork I designed for my publication. It makes up the front cover for the magazine, and it also comes as an A2 fold out poster. I thought it was appropriate for the imaging on the cover, because it does a good job of setting the tone of voice for the publication. It certainly mirrors a lot of the themes I've covered in the essay itself, being: sex and the virtual identity, sexuality and exaggerated personifications of oneself in a made up environment etc. I'm really pleased with how it's turned out, I think it's a really cool image and it got a lot of great feedback when I was putting my stuff together.

In terms of the actual creation, I used a high res photograph from a pornographic shoot (I'd provide a version but it's quite explicit). I then made vector versions of the emoticon faces to paste into the scene. Once I was happy with the composition I applied a filter to make the image fit together more seamlessly.

It's also worth mentioning the 'hidden' emoticon I inserted too, at a glance you assume that what you see in the image is indeed the male's penis. However the more keen observer will notice it is in fact the infamous 'aubergine emoji' and not a penis at all. Again, this whole system challenges the embedding of sexual culture into our everyday social and virtual lives.

COP - Branding my Publication

So I've got my concept: A publication that hosts a variety of articles related to the field of emerging technologies and Virtual Reality. The name I came up with for it is simply a stylized anagram  for it: VR, it's short and snappy enough to grab someones attention.

This is what I came up with. The typeface is called Novel, and I'm really fond of it. I deliberately picked a serif typeface, the reason being you'll notice there's a custom made ligature connecting the two characters. This is the concept that holds my brand together; I wanted to merge the two characters together, to symbolize the merging of 'Virtual' & 'Reality'. Upon reading through my essay it becomes relevant that this is a topic I've heavily looked into, making this exceptionally relevant.

I'm pleased with it. Not only does it look great, it also nails the theme of the written work conceptually too.

COP - Proposing Ideas for Practical & Visual Research

The content and theme of my essay is on virtual reality, new technologies and the role of the visual communicator. I've came up with a few different possibilities for what I can do for my practical work, but the idea I'm favouring is as follows:

I'd like to create a mixed publication, that's primary function is to host my essay, as an article response. With a mixture of photographs, added articles and journals. The content I've got ready at hand to go straight into it includes:

- The 3000 word essay I've completed on VR and new technologies.

- The Transhumanist declaration, which is an article I've looked at in detail to anchor the findings I've made and justified against the development of certain technologies.

- Mark Zuckerburg interviews, on the purchasing of Oculus, facebook's future etc.

- Oculus articles that I've looked at in my research.

- Articles from sections of academic resources I've looked at, ie New Media: A critical analysis.

There's also ideas of content that I could generate myself, which include a few smaller ideas:

- A photography series of 3D rendered objects transposed into real life

- And real objects transposed into a 3D context.

- I had an idea to create masks of emoticons that we see everyday and photograph those in context.


My plan is to make a collated piece of editorial, that is one-off by nature. I'm under no illusion that I've got a small time frame to work from to complete this work, and for that reason I've decided to make each individual piece of work separate that joins together in a fashion that collates the entire piece. This means I can keeping adding sections to the publication as they're completed, and I can realistically complete at least some of the sections I've talked about.

For this reason, I want to make a booklet style magazine that varies in size, stock and processes that will all be bound together using a practical and versatile method of binding: stitching. Plus, this again means I can keep adding to the piece if I find I've got the time to add elements.

To get an idea of the aesthetic style I'm aiming for I've got a couple of pieces of research to show: