Composition task using only selected typefaces to covey the themes: feminine, masculine, pattern, playful, power and scale.

Influenced Design

Vaughan Oliver inspired piece

Peter Grundy inspired piece

El Lissitzky inspired piece

Little Women in the style of Peter Grundy

I was inspired by the layout that Grundy used for his work with Landsec real estate company. I really liked how he used a lot of elememnts together creating almost a collage and sticking to a mostly square grid style.

Design process on Photoshop. 
All of the elements representing things from the story of 'Little Women'. The cornered objects represting each sister; Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth. The house, key, ice skates and scissors representing key plot points.

1984 in the style of Vaughan Oliver

I like Vaughan Oliver's work a lot, I feel his designs are very suited to album covers and defined an era and sub section of music. Above are two of my favourites by Oliver and also two of my favourite albums. I like that Oliver uses a lot of texture in his work to make it look worn and aged which gives a piece character and also his use of found photos.

Expanding on my thumbnails, I took my ideas into photoshop. I liked the found image of the man as I felt it fit in with themes of 1984, I began playing with layering and textures. In the end I chose a dark blue and brown colour scheme similar to the one used by Oliver in the Doolittle album sleeve. 

Oliver Twist in the style of El Lissitzky

I struggled with this design the most, I think because I was getting too hung up on making the cover look like it had something to do with the plot of Oliver Twist. So instead I just decided to make it directly be in Lissitzky's style. This meant making use of red, white and black. Using blocky letters with 45 degree angles and lots of smaller lines. I decided to use the pointing hand again, like I did in my inspired piece. I feel it adds a little more charcter to the piece, I also wanted to make the letters form into a neat cube.

My Adidas

For this project, we were asked to choose a song out of a couple and create a 8 page book in responce to it using all of the lyrics. Out of the songs I chose My Adidas by Run-D.M.C. After listening to all of the songs this song stood out to me the most and felt like it had the most character and personality. At first I wanted to do my book about the New York hip hop scene in the 80's, but after doing some more research I decided against this. I learned that Run DMC got their Adidas sponsorship from this song, the song is to me a celebration of Adidas and sneaker culture in the 80's. I started to look at 80's Adidas magazine ads, I really liked the aesthetic of them so decided to create my book as though it was filled with these retro adverts. Below are some that I looked at. I managed to identify one of the fonts for the headlines used and began looking for photos that would look like they would fit into ads.

When I was looking for found images, I was looking for pictures of people wearing adidas or just adidas themselves or things inspired by the 'vibe' of the song. I didn't really want to use actual adidas promo shoots and wanted to instead find retro street photography ones. After looking through many I settled with these which I put into a folder on my desktop.

Thumbnails

Final Design

The front cover was directly influenced by a number of adidas ads I saw that had the tag line 'the mark of the winner'. I chose the image of the young black man to contrast against those ads which mostly used photos of white people. I also felt him holding the boombox was very Run DMC. I used a script font as close as I could find to the original to write the artist name.

These are my favourite two pages. A line that stood out to me the most at a first listen was 'I stepped on stage at Live Aid' obviously in refernce to Run DMC's Live Aid performance. However I began to think of how Freddie Mercury also wore his adidas at Live Aid. I chose the iconic photo of him in his yellow jacket for this 'ad'. I used yellows from the jacket for the writing and edited the photo to look more aged and washed out. For the second page I wanted to contrast the glamour and celebrity with the everyday and the reality of adidas, reflected in the use of the brown and beige colour scheme. I felt the headline was very urban so wanted to reflect that. Also using the photo of the man on the payphone to reflect the 'yo,wassup?' as if he were talking to someone. I am also using the actual adidas font the whole way through the piece. I really liked the image of the man laying on the ground with adidas on and felt putting the 'funky fresh' lyric in a script type would work as a bit of sarcasm.

I wanted to have a big page with just text on so, this is that one. The black and the white work well to grab a readers attention. I also like the cropping I used on the photo of the people jumping. I used the outlines to the state of California and New York as there is a refernce to California later on in the song.

 This was inspired by a rare photo of Michael Jordan wearing adidas instead of nike. I dont like this spread as much as the others. I wanted the text to wrap around the ball but I then thought it would be a bit too confusing to know wether to read up and down or across the ball.

For the back cover I was referencing the stickers that are found on adidas shoe boxes that have the 'specs' of the shoe, whereas I have replaced it with the 'specs' of the song.