OUGD405 Design Process- How to tell a lie convincingly

Based on our research crit last week our brief was to come together to and tell a lie convincingly. As a starting point we came together and shared our ideas;

From this we narrowed it down to a couple of ideas that would provide sufficient research and design opportunities but also the ones we thought would be the most successful lie to tell. After discussing what idea would be best we decided upon the fake competition because because it would be the most convincing but also we could target the whole college who would be less suspicious compared to our peer group.

We then brainstormed fake competition ideas that could deceive people around uni, a couple of ideas until we came up with the idea to enter a photograph of yourself either to win a camera or the adobe master suite. It was just a matter of refining our ideas so we could make a start. The finalised idea is to create a fake competition where entrants submit a weird/funny photo of themselves for the chance to win a lomography camera.

This is the design sheet I created for the set of promotional posters. Everyone in the group did their own design ideas and then we came together as a group to discuss suitable ideas, see which ones work and which ones can be discarded straight away. We also looked for any common ideas that we may have had which we could pursue further.

This is a design James created as a visual representation of face off to go on both posters and flyers.

I put my newly found illustrator skills to use to design the lomography camera for bother the posters and the flyers. I'm so pleased with overall design, it's basically a spitting image of the camera and has been done to a high standard which I believe makes it more convincing and should hopefully deceive more people.

Below are some layout we did together on indesign, Beth and James did most of the technical work because they had the required skill set to use indesign, our job was to give feedback on layout and colours.

Below are the printed leaflets and posters we made to be distributed around uni, the designs aren't too extravagant because we needed to design everything within a day in order to distribute, promote the competition and receive entries by the end of the week. 

These are just some images of the leaflets and posters around uni, we placed them on all the information boards and on the tables in the mosaic bar.

This was our first entry but we did ask him to enter unfortunately but we needed to get the ball rolling to make the competition look convincing.

To promote the fake competition more we got Joe our course rep to post it on the graphic design facebook page.

Below is just a self evaluation formed we filled in as individuals about working in a group etc...

OUGD405 Design Process- PUNK Primary research

I conducted a quick qualitative survey to find out peoples knowledge on punk, by asking the question "Name the first 3 things that pop into your head when you hear the word 'punk'" it will hopefully give me icons from that period because they're the first thing that people remember and say;

Name the first 3 things that pop into your head when you hear the word 'punk'

1. Safety pins, bondage and Sex Pistols
2. 1977, Sex Pistols and The Clash
3. Mohicans, leather jackets and Clint Eastwood
4. Music, tartan and Dr Martens
5. Never mind the bollocks, God save the Queen and mohicans
6. Mohicans, politics and DIY clothes
7. Tartan, mohicans and Sex Pistols
8. Stiff little fingers, DIY music and S+M
9. DIY, Dad and mohicans
10. Tartan, Mohicans and Vivienne Westwood
11. Mohicans, Tartan and bright coloured hair
12. Studs, Vivienne Westwood and Dr Martens
13. Leather, Sid Vicious and Mohican

I've tallied the results to make them easier to digest;

• Safety pins-1
• Bondage-2
• Sex Pistols-3
• 1977-1
• The Clash-1
• Mohicans-8
• Leather-2
• Clint Eastwood-1
• Music-1
• Tartan-4
• Dr Martens-2
• Never mind the bollocks-1
• God save the Queen-1
• Politics-1
• DIY-3
• Stiff little fingers-1
• Dad-1
• Vivienne Westwood-2
• Hair colour-1
• Sid Vicious-1
• Studs-1

Some of the results are very similar and could be merged into groups E.G. Never mind the bollocks and God save the Queen only got one result each but fall under the category of music. I'm going to keep the original tally but also going to create a new one that puts all the similar results into a group. I organised my findings into these specific groups because I feel they were and are the most important icons of the punk period.

• Clothes-12
• Hair-9
• DIY-3
• Music-8
• Politics-1
• People-3
• Other-3

Conducting this survey gave me an insight of peoples understandings of punk and it's icons but I wanted somebodies first hand accounts to get a greater grasp on the subject, therefore the next step was to interview an ex-punk.

Q. When did you first consider yourself to be a punk?

A. It was 1977 because I had been working away and had just returned around the same time punk had reached Lancashire.

Q. Why did you choose to be a punk?

A. It wasn't the way they dressed it was the alternative music. I'm interested in the lyrics of a song and the meaning behind them, at the time there were 4 music choices; Prog Rock, Disco, Punk or Pop. Punk songs had real meaning behind them.

Q. So what was your first real punk experience?

A. It was a gig, I saw a band called The Attics at Lodestar in Ribchester.

Q. Were you into the whole punk fashion?

A. No I didn't dress like a punk at all even though I was a manager at a punk clothing store. The reason I didn't dress like a punk because I didn't want to alienate myself from other people.

Q. Did the politics and social issues at the time affect/influence you?

A. They only really affected me through the lyrics in the music I listened to as opposed to things happening on the news and in the real world.

Q. Were you part of any group or gang?

A. No at the time I worked and lived in Devon and there wasn't a big punk scene where I lived. I was influenced solely by the music and not peer groups.

Q. Finally can you recall any 'icons' of that era?

A. Joe Strummer, Sid Vicious, Malcolm Mclaren, Vivienne Westwood and Johnnie Rotten.

OUGD405 Design Process- Deception Workboard

Below are the design boards I put together in response to my research on deception, I created a quick survey and asked around the class a couple of questions and below are the results to the questionnaire.

OUGD405 Design Process- Typogateux

I joined a group with Ellen and Laura after they had already grouped together their ideas. After they had briefed me the ideas and told me about their favourites we had a discussion and created a shortlist of; leaning tower of type, helveticake and helveti-spaghetti.  After going back and forth between ideas, helveti-spaghetti was decided upon. For the cake we used the hairy bikers basic sponge cake;

Helveti-spaghetti consisted of creating a bowl out of sponge cake, filling it with red icing and white iced Helvetica letters. First of all we made the cake mixture and cooked it in a round cylindrical cake tin to make it easier to carve into a bowl.

The helveti-cake failed because we needed to create a deep cake to be carved into a bowl, however it was too deep to be cooked throughout meaning the top was burnt but the inside was still gooey. After 2 attempts at burning the cake we decided to give up on that idea and go for our back up cake which was the Helveticake. 

The Helveticake simply consisted of creating a black or grey cake and cutting out 'Helveticake' in helvetica pt 250. Using the same cake mixture we added black food colouring to try and create a black cake but this was harder than we thought. the best we were able to create was the dark grey cake shown below. the cake mixture didn't provide us with a thick enough cake so we baked 2 and sandwiched jam in between the two. The process to create the Helveticake are shown below;

Trimming the cake

We experimented with wrapping the letters of the cake in grey icing to give them a smoother outer texture.

However from the image below it was a lot harder than originally thought to get the desired look and finish, therefore we decided to leave the cake in its raw and naked form. I love how each layer is revealed by looking at it side on and also the texture created by peeling off the top upper crust. It has a porous texture to it and accompanied with the dark grey colouring it resembles something similar to volcanic rock.

This is the final cake and how we presented it, luckily the pink and white sheets that were already laid out contrasts our cake and adds to what is a quite simple cake compared to some of the competitors in the class. The edge wasn't as clean cut as i would have like meaning the cake looked a bit rough and there was a few crumbs scattered about, but overall as a grouped we were extremely happy with the outcome after all the stress of the failed cakes before it. 

OUGD405 Design Process- photoshop workshop

Scripts

To upload multiple images into one document open images via scripts and load files from stack...

Browse for images, for this we are using the Chicago Bean

Smart object is displayed in photoshop but is editable outside of photoshop. If we save all images as smart object it will collapse all the images onto one layer as opposed to multiple layers. To edit a smart object just double click and it opens all layers.

By going to layers, smart object, stack mode and selecting median it removes all people from the foreground.

 Before

After

However the sky is really blurry, to rectify this go to file, place and select an image with a sky you prefer.

But the people return to the meaning we need to delete sections of the photo but it's a smart object. To rasterise the layer, right click on the layer and rasterise layer. This allows to select sections.

Use the quick selection tool to select only the sky, select inverse and delete, this leaves us with only the sky on that layer.

File formats 

Lossless- For print based images (PSD when working on it, TIFF when finished)
Lossy-  Compress images to load quicker for screen based images (JPEG)
PDF portable document format 

OUGD405 Design Process- Photoshop workshop

Proofing a photo

To make turn an image into CMYK (print) you could use 2 methods; image, mode, CMYK colour. However this is destructive which means once saved and reopened there's no way to get the original image back. This could cause problems if working for a publication that wanted an image for print but then realise it would also look good on their website.

To get around this we use proof colours, this enables us to view the colours it'll print out. We can tell from using this the photo will print out considerably duller.  

To find out what colours will print out well we can use the gamut warning. Gamut = colour range; therefore if it's out of gamut, the colour is out of range. 
Below we have used gamut warning and from this we can tell that the photo is vastly out of the CMYK colour range because of the grey parts.

If we change the hue (the colour of the light) to red the grey parts vanish, meaning the photo is now in gamut range and is a much clearer image. 

We always have to proof to show as well.

Making sections of an image clearer

To make certain sections of an image clearer we can make the photo lighter by using levels. By altering the white levels we can make the image a lot lighter to reveal the mosaics on the ceiling.

However the glass on the roof has become far to light and we have lost all detail, by masking the sections of glass we can affect what sections of the photo are affected by the change in levels. To mask sections off we simply block different parts of the glass on the levels layer with the black paintbrush tool. 

By masking the glass sections we end up with the original glass coming from the original layer.

There is another way to lighten specific parts of a photo (mask). By using the quick selection tool we can select only the statue because it is so dark in contrast to the sky.

Once the image is selected we can then change the levels in a non-destructive way same as the previous technique.

However changing the levels has also changed the levels of the clouds in the tiny gaps in the statue that show clouds. To fix this simply magic wand the white bits, edit, fill, and fill them black which simply masks them off.

We can also alter the clouds by selecting the clouds using the quick selection tool, selecting hue/saturation and playing around with colour.

Creating panoramic images

Go to file, automate and photo merge. It should then bring up a window similar to the one below, from here upload the set of images you wish to align and merge.

Something similar to the image below should be created and all that is left to do is to crop the image to a rectangular shape to neaten the edges.