Highlights; Logo's

 As a designer it is wrong to have favourite projects but when a logo brief comes a long I really like it. It is always a challenge to try and fit an entire company's style and ethos into a single identity and for said identity to be seen everywhere.

This project at uni was creating several logos for stupid and silly companies that could never exist. I worked in collaboration with my friends Vincent, Sophie and an exchange student called 吴吴珊. We were set the challenge to make 9 logos (because our group was so big). We collectively got a decent grade out of all of our hard work. 

The approach for each of the logos was different and the style of each one had to be different for each. Working in collaboration made it easy to decide on which way to do each one was best.

Portable Double Bass

Faberge Scotch Egg

Night Club For Pensioners

Fighting Game for the Under Fives

Jamaican Cheese

Recycled Cardboard Robot

Tree Based Refreshment Drink

Turbo Charged Scooter from the Elderly

Lost Sock Detector

highlights part 2: Typography

Typography is something that I have never explored before coming to uni. I had no prior knowledge of it what so ever apart from font choice was important. I wasn't told which ones were good but knew that comic sans was bad. I have since been taught that;

• Garamond
• Didot
• Baskerville
• Times
• Futura
• Helvetica
• Univers
• Gill 

are all top notch quality fonts. I will never forget this. The amount of bad typefaces outways the good by 95% to 5%. Type is something I have explored more and more throughout the year. Above are the pieces from the 2nd type project of the year. They are poor examples of good type but I count them as a milestone.My typography improved and below is the my best marked piece of type that was featured on the course blog. It was called premier league typography.

Highlights of my first year at uni; Part 1. Congratulations it's a horse

During my first year I was given three moving image projects and I have never done a moving image project on a graphic design. I have studied media before but this was to prove of only minimal use as the software that I was to use was different, the hardware was new and sometimes strange.

We were give the brief of; create a title sequence for a fictional TV program from Charlie Brooker's website http://www.tvgohome.com/. We were given the sitcom "Congratulations, it's a horse". I say we as I was working with my good friend Sophie Taylor. This was the definition we of the program.

Over the first week we came up with the idea of it being stop animation or a POV scene. However, at the end of the week, the tutors did not like it. So we took it on board and just decided the only way to achieve what they thought would work, would be to green screen it. Yes it would look tacky and have a low production value but it would get the job done. We filmed it all in one day and edited it 2 days. The illustrations are done by Sophie and work really well with my bad action on top of them.

65 was the grade that me and Sophie achieved for this piece which, safe to say I thought was a great a achievement.

 Below you can see the finished film;

First REAL Post

As far as I can tell this is gonna be my first offical post where I actually talk about me and the things that I do. So far it has just been pieces of design that bare little or no resemblance to anything that could be produced in the real world and it also varies a lot in quality. But this is a milestone.

My name is James Reay and I am a university student (art Student) studying Graphic Design. I am currently based in carlisle studying at the University of Cumbria; run by the team of Grillust (http://grillust.blogspot.co.uk/). I am just about to finish my first year and I have very much enjoyed. I have gained lot's of skills. Skills that stretch beyond Photoshop. I am now aware of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I have met some amazing people in my first year and hope to continue these friendships beyond the education system. I hope to post up some of the highlights of my first year work which include collaborations, personal experiment work and finished products.