Social Serendipities!

serendipity

ˌsɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪti/

noun

1. The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

   "A fortunate stroke of serendipity".
2. 
   

So last night was a mad one! I ended up going to Nation of Shopkeepers to support a collaboration between Leeds College of Art & Leeds College of Music, they stylishly called it 'LCA x LCM'. The event was excellent, what with a Fine Art exhibition at one end of the bar and live music at the other. As you can imagine the nature of the project gathered the interest of many young creatives across the board so the atmosphere in there was buzzing. It was a really positive thing to be surrounded by so many people that were creatively inclined!

However the real personal success for me last night was of meeting a group of design professionals on Call Lane. I introduced myself and we got talking, and (like I nearly always do in normal everyday life) I ended up talking about Graphic Design. Normally that's not such a big deal because I do it all the time anyway, but you can appreciate I was a little taken aback when I learned that I was talking to the Director and Senior Designers of a massive Ad Agency. It was lovely meeting and talking to like minded individuals, if anything it gave me a projection of what I'd like to be doing in a couple of years.

I always feel comfortable when I can chat sh*t to people about Typography and they know what I'm talking about.

I left Call Lane with a big grin on my face and two new connections! I'm really excited about the potential of this, again I mentioned in a post a couple of days about how the internet is great for talking to people in certain contexts, but the fact is that as humans we relate a lot more to personal interaction. The old methods can still be the best. So anyway I did some research into the agency, and I was later surprised that I'd never heard of them. They're pretty big. To give you an idea, here's a small piece of text from their site: 

"We’re responsible for the marketing communications of many a household name. And we’re not bad at it. We’re on the RAR. We’re DADI award winning, a Google Partner and we’re in this year’s Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100. We’re also 3rd in the Top 50 agencies in the North* and of course, we’re very modest with it."

As impressive as that is, it's that final part that really hits home for me. There's a stigma surrounding the creative industries that gives the impression that the high flyers look down their noses at everybody else, and I'm sure that at times that may be the case. However it's times like these that I try to remind myself that there are creatives that love what they do, and stay modest about it. That really appeals to my design ethics. And I got that impression from those guys last night too, they really were lovely to talk to and engage with.

So. I have two new links on LinkedIn, and hopefully grounds to at least blag a studio tour. We'll see how it goes.

http://www.homeagency.co.uk/

Now if that's not a serendipity, then I don't know what is.

Letterpress Workshop

"I'm obviously a Typomaniac. Which is an incurable, if not fatal disease. I can't explain it. I just love looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it. They are my friends, you know. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls bottoms; I get a kick out of looking at type. It's a little worrisome, I must admit, but it's a very nerdish thing to do."

- Erik Spiekermann

This is one of my favourite quotes of all time. I can actually remember making a typographic poster around 3 years ago of this quote. If I get the chance I'll get that posted up here, perhaps even improve it with the skills I've learned in the time gone since. This quote is even more relevant to me today.

Right now we're being shown the ropes of letter-pressing. It's something I've been aware of and wanted to do for years but never had the chance to do until now. So, we've had a letterpress technician come into the studio today and he's showing us the basics. I was lucky as I got to grab my letters first and getting cracking with it. Again the Spiekermann quote I mentioned is very relevant. 

I absolutely love sitting at a computer and designing type so meticulously that I have complete control over the leading, kerning, tracking etc. and today I had the exact same attitude, yet I was using technology that is around 500 years older than what you're viewing this on.

How is it relevant? Well, seen as though the aim of this brief is to promote my website through printed media (whilst considering themes of augmentation and interaction), and my website being about code, perhaps a logo that was made in a very pure and traditional way would make a nice juxtaposition. Either way, it's experimentation that counts towards my design process. Check out the youtube video I made of my process:

You'll notice I took a while arranging the type, with intent to make it look as good as I could.

 I'm afraid I just couldn't help uploading these to Instagram...

Liam's work is all about seeing faces within other things.

Here's what I made. And I'm pretty pleased with it! I think I was a little bit cheeky by putting a little TM sign on the end, but it definitely contextualises it a lot more considering I was experimenting with a logo. The typeface is Futura Bold, and it's bloody gorgeous. I'm pleased I took the time to play around with the type, as the kerning is BANG on.

Instagram

All right I'll admit it. I've only just got Instagram. And after seeing all the awesome stuff on there, I'm starting to wonder why it's taken me this long to catch on? Perhaps it's because I thought it would be full of selfies taken by 15 year olds...

But that's not the case. In fact, I've not seen one selfie yet! I was completely naive in thinking that I wouldn't be able to choose the material I'd be looking at one there. And it's so relevant too! There are tonnes of design studios on there that I'm now following, so it's essentially another channel for me to access the inspiration I need. I've mentioned before though that's it's not just graphic design that I'm interested in, so it's a place where I can pool a lot of my interests and get visual sources of inspiration. Here's a quick look at my page:

To start off with I posted some photographs I'd taken last year for my context of practice module. They're some of my personal favourites that I've taken myself so I didn't feel uncomfortable about uploading them. You'll notice that it's turing into a general lifestyle feed that focuses around my creative lifestyle and tastes. I'm looking forward to keeping up with Instagram and uploading (well photographed) pieces of work that I'll be making in future!

Skinner & T'witch and Google+

I mentioned in an earlier post that I went to see some music last Thursday, and I talked about how I got talking to the featured act of the night: Skinner & T'witch. I shared the blog post I wrote with them on their Facebook page, and since then they've got back to me expressing their appreciation. They've also shared the YouTube video I made of us lot singing along to their first performance of their 'Googling song'. What I've learned through this whole experience is that:

If you make that effort and go that extra little bit further, then good things will start to happen. There's really no harm in being proactive about your creative lifestyle.

There's a chance I've made a connection in those two, whether it's for graphic design reasons, or even if it's just that I'm now in the loop of their musical circle and stay up to date on their social on-goings.

On another note, I've started to appreciate the untapped potential that there is in Google+, the way I see it at the moment is at a kind of mid-point between Facebook and LinkedIn in terms of it's social stance that's centred around professionalism and has quite a fun edge to it. I'm currently trying to promote myself through it, because like I said, it is a small online community so far compared to Facebook, Twitter etc. yet there are still those how assign themselves to groups, graphic design within Google+ is therefore a very niche area, and if I approach it correctly, I could maximise this potential to make a name for myself. Here's a quick snippet of a blog post I shared on Google+ (see below). Also, really weird, but apparently I've already had 45,000 profile page views? If that's the case then it's even more beneficial for me to be utilising this online stage.

I thought using this image would be a good idea, even though it was taken a couple of years ago, it's still my work and captures that sense of mystery. Plus it's cool as f**k.

Photography Lighting Workshop

On Friday last week, the course was lucky enough to be given a photography introduction. A technician came up to our studio and showed us the ins and outs of taking professional standard photographs with the equipment they've got. This is something I value as much as any other part of the design process.

You should never underestimate the power of good photography when it comes to presenting your work.

I'm really lucky actually, before I came to Leeds College of Art I studied Art & Design for three years at Carlisle College of the Arts. The photography facilities there were second to none, and I'm extremely grateful for that, as I was shown how to operate flash guns, continuous light, high end DSLR's, infinity boards & backdrops etc. from the age of 16. Since then I've tried to make it an inherent part of my design processes.

Here's a quick look at some of the photography experimentation I used to get up to:

(Remember these were between two and four years ago, so don't judge too much...)

This is a bit of trickery I did with montaging and editing to give the impression I could float. I promise no wires were involved, which is more than what Dynamo could say...

I 100% convinced loads of my mates I had a twin brother with this one...

Again, on Friday we were told about the advantages of using high end flash guns to produce high quality photographs that could be captured with an extremely high shutter speed (perfect for modelling) where a moving subject is often used. This is a great example of this advantage.

You'll notice that digital photo-montaging was something I was heavily into at one point. Here's my best mate Joe (not looking too happy) modelling for me to show how with the right equipment, you can successfully replicate subjects within a scene.

As you can see I got up to quite a lot with the camera, and I'm fairly clued up on how to use one. However, Friday was brilliant for refreshing everything I'd previously learned, and because of my previous experience I was able to show others how to set up. I really enjoyed the day, there was a brilliant buzz in the studio where everybody was contributing towards something. But the most important thing I learned that day was that I've stopped doing as much photography as I'd like to, and right now it should be a super important part of my process. I'll reiterate on what I said earlier: 

It's great making the best piece of design you can that stretches the limits of your creativity, but if it's presented as though it's been photographed with a f***king potato then really what's the point?

So building on that, the point being that I'd like to be photographing my work more often and to a more professional standard, what am I going to do about it? Well I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I'm considering setting up an infinity board in our house somewhere so I'd have access to some kind of photography opportunities. However I'm starting to think this may be unnecessary what with the equipment from college being able to hire out whenever I want. So, I was talking to our student reps and mentioned that it could be massively beneficial if as a course we all borrowed the equipment together and set up our design studio as a make shift photography studio on a regular basis, I initially said perhaps every month, but on reflection I think it would be better if we all agreed to hire the equipment a few days leading up to every brief hand in.

Good stuff. That's that. I actually experimented a little bit by making a couple of time lapses and videos of us guys in the studio on Friday, here's the YouTube video that shows us setting up in the studio: