Final Ideas

This afternoon we pitched our ideas to a room full of important people including David Crow, Phoebe Bois Rachel the Marketing officer and some heads of departments amongst others. It was only a 5 minute presentation but seemed to successfully and was good practice. They were positive about our idea, David Crow said it was very self explanatory which we took as a compliment. The concepts of each group were very similar, although we all came up with different visual solutions, so now all we have to do is wait for a verdict!

Our idea is based on a different symbol and colour for each of the 22 courses exhibiting. We took these symbols from brail and the actually spell out the initials of each course, but this was purely a visual experimentation and not really part of the concept. We've taken this beginning and made it more abstract to fit to our purposes. The final image of the poster is made up of these symbols, but is seemingly random.

Another reason we used this idea was that it translates nicely into decorating the university as well. Using vynal stickers to mark out each show and also lead people through the corridors. As many of our corridors are dark and scruffy, we felt this would really brighten up the place and create a much more accessible and enjoyable experience for the visitor.
The design could also be adapted across the website and any other digital portals that the university set up. We came up with the idea of stickers that could be given out at the degree show because visually it fits with the poster, and also gives the opportunity for an interactive element. As you peeled away the stickers, the sheet will resemble more and more the poster image, creating a new piece of art work. The stickers could be used for a number of things such as rating the shows, marking where you've been or simply adding to a bigger piece of art work.

Hopefully there will be an opportunity to come out of this for working towards the final design of the show, but if not we've enjoyed the week and have another successful project for our portfolios. This project has been a nice sideline from the other 3 i'm working on at the moment and I feel we have produced a lot of work for a week, and if nothing else, I have a finished and ready project for the reviews next week!

Degree show Brief

Early last week Alison and myself decided to take a quick shot on the degree show brief: To come up with a concept/visual idea that represented the breadth of creativity and diversity within the art school. As I haven't really kept a sketchbook in the last week, I thought I would post some of our research and inspiration on here.

We looked at a lot of visual identity's and signage, including David Crow's book and a few others.

Lots of crazy brainstorms later we came up with a few directions, stickers/badges/prisms/brail/colour/symbols. It was important for us to come up with an integrated design that could adapt across different media, especially into the mapping and navigation of the exhibition, which we felt has often been a let down in the past. We were also keen to get some interactive element to the show, similar to the Spiro-graph installation of a few years ago which stuck in our heads as very successful.