Hello All,

Long time no speak, I have no idea who still follows me on this blog, which is one that I used while at uni so has a lot of my design progress and mistakes too! 

I have been wanting to start back on my blog for a while now, since leaving uni I have missed seeing updates on the old uni chums work so I thought I’d let you all know what I’ve been up to! 

Since leaving uni I started a placement at the wonderful Eskimo and spent two lovely months there, one thing in particular amongst other things I learnt was coming out of uni thinking you know it all does not remain true and that for sure is one hell of a grounding, I found out about things I hadn’t even considered and had huge eye opener into the world of real design, Eskimo looked after me and taught me tons which I thank them for! They do some great work and work hard to say the least! 

However I left Manchester and needed some time to get my head together and have a rest, three years of uni and a gruelling few months in the last year had took it’s toll! 

To cut a long story short I went across the M6 into Stockton Heath ( near Warrington ) to speak to Diagram Design and I’ve been there since September! Diagram are a great team to work, I love it there! It has made me progress in so many ways, they do work for a few companies and it’s all very fast paced which has made me adjust and get into the rythmn of it all! 

I’ve started to push myself further and further into doing more illustrative work, in terms of vectors and hand drawn type, and I’m seeing work that I would never have been able to do, my skills are definately improving! 

Anyway here is some of the work I’ve done while at Diagram, and I will try to keep you all posted on what’s going on!

Thanks

Mel :)

Since leaving Uni I’ve found that I need to kick it up a gear now, my portfolio is full of projects from my course but not much of anything self initiated. I have wrote down a few things I really want to work on and really push and one of them if experimental work, I have a bad habit of jumping straight onto the computer and even though I don’t do it enough I really enjoy just testing elements out and finding different outcomes. 

For instance my Kid British logo I spent a whole night cutting up type and arranging it till I had a form that I was happy with. It was really refreshing and I enjoyed mixing it up and taking risks with stupid ideas which probably lent themselves to great ideas.

I have been collating mood boards on pinterest of work I admire and take inspiration from, and at the moment ( whether it is on trend or not ) I really like the nordic design style.  So yesterday I decided to pick a section from Paul Arden’s, It’s not how good you are but how good you want to be, and printed the type out and had a play with the scanner. I experimented with folding and tearing up, with the hope of getting a jagged mixed up look. I also tested with getting waves in the scan, but the light flooded the scan too much. 

I wanted to work on my colour palettes as I feel they’re too safe, and tried to escape from my comfort zone, and the two sets uploaded are my favorite of the lot. These are colours i definitely wouldn’t have picked, however they are really interesting I particularly like the indigo blue on the first one.

Over the coming days I plan on working on lots more experimental work seeing what I come out with alongside layout design, which is a big one. These designs need refining more too

Some of my boards from the hand in on Friday. Overall I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I really enjoyed spending two days last week photographing my work & I think it paid off. It was nice to explore photography in terms of putting my designs into context. I wanted to add a slight design to the boards which would run with the overall branding too.

I have struggled with this final project, mainly due to the fact that I wanted it to be my killer piece in my portfolio. I didn’t want to rely too much on my Giant brief, which is what seems to happen when I’m going in for portfolio surgeries. I went through about four or five different routes when actually choosing a brief to do which hindered me because I didn’t want to waste the time I had, orginally I wanted to do two briefs in this space. When finally settling on a brief the name of the bar was keeping me from moving further. In hindsight I should have asked someone to make me a brief but hey ho.

I am really quite happy with my outcomes ( apart from my invitations) because I feel like I showed how to apply a brand across a wide medium. Having a good concept makes it very easy to spread the brand across. I explored web, & print in this process & got to work highly with typography which I enjoy.