End of year Show Proposal

Above is my initial propsal for my display at the end of year show. I wanted to display my two most recent tyopefaces, laser cut out of asetate. They would have spot lights above them. I felt this reflected my interests both in processes and production techniques as well as typography. However Fred and Lorenxo, in the tutorial, said that this was too light and I needed to do more with my exhibition. Suggesting that, instead of producing 2 A1 posters I produce 9 A2 posters, utilising all of the typefaces I have made this year.





















My Second Proposal looked like this, it uses 5 of the typefaces I have made over this year. I also utilise more production techniques, including laser cuts, digital printing and screen printing. I feel this is a more complete representation of my interests and more engaging.

At the moment I feels a bit scattered and I probably need to make it a more cohesive. I will probably use more consistant colours and materials to achieve this.

Mind Placement

I Email Holger Jacobs at Mind a pdf of my new portfolio regarding his metion of doing a work placement. Apparently they don't have any interns at the moment because the projects they have on aren't very interesting. However he said that if I stay in touch they may have more interesting work on by the time I graduate. So fingers crossed I'll be able to do some work with the later in the year. Below is his response.

Hi Angus,

sorry for the late reply. I am actually on holiday at the moment. We don't really have any interesting work at all at the moment. All the potential projects we were hoping to get recently have fallen through. So at the moment is really not a good time for any intern I am afraid. But that might change again by the time you are finished with your degree show and everything. So I put a note to contact you again. And remind me closer to the time when you are finished. At the moment we don't have any intern at all as I hate letting intern work on projects that are totally boring and do nothing for them or their portfolio.

All Best, Holger

Print Portfolio

I got my portfolio printed out last week. I think it looks nice and I'll have something I'm proud of to show designers thta I visit or come into the college.

Revised Portfolio

After talking to Chris from Elmwood and also shooting some product shots of my most recently complteted work in the photo studio I made some more alteration to my PDF portfolio. Mainly it was a case of taking out the fat and making sure that everything in it I was 100 percent happy with. Chris said that you need to be able to be totally confident in talking about every project. I also moved the YTD project to the front as Chris said this was my strongest project.


Portfolio April 2010 Web

New Portfolio

Well I have been gradually putting together a new portfolio over the last week or so. This is where I am up to. I showed it to Chris from Elmwood and overall he was very positive, he suggested a few changes which I am going to act upon.

Portfolio April 2010

Team Impression: Day 5 and Evaluation

Well day 5 was kind of slow I was in the finishing unit again. In the morning we foiled a whole lot of really high spec invites that had been designed by SEA. Their front and back was printed on sepertate sheets of paper which were then duplexed. I say printed there wasn't actually any printing involve, all the text was in silver foil and there was a big number 10 debossed at the top of them. Seeing them produced was particulay interesting becasue I had pretty much followed the job through the whole system, from the art work being setup in reprographics to them being stuck together and cropped in the finish room.

Again I got a real sense of the skill involved in doing a good foiling job. Richy the guy who was showing me how the machines worked clearly took a lot of pride in what he did. After the SEA invite we worked on some business cards for Front Ideas Company. The first batch had been sent back because they had bee cropped wrong so they all had to be re done, probably a couple of thousand cards whch was obviously very frustrating for Richy.

EVALUATION

I really enjoyed my time at Team and it totally changed how I think about the production and printing process. I kind of though before I went that you just sent a file to a printers they sent it to the press and your finished product came out the other end. Obviously there is a hell of a lot more to it than this. I though this would be more automated but actually a lot of it is still done by hand and requires a lot of skill.

Maybe the biggest think I will take away from the experience is that printers definately aren't designers and as such don't really have a huge appreciation for design. Before I went I had this vision that I would be on the factory floor with all these talented printers that had a deep seated paasion for typography, paper stocks, finishing prcesses and good design now I see this was pretty naive. They are printers rather than designers and while they take a pride in what they do and go to great lengths to get it perfect, they aren't interested in the design itself.

Overall I am really glad I went to Team and I got a lot from it. But I know I definately don't want to go into printing, design is a lot more fun.

Team impression: Day 4

I spent most of today in finishing. First I was on the guillotine, this isn't anything like the guillotines in college its huge and can cut through a few hundred sheets of paper at a time. It's impressive how powerful and accurate it is, the precision of the cut looks really good. It seemed like it would be quite a tedious job to spend all day on it however.

Next I was put onto the folding machine, or I should say machines as its a whole set of different modules which can be put together in different was depending on what is being folded. We were working on a 16 page section of a book, which required 3 folds, they can do a few thousand in an hour and obviously the quality is really high. Very clever kit and it was really interesting to see how it worked. I also got to see how the laminator worked, its really just a very fast version of the laminator in college.

Then I got taken to unit 11 which is the, where they do die-cutting, foiling, embossing, and making up boxes and covers etc. which is know as paper on board. I got a real sense of the craft in this section particulaly with the foiling, it is definately a skill that takes a lot of practice and the people there take a lot of pride in their work.

The foiling, embossing and die-cutting machines are all old modified heildelberg letterpress machine. They work in a very similar way except the plates they use are heated and just push foil onto the paper. This is the room where a lot of the really high end beautiful print finishes happen, I'm going to be back there tomorrow.