OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Design Boards

OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Final Printed Products

I am very pleased with my final printed works for this brief. I feel that I really utilized the feedback I received in the crit sessions and used it to really push and develop my ideas from the inception of my initial concept, which was of course, 'keep it fresh, fresher'. I am really pleased with the overall look of the advise booklets, I feel they make a statement and hopefully the freshers will be able to relate to the tips and want to keep the booklets for reference later on in the course. I am planning to print a large number of the booklets in monochrome using the studio printers when I return to start second year and distribute them out amongst the fresher, as this was the intended purpose behind the work.

I think as a body of work it is successful. I am glad that I didn't abandon the posters, because I have discovered on this course that my passions lay equally in poster design as well as editorial and layout design. That is why I did both, to demonstrate that throughout the year as a fresher you need to follow your passions and really push yourself in terms of the research and work you produce. 

OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Inspiration for Aesthetic

Warhol's Space Fruit series: Throughout his career, Andy Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create numerous print portfolios. In 1977 he met printer Rupert Jasen Smith who worked with him to create the series Space Fruit. These prints demonstrate Warhol’s experimentation with a centuries-old genre in painting—the still life. Still lifes by their very nature are choreographed compositions focusing on shape, color, space and oftentimes symbolism. Warhol was interested in the use of shadows as a compositional element. He first placed one or more pieces of fruit on a white back ground, lit it from an angled position so that shadows were cast onto the white paper, and then photographed these compositions. He also used collage and drawing to create the source imagery for the additional screens used in each print. Each color in these images represents a different silkscreened layer of the print. The printing process allowed Warhol endless colour combinations within each composition.

A portfolio of screen prints by Warhol, bizarrely titled ‘Space Fruits’, was published in 1979. Although based on the traditional subject of still-lifes of fruit, Warhol’s fruits are treated in a distinctly non-representational manner. This image of a watermelon appears more like a meteor than something edible. This highlights his evolving interest in abstract art which developed in his work in the late seventies. He has incorporated blocks of irregularly shaped colour, which, although screen-printed, appear like collaged fragments of coloured paper. He has also combined photographic aspects with printed hand-drawn lines that, while emphasising details, add to the abstracted quality.

My response: The reason I chose to use Andy Warhol as inspiration, is because I wanted my booklet not only to give helpful tips and advice to fresher, but to promote the value of analogue printing techniques. In an ideal world, I would have screen printed these posters (mainly time restrictions and organising my time with other briefs meant that I wasn't able to use this technique) Screen printing has been one of my favourite techniques to use for a very long time and I wanted to show this through my design treatment. I believe that the freshers should be completely aware of techniques such as screen printing, so who else better to grab inspiration from than Andy Warhol. His work is visually arresting and timeless, and I wanted to try and reflect this through my designs. Hopefully I have subtly communicated this passion for analogue design through my zine and set of posters.

OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Research

For this brief I focused the majority of my research on contemporary editorial design and small publication design. I looked further at independent zines for inspiration, as I wanted my booklet to have a unique personalised feel and be specific to Leeds College of Art.



There magazine covers inspired me greatly. I really like the typeface used and the way it has been typeset. I also find the colours used and the imagery very inspiring. The covers are full of contrast and look very fresh to me, something I want to achieve in my work for this brief.









Further layout inspiration. Here I was drawn to the monochrome imagery printed onto coloured stock


Photo books are also massive inspirations for me. I like the notion of communicating information and discourse through simple series of powerful and visually strong images:

OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Self Written Brief

OUGD406 – Brief 04 – Self Written Brief

Design and produce an A5 guide for next years’ graphic design fresher students that includes five ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ about the course. The guide has to be appealing and context aware and no longer than 10 double page spreads. Keep it simple, short and effective and above all appealing to first years’. Make the book personal to you yet relate able to the new freshers. Remember to keep it firmly rooted in the realms of graphic design, it must be course specific. The book has to appeal to freshers of this course, not general Leeds freshers. 

Accompanying the publication, produce a set of five posters which communicate the same do's and don't's. The posters must be visually similar to the aesthetic of the book and work hand in hand with the book. There is no limit on the size of the posters. 

OUGD406 - Brief 04 - Colour Choices + Stock (Aesthetic)

I did some visual research online, using the website Design Seeds to help me choose which colours may look good to use as the stock for the zine. In the crit, people said I should look to use colours which are fresh and represent fruit and I agreed with with strongly. I knew that I wanted to use colours that would also make the content, which is going to be printed in pure black, look great. Below are a selection of possible colour pallets that I could potentially use as stock colours.