OUGD406 DESIGN PRACTICE- Risk assessment

Having a tea stall within college takes a lot of planning and meeting with building regulations because of health and safety. First of all Laura and I had to draw a floor plan to show where all the equipment will be, the source of the power, where the wires will run and the source of the water for the kettle. This was then sent off to the buildings team to be approved. The image below is the re tweaked version because some details were wrong.

 Below is the email sent by Andrew (a member of the building team) with the next stage of the process which is the risk assessment form, lucky for us he had already helped us and filled the majority out for us which was really helpful because it was extremely confusing. It basically proposed a problem such as spilt liquid on the floor and how and who would respond.

Below is the risk assessment form we filled in;

Below is the confirmation email to say everything is in order and we have been given the all clear to go ahead with our chariTEA sale outside the graphic design studio next Thursday.

OUGD406 DESIGN PRACTICE- Secret 7 feedback

From the crit on friday I have taken on board some of the suggestions I received about adding a singular colour to the barrel of the gun to represent the don and to single it out so that is easier to recognise and understand. Another suggestion was to insert the barrel in the centre of the skyscraper perspective cover. This idea didn't work out very well in my eyes, there was just too much happening in one image, I didn't know where to focus and the meaning of the design was lost somewhere. The design could have meant anything and it wasn't really open to interpretation because there was too much clutter and visuals.

Below is my final design I have chosen to submit, I have taken on board the suggestions and I believe this is the most aesthetically pleasing because it's simple, precise and provokes thought. The title 'The Don' doesn't instantly jump out and grab you but when you consider all the factors within it; the gun barrel, the singular gold bullet positioned at the top suggesting hierarchy or the fact it looks like a birds eye view looking down on a table, a meeting where the gold circle is at the head of the table and higher ranking. I have also decided on a heavily saturated grey back ground just so that there isn't too much boring white space that the central focus is lost.

Below is a screenshot showing my submission;

Next time I will probably approach the brief slightly different focusing more on meanings and emotions as opposed to the title of the song.

OUGD406 DESIGN PRACTICE secret 7, five designs

Because this is a live brief and secret 7 required submission within a week I got straight to work on design sheets. Based on the research on Nas, the 'Don' and his previous album covers I have produced a series of design sheets based on my interpretations of the song and the word Don based on hierarchy and being the 'top dog'

From the thumbnails I have drawn up I have to digitlise and print 5 different designs for fridays crit allowing me to repsond to the feedback over the weekend and submit on sunday night. Below are the 5 designs I decided to digitalise and print to the specified requirements. 

The two above are a based on the godfather famous artwork but created using simple geometric graphic shapes. The top one includes a city skyline at the bottom of the shirt because when I think of the don and the godfather I instantly think of New York.

This design is based on the barrel of a revolver with again a cit skyline involved. I really don't think the skyline concept is fitting in with any of the designs above, they're just two completely different things and its hard to see any relation between the two images without involving any text. However I feel the idea of a revolver is definitely a strong starting point and believe it can be developed a whole lot more. This is definitely one of my strongest concepts and I will go in to the crit with questions about having only a singular bullet and if it's too simple to understand any visual link between the image and the song.

This is just an illustration of Nas based on the bio picture given with the brief. I tried to go down a more illustrative route with this design because a lot of my work generally doesn't include too many illustrations, and if they do they're generally very precise geometric representations as opposed to a more hand drawn illustrative style. I don't think i'm a big fan of this illustration because it looks poorly executed and he also looks like a snowman with sunglasses and a hat on because of the lack of facial features.

The two above are based on city skylines because of the relationship between the don, new york city and the fact 'new york don' is a line repeated a substantial amount in the song. Again it's hard to relate these two images with the song without type. I feel that design and concept wise they're both pretty poor because they're boring to look at but also difficult to understand if somebody else was to interpret them.

I feel like i've struggled this week to visual represent a title using only images and I think it has been one of my weakest design outcomes all year probably because I had quite a negative mindset due to the restrictions of the brief. If I was to do it again I would probably choose a song more suited to my design and also look at different ways in which I can visually represent a song.