you me and an xray machine

If you aint got anything to blog about....

2009-06-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

Then don't blog at all...

These are the words that have been pumping through my head every time i graced onto my pitiful blog page. Now, now its once again been a while since i last blogged on here, but i thought it was due time for another Craig spurt.

So my 2nd year at University has officially ended and i am now currently far away, safe and sound, locked in my bed room at home in Crewe. And how do i feel??

Well.... Looking back on my 2nd year at uni it was a very pick n mix bag of emotions on my behalf. At the start of the year i was flying high, eager feeling fresh and ready for my course to begin. I was excited to what projects we would be given this year, as i have to say 1st years projects were a load of horse shit. But yeah i have to say the projects this year were a 100 times better but also a whole different league of difficulty. Overall i feel i worked very hard through out the entire year. Granted i could of put a whole lot more effort in, but hey that's something to work towards for next year right?? Anyway, i am happy to say i got through it all with out too much crying and bitching on my behalf....... Well.. Maybe a little haha.
But seriously though, after looking back on some of the work i have produced this year, i am very proud of what i have achieved.

As for this summer! I have BIG BIG plans and i am very very very very very very excited about what i am currently working on.
I wont speak to much about it just yet, as i want to save it for a time when i have something a bit more "tangible" to show/talk about.
So fret not, i will share with you all in due time. (Most of you reading this probably already know what i am on about anyway)

As for now... This "project" i am currently working on is what i need right now, more then anything!

Until we next speak blogger...................... SEEYA!!

Oh

P.S

If you haven't already purchased this record, then where have you been??!! Seriously this record is FANTASTIC, a truly great soundtrack to your summer.

Buy it! Download it, Stream it.... Whatever! Just enjoy it! I promise you wont be disappointed :)

XXX

Night Of The Pencils

2009-04-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

Well after a very long night and what has been a very (dare i say it) "emotional" past few weeks on my behalf, i have finally completed my last project of the year clocking in around 4:30 AM this morning.... And do i feel better?? Not particularly, staying awake all night trying to force myself to design never puts a smile on my face. Right now i am a mixture of nauseous pains combined with a slight light headed and dizzy sensation, all in all makes a tasty cocktail of only what i could describe as "FUCKED OFF!". Annnnnnnyway.. Here is a bit of a preview of how my art direction turned out:

All i have left to do is print, mount and then wait for my crit tomorrow.
I am really not that optimistic as i have no backup work whats so ever.... But only time will tell.

I best pull my finger out

Here...

have a video of some dancing French men....

FUCK DA POLICE!!

xxx

OLD DIRTY BASTARD

2009-04-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

Well well well.... Its been a very long time since i have updated this what has become a very dead blog. Mainly due to myself frankly not giving a toss anymore, but also i have a few hardware problems and unable to log into the blogger dashboard... Anywho
Recently i have been finding myself very frustrated and generally uninspired/motivated to do any uni work. I hate to admit it and i don't really know what has happened to me over the past month or so, but i am constantly finding myself hating graphic design more and more as the days pass by. Maybe its the fact i feel like i put so so so much effort into my work and i dont get rewarded? After all, that is the sheer basis of design ethics isn't it? To feel a sense of achievement from what we design, otherwise what is the point?

I know what your thinking, this is just making me sound pretentious and arrogant, and you would be correct to think so. But i feel this is what the course is turning me into, i am becoming something i despise. I am becoming an awful person who must thrive on my ego being fed otherwise i will not be satisfied.

This is not what i want to be :(

I just hate the fact that i am feeling this way right now. I really want to turn this around, and i know i can.... But honestly.... I just need a long break from the "wonderful world" of graphic design.

MOVING ON...

More onto the point of why i decided to post this little blog.
Those of you who know me, probably know how much of a love and passion i have for making music (i admit i am not that great at doing it, but i still love to do so). And how excited i can get when i get a new piece of musical hardware.... I am just a nerd when it comes to these things.

Recently i purchased a swankey new digital effects pedal for my bass guitar. As you may or may not know, there isn't that many digital effects out there that are designed purely around the bass as it is pretty much a solid sounding instrument that shouldn't really be tampered with. But they make effects for pretty much EVERYTHING these days, and the bass guitar is no exception in this case.

Behold my new BOSS ODB-3 Digital Bass Distortion Effects pedal:

I managed to snap this baby up 2nd hand (as you can tell) for only £25! Which i feel is a HUGE bargin, as these pedals retail at around £75 a pop brand new. Some of you may disagree with me on this one, but personally i love the fact that it's scuffed, scratched and battered to hell, it gives it a sense of character....... Just look at how beautiful it looks!
I seriously can not wait to get back home and have a play around with it and see what crazy ass, dirty sounds i can make. If any of you are curious to what it sounds like click here and you will see an awful metal demonstration of what kind of overdrive tones you can get out of the ODB-3. For me though, i want to try and get a really nice "dry" bass tone out of it, similar to tone of bass guitar used in such bands as Tokyo Police Club etc.

Event Promotion

2008-12-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

I know its once again taken me a while to update this awful blog but i have had a number of problems with my browser constantly crashing when i attempt to log into my blog.
Any who enough of the boring shizzle, below is my latest completed university project. For this brief we were asked to choose from a list of events that have some what of a "geeky" image to them and design an event poster and associated marketing material to go with it all. I decided to choose The Knitting and Stitching Show event as it may sound lame , it was something that actually interested me (i used to love knitting back in the day).

As this is a very hand crafted event, with mainly very basic tools being used to knit and stitch i began to look into the aspect of handmade designs, as i thought this would be very appropriate for a crafts skill event.

After flicking through many ideas i decided to use a very traditional hand made print method for my poster by using a lino cut. I spent two extremely long days cutting and printing my lino block (i only cut myself once while doing it) i ended up with a very interesting results that had a professional look but also had a hand made quality about it. I then took my prints and brought them all into the computer and added hand made text to tie everything together. The end result can be seen below:

I decided to play on the idea of my poster having some sort of fantasy theme to it, almost dream like with a notion that if you attended this event you could create and make your dreams come true(cheesy i know). I also wanted my poster to be very eye catching to viewer, so i used very dramatic angles and shapes to create this effect. The bird was added to enhance the dream theme and also play on the idea that birds are very good at construction of nests, very much the same as weaving and stitching.

Somebodys Going To Miss Us

2008-11-21T12:30:00.000-08:00

This doesn't really have anything to do with design at all, but its something that plagues me everyday while I'm here at university.
Lets face it, we all have our bad days, but just recently i have been constantly finding myself upset and a bit lost and really rather frustrated with everyone and everything around me (apart from my wonderful friends, who i might add mean the world to me).
And its all because i left one of the biggest (and to me most important) pieces of my life behind when i set sail for the university. I know this sounds rather homosexual but my band was one of the things i actually loved to pieces, and when i use the term "loved" i actually really truly mean loved with every inch of my ever pumping heart! I wish that there was someway i could explain it, but i honestly cant pluck the words out of my mind, it's just something that feels so right when i do it.
I always looked back thinking i diddnt really achieve much with my band, But when i actually scratched beyond the surface we in fact achieved so so so much in such a short space of time. And with that came attached hundreds and hundreds of wonderful memories that i could honestly talk about for years to come and bore the crap out of everyone.

I know most of you reading this wont understand or even particularly care what i have to say, but creating music is something i loved to do, and i was so lucky to be able to do it with the most wonderful people you could think of. And not a day go's by while I'm here when i don't constantly beat myself up inside for ruining everything for my fellow band members and heading up here to Carlisle.

The excitement of waiting for everyone to turn up to band practice, the sense of butterfly's in my stomach when Rob strung a certain chord, the sound of my bass coming out of my amp when thrashing the crap out of it, that feeling of passion when everything all gelled together perfectly when the drums kicked in.....i cant even comprehend how much i miss these feelings and how much it truly meant to me. And the worse thing was we diddnt really ever sound that good, but i diddnt care, all that mattered to me was I am finally doing something i am proud of!

"what this is to me
is more than words could mean
i guess dreams do come true
this song itself is living proof"

The Starting Line - Given The Chance

Corporate Logo Design

2008-11-14T08:41:00.001-08:00

Here are the designs for my latest university project. We were each given a celebrity and a company, we then had to discover the values of our selected celebrity and then apply them to our select company and create a Corporate identity and a set of Stationary to go along with it. My chosen celebrity was Alaskan Governor Sara Palin and the company i had to apply her values were an Alternative Energy company.
After studying Sara for some time and seeing that she has so many values worth exploiting, i decided to play on the idea of Sara Palin having a dark side. So with this in mind i decided to make my company an alternative "nuclear" power company that has a caring motherly logo but also has a very industrial dark driven aspect to it all (hens the choice of color i went for). Anywho here are my designs, i hope you enjoy them:

Business Card Front

Business Card Rear

Compliments slip

Letter Head

I was rather pleased with the outcome of this project and i put a hell of a lot of effort into my corporate guidelines that can been seen below. These next few pages basically explain what you can and cant do with my corporate identity.

My lecturers who were grading this diddnt seem that enthusiastic about my deigns, but they were please with how much passion and effort i had put into it. And In the end the feedback they gave me will really help me in the future. Because that's wonderful thing about learning, you never, ever will stop.

Even though i found this brief to be rather challenging, i am still extremely pleased with the work i produced, and in doing so i have learned a great deal.

P.S

Il be updating this blog much more from now on :) ............Promise

Something Left to Give

2008-11-06T14:23:00.001-08:00

As soon as i get a chance, i will update this i promise!! I know i have been doing the exact opposite of what i said i was not going to do with this blog.

Anywho i have some News coming very soon!!

Also make sure you check out my friends blog links, they are all wonderful :)

P. S

Balls to logo design!

Sounds Like An Almost Bang'n Tour!

2008-10-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here is the tour flyer i created for my old band Soundslikelazerfire! for the "Sounds Like An Almost Bang'n Tour" that we take part of every summer with two fantastic bands Sgt Wolfbanger and The Almost Super Heroes. The tour has become something of a tradition over the past 3 years as we all help to organise, promote and fund the entire thing ourselves. Some of you might be thinking "yeah that's just a walk in the park man, anyone can organise something like that" but trust me, it is far more difficult then it sounds (if any of you have ever been in a band you will understand what i am talking about) So i thought this year i would help out and go one step further by creating a flyer to help promote the events.
It was such a wonderful feeling turning up to the venues with my flyer pasted up on the walls while people were queuing outside, almost felt like we were all professionals. For about a week i felt like a right "hip, cool designer" kid ha ha.

To create this I used mainly vectors with elements of Photoshop CS3 added in later for a distorted effect. I pen tooled around a photograph of a gay biker guy with a rather awesome looking moustache then vectorised it in Illustrator and dived into 3 different coloured layers, that once were placed together created a very interesting effect. Overall it was a very quick process to design for and i was very happy with how it turned out, although the text might have been a bit hard to read for some people, but balls to it...... I liked it.

Because Everyone has got their little tune

2008-10-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

I know this is rather old news (well in terms of my course anyway) but i thought i would upload the Magazine spreads i did for my Editorial Design Brief earlier this month.
Basically we were asked to design a grid and then explore its use and effectiveness in laying out images, typographic display elements and text matter. We had complete freedom on subject matter, so i decided to take a risk and try something that was a little different to the stuff i normally churn out. So i had a look into the wonderful world of fashion, and After flicking through many photography books in my university i stumbled upon a truly fantastic Photographer named Norman Parkinson who's portrait photographs are truly breath taking. (i would advice anyone who is into fashion to check him out) Any who here are the final magazine spreads i created:

These look a little weird and warped after i re-sized them, and i should have really put a solid edge around the spreads as most of the white bleeds in the web page. But you get an idea of what i was trying to produce and the kinda look i was aiming for.
(and for those of you who don't know what's what) The first page is the front cover, the second is the contents and other two layouts are the splash page and turn page. Overall i was very please with the outcome and i got a 2:1 with 2 marks off a 1st. I may refine these in the future and correct one or two things for my final portfolio, but at the moment lets just say its a work in progress.

Some Kind of Video

2008-10-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year i was playing around with the idea of making a short video or film just for fun. Sadly i never got around to making a full film, however over the summer months i experimented with some ideas for a short promotional video for my band. The whole concept was of a very mysterious and dramatic images that didn't necessarily link with the band, but yet had a whole creative aspect of its own. I was inspired by many different videos on youtube.com, mainly videos of "people watching" and movement, when i stumbled on to this one video that really did take my breath away. I really loved how all the movement was sped up and how a sense of time was captured in the film, i must have had this repeating for days.

Here is my attempted at my own after being inspired by the previous:

The typeface i chose for the text at the beginning and end were completely wrong and not fitting with the film, but i did have a lot of fun playing around with my computers video editing software. Sadly not many people got to see this short video, and to be honest i am not really that proud of it. But you can see what kind of theme/idea i was working towards.

We're Gonna Need A Bigger Carpet

2008-10-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

Well, today i finally sold out and acquired my very own online visual blog. I am very new to this experience so its all a bit touch and go for the moment until i get everything sorted and figured out. But in the long run i hope to be constantly updating this in the future and keep it more as a visual record to myself that others can hopefully be a part of.

Any who, i think i should take this moment to explain a bit more about myself and what i do. I am currently in my 2nd year of a BA Hons in Graphic Design Degree at The University of Cumbria based in Carlisle and i am really enjoying it. I have a huge passion for music and the people that make it, i am hugely inspired by music and design, and i love when both elements work together. I also write, record and perform in many terrible punk bands, but it's something i seriously love to do. (if your interested you can check out and listen to one of my bands here)
Slightly drifting off topic there, but this blog is mainly to showcase my design work and to share it with the world.

Here's to the future