Design Manchester '13

On the 31st October quite a few of us went to design Manchester where a number of designers gave brief lectures on the topic of longevity.

Some of the highlights from the event:

Greyworld 

This was from the first talk by Andrew Shoben from Greyworld. Greyworld make huge installation art that is interacted by and interacts with the public. I think that this is so much better than the majority of art that is published. He said that greyworld name their work after what it physically is rather than giving it a pretentious name (e.g Damien Hirst) which alienates and is disconnected with the general public.

The Source (Channel Four footage) from greyworld on Vimeo.


Kate Morross

The take home point from Kate's talk was that the future of design is multi-disciplinary, and that there will be less demand for designers that specialise in one area of design and more demand for designers that are well versed in a range of disciplines and excel in some areas.

Mark Farrow

Mark Farrow had an interview with Design Week which mainly consistent of talking through various pieces of work through history. Some of the work that caught my attention:

Medically inspired cd packaging for Spiritualized

A running theme throughout his work is simplicity and standing out from what exists already.

Mail Shot Response

Robot Food

After sending out the lone mail shot to Robot Food they rang me a few days later when it had arrived to invite me to the studio. After going down for an informal interview and a bit of a talk through some portfolio work we organised for me to go there for a week over assessment week. Having the experience at Big Fish helped me out as they mentioned that they think Big Fish do well at fulfilling what the client needs. Robot Food again, are very focussed on packaging which is my area of focus this year. I look forward to spending some time there and getting involved with some live packaging briefs.

Mail Shot : Robot Food

Having identified a design studio called Robot Food -who are based in Leeds- and who I think share a similar design approach to myself and do a lot of work in packaging which is an area I am growing more interested in, I have refined and made a mail shot that I started last year to send to them.

Business card insert

The page on the right is perforated and rips out to act as a landing pad 

When the landing pad is removed it reveals the CV

Personal branding: Web

Working from some very rough scamps I began to quickly throw together some potential layouts for the website

After not being happy with these quick throw togethers I quickly sketched this thumbnail of a centrally aligned page that I wanted to try out

I am much happier with the way this looks, and the larger amount of white space gives the page a bit of space to breath.

This is the basic grid for every page of the website

Each page of the website works by the user scrolling down, the navigation bar at the top stays fixed throughout

The place where the images scroll under has a subtle grey gradient on it to add a bit of depth to the page.

The site will feature an interests page, to get across a bit of who I am and what I am interested in, this will be updated regularly

This page will use lightbox to display information about each specific interests.

FInished Mock Ups

Info Pack

This is my info pack that will be sent to potential studios. As the people that will be receiving this pack will get an awful lot of similar things I decided to start the pack with an interactive game that involves the user ripping out the perforated page and placing it on the floor and then trying to land the business card on the zone. The pack then goes on to deliver CV information and samples of work.

As there has been some confusion about howe to fire the cards I did some diagrammatic illustrations to explain the procedure:

This is where the business card will sit, either it will be held by these tabs or a small sticky tab to avoid damaging the aesthetics of the reverse side of the page.

The samples of work give a taster of some of my successful projects and then the user is directed to my website which will feature the projects in greater depth.

Other products that could accompany this pack are, pop-up fingers, shuttle finger puppets, posters, cd etc.

Networking

I have been emailing studios over the Easter holidays, I began with the studios that I identified in a previous PPP task as places that I would like to go to/ have a certain affinity with (http://c-shuttleworth1114-ppp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/6-tasks.html)

I have managed to sort out a 2 week placement in June with Big Fish who do a lot of work with packaging which is something that I am very interested in (http://www.bigfish.co.uk/)

I am also in contact with somebody at The Chase where I am trying to sort out a placement in the Manchester or Preston offices. Some other agencies that I am considering contacting for over the summer are:

http://wash-design.co.uk/?site=wash

Who are a small design agency in Preston that have done some interesting work

http://www.robot-food.com/

 Who seem to be relatively small but work with big clients


http://www.fatmedia.co.uk/

This is a web design company which is very daunting as my web skills are quite poor at the moment but I may contact them to see if they could use someone with my skill set  and hopefully I'd be able to take a lot from it.

Self Branding

Over the past few weeks I have been working on creating an identity for myself as a designer, I wanted something that would stand out against the majority of modernist and 'robotic' kind of branding, such as:

etc.

I have decided to stick with the name of 'Shuttlefingers' as this is memorable and would get more search results that Chris Shuttleworth, who sounds like a bit of a bore anyway.

I wanted a simple but bold logo that could be used for a variety of applications, after a few attempts this is the basic idea that I decided to stick with:

To make my business cards unique I wanted them to fly through the air, which would suit the 'shuttle' theme. I initially wanted the finger to be perforated so that it could be popped out and fired somewhere and the user would be left with details on the rest of the card, however I didn't have the means to produce this in a professional way so I decided to look into firing the whole card.

The plan was to hole punch the card and feed an elastic band through it so the user could fire it.

This is the finished design of my business cards, before ordering them I tested firing some business cards with the free pack that Moo send out, I was initially going to order rounded corner business cards but when I tried firing them they just span around and hit the floor, the only option that had enough rigidity to make the cards control themselves in the air was the 600gsm Luxe cards that flew through the air like majestic eagles. I also discovered that making two small cuts in the sides of the cards rather than a hole in the centre made the card fly straighter and easier to control.

These are the printed cards & giant pop up finger:

Shuttlefingers HQ