2nd year was the middle, and the easiest. My favourite class was Typography with Neil Laing. He is a fantastic Graphic Designer and all around great person. We had two awesome projects where we designed a menu, mine was called Kiki's Supper Club, and a CD package of a famous artist. I picked Janis Joplin just because at the time our family hippy and friend Nathan was really getting me back into the oldies.
We had Layout with Andrew McLachlan, who was a great inspiration to all of us. And what a story teller! This man could get off track in the wink of an eye, but somehow it tied in with his lectures. I always enjoyed his projects because of the leeway with creativeness he allowed us. Basic design principles were something we needed to understand and employ, but he understood that sometimes you needed to break the boundaries. We had to develop a logo for the CD Package that was unique, and with any type of brainstorming, usually you should come up with words and concepts associated with the idea or word that you are focusing on. Vision: outlook, angle, aspect, perspective, imagination, perceiving, eyes, eyes....and eyes??? That is what everyone 'focused' on it seems, and I wanted to look at a different point of view. I thought that a vision often leads down a 'road' of sorts to a new understanding life. So I graphically represented a road with a 'circular' goal at the end, if you can discern my meaning. Our topic was an art of some type and I chose fantasy art (not surprising). Each circular picture is a work of art from deviants I follow on devianart.com.
We did a packaging project in 3rd year, as well as logo development and advertisement. My package was a little box containing a bag of organic chocolates (which were actually dollar store wax easter eggs.) Throughout my concept procedures, I decided after researching different packaging methods that I wanted a 'cut-out' of a feature. What a bitch! I really did step over the line there, thinking that with an exacto-knife I could somehow flawlessly cut out a vine design. But I did it, albeit a tad shoddy, but nonetheless I was happy with the outcome. What I liked the most was the ad, this version here does not include the picture of the packaging on the front, but I'm sure you get the idea.
The faculty often approaches non-profit organizations that are in need of some Graphic Design work, and the students help with ad campaigns that are marked based on the criteria of the 'clients'. There were 3 different organizations to choose from, and I chose Kingston Writersfest because I immediately had an idea of what I was going to do. While Andrew pitched our project, I started to draw the head below, making words flow out of her mouth and into her head symbolizing the transfer of the written word from the author to the reader, so to speak. The following pieces are the 3rd year exhibition poster and the front page of my flash website (which no longer exists).
Neil only taught during 1 semester of the 2nd year, otherwise all of our Typography education came from Don Niven. Most considered him an odd fellow, me included, but I enjoyed developing and refining logos, typefaces, text, etc,... in his classes. He always had a lot of up to date resources, and seemed like a hoarder of Graphic Design, finding, implementing and showing different flavours from all time periods. We were given a project outline to do a business advertisement campaign for a brochure booklet. He always gave us categories to and names. I ended up with Floorits, which was an imaginary company that manufactured floorlights. It was quite difficult to find resource images for the vector graphics we had to incorporate, but eventually I persevered. It was by far my most favourite project, and the one I most let myself go while still remaining within the boundaries of design concepts.
I had an array of other classes including Branding, Illustration, Art History, etc,... While it helped me to further my goals, I don't feel that they contributed as much as in the classes mentioned above, nor the people that helped to realize those goals. There is so much I could cover about those 3 years, whether it be the concepts I had learned or the personal feelings I have, but I think I've wrote a lot already.
I just graduated from 3D Animation and will soon be studying 3D Game Art, of which in later blogs I'll post some of my work. In the next blog I think I'll be covering some more of my personal artwork.
Kristine
"Copyright infringement: it's like me going to your house, ripping off your face, strapping it onto my head and claiming it as my own."
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