josephjohnbradley-blog

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Looking Back

I feel as though this year has taught me a lot about myself as an artist. I know there are many aspects of my practice that need a lot of work and with the industry growing every day the competition is always getting bigger and more difficult. I however have learned a lot about myself as a person too. I understand that not everyone is going to like my artwork and I need to make artwork that fits my design and artistic ethos. It is important to be open minded as a creative person and constantly be respectful of other people’s ideas and inputs when it comes to your work, however I have also learned that it is okay to ignore what people want you to do and do what you feel represents you best as an artist.

I do not feel as though I did this this year, I know I let far too many things come between me and my artwork and I changed a lot about my projects that I enjoyed to fit some one else’s tastes. Regardless of the course and any grade afterwards I know I have learned more in this one year than I did in my entire life as an artist.

 I understand I could have managed my time much better whilst on this course but I am aware that there is always time to improve things about my practice and I will be sure to make those changes in the near future.

 Keeping a blog is a difficult process for me as I find looking at computer screens quite boring and much prefer the freedom of a notebook, I also have a very bad habit of forgetting things exist if I can’t see them so not having a physical thing I can make notes in usually means I don’t take notes. I am trying to combat this by carrying a pencil and note book on me at all times.

I’ve used several notebooks over the course of this year which makes a change from the usual one a year I use. I find now that I have been educated in Graphic Design, my interesting in things that I would never have noticed before hand has risen. I now look at all shop signs differently, I look at road signs differently, I pay more attention to logos and business cards and if I find ones I particular like I used either take pictures of them or put them in my notebook.

I have also found myself tracing calligraphy I find with my finger to see how they are connecting different words.

 Text and image has been a huge thing for me this year and I have had a lot of enjoyment out of finding which typeface goes with which image and looking at the placement of different text over images. One thing that I have learned that I think is possibly the most valuable with regarding text, is that there usually isn’t the perfect font available so it makes more sense to design your own for each piece, there will be some cases where the perfect font does exist but when it comes to designing comic book covers and things of that nature I thin I will be drawing up my own.

 I am very confident in my abilities as both an Illustrator and a Graphic Designer going in to 2018.

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Comic

To understand how I became interested in a project based around my Father’s youth it’s important to mention that when I was a child my dad would never read me stories from books or recite fairy tales or anything like that, my Father wouldn’t even enjoy a movie with me if it was fantasy based. All of the stories that I was told as a child were real life, gritty and (In all honesty) terrifying.  It wasn’t that he intended to scare me it was more that he wanted to teach me some lessons and for him the most valuable lessons were learned either on the street or from him Father John Bradley.

 As I grew older the stories continued, it was interesting when I would hear a story that I remember hearing when I was a child but this time it was different, this time it was uncensored. So as I grew older the stories became more and more elaborate and things that didn’t make sense to me as a child made complete sense to me now.

 So when searching for a new project that had a stronger narrative it made sense to retell my father’s stories, but accompany then with different pieces of arrange some of the stories into a comic strip. My father has a lot of interesting stories and some are remembered by me as his “classics” so what I plan to do is take some of my favourites and use them as part of this project.

 I couldn’t decide on which of my dad’s stories to tell first so I went with my favourite, the story of my Dad in his twenties meeting a man in a pub who considered it an honour to get into a fight with my Granddad, John Bradley, purely because of how well known he was at the time.

I couldn’t decide how to recount this story, so it only made sense that I tell it I the form of a comic book. I started sketching out the rough ideas and found it a lot more difficult to come up with a style than I thought it might be. Usually I would draw the characters in a semi realistic way but something told me that I needed to really consider the art style for this story, as it took place in the 1970s, it was only a short story and I actually had no idea what the other man in the story looked like.

So I began looking at my comic collection for some inspiration. Out of all the comic book artists and illustrators that I admire, none of them seemed to fit. So I just started drawing cartoon versions of my father and saw where that led me.

 I have never really had a distinctive art style, even though I’ve been told when I draw I have recognisable traits. I’ve never found a style that made me give up wanting to learn different techniques and try out different styles. I really admire illustrators and artist’s who have and art style that really works. Skottie Young, for example has a very famous art style in the graphic novel industry, his sharp lines and bold colours are immediately recognised as his. I had hoped that my time on this course would lead me to an art style that I was proud of but it actually just added more styles to the competition. I have always loved the work of Ralph Steadman and really appreciated his ethos. The idea that a piece of artwork can tell a story or tell someone you love them or it can simply exist for no good reason at all. I would say this is the kind of artwork that I identify the most with because a lot of what I do is actually for no good reason at all other than to make art.

 I was very aware though that a comic strip about my father was a reason to make artwork and I have to find a style that was appropriate, I played with lots of different styles until I roughly sketched out what I thought the other man in the story would look like and I actually really liked the outcome, so I began to sketch out every scene, until I had all my frames, then I simply scanned them in and coloured them in Photoshop.

 I wanted the panels to look rough an sketchy and I definitely achieved that, I was however a little disappointed in the continuity of my characters but I understand that it as my first time using that style and I don’t have a lot of practice consistently drawing the same cartoon characters. My plans for future comic books is to try and experiment with different ways of drawing faces. I find it very difficult to stray from the conventional way a face is drawn as I pent so many years of my life trying to draw realistically that cartoons are so much more difficult for me.

I have had experience drawing comic strips before but I did use a semi realistic style in those also. I am looking into taking some kind of class or online lessons that can teach me the basics of character design, I think this in the next logical step for me as an artist and the comic strip of my father that I produced is some what disappointing over all.

 If I had longer to complete this project, I would spend a lot of time filling sketchbooks with different styles of drawing characters and correct ways to proportion people. I think it would benefit me to have a personal style as an illustrator because any brief I get I always think too long on which style to use whereas if I had a artistic style already in mind I would be able to hit the ground running on most briefs and start creating as soon as possible giving me more time to refine and edit the final project.

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ANCHORS

Near the end of my project I spoke to my tutors about what I had done in th year so far, they thought and I agreed that nothing I had done had any weight as an MA project. I had done lots of mini projects but nothing that really resembled me or my work in any true way. I wanted to create a project that people would instantly recognise as mine. This would be difficult because I’m sure that most people would agree, trying to define who you are as a person in one project is almost impossible. Nevertheless, I needed something to work with and as time would have it I only hand two weeks to complete said project.

Throughout the mini projects that I had been working on, one theme stayed consistent and that was the use of illustration and text. I liked using little phrases with my work because I helped take the edge off what I had drawn, I find that my drawings on their own can seem quite sad or sinister but if they are accompanied by a funny line or a phrase then it seems to dilute my image into the realms of playful rather than disturbing (an eagle with it’s talons sunk into a rat titled ‘hang in there’ is the perfect example).

 I needed to find something that spoke to me as an artist that I would care about and would also have the freedom to be both serious and ridiculous with. I am aware that when it comes to my own work I have a lot of trouble staying serious or even staying on topic, but I feel as though these things aren’t necessary in an artistic setting, I have never been very academic and have always had trouble putting my thoughts into words. I find it difficult and on the whole a huge waste of time writing about how I do what I do and I mean that specifically for me. The majority of my work comes from spur of the moment nonsense that cannot be transcribed into academic writing.

 After another tutorial, my tutor and I spoke about my Dad, he was very ill at the time and had been for most of the year. I explain my worries about him had been effecting my work and it was suggested that I do this last minute project change on him.

I was eager to start the project because of time restrictions but also because it meant I could spend more time with my Dad and also, if he’s the main focus of my work he’s bound to take an interest.

 So I called up parents and arranged to come home for a couple of days to gather stories and information about my Dad to use in my project.

The research stage of this was difficult, I knew I didn’t have a lot of time and I had not organised what the project was going to focus on properly. I recorded a lot of notes while he told me stories and much like my Father usually does he told me a lot of other stories about things that were irrelevant to my project.

 When I got back to Huddersfield I read through all of my notes and started looking for interesting links between them. A lot of the stories I was told were about my Grandfather, John Bradley. By all accounts john Bradley was a very large, strong man who had earned a lot of respect in his town of Middlesbrough over the course of his life. He was also in the navy, which reminded me of his tattoo. There is only one photograph of John Bradley that anyone in the family can find and that is of him in his Royal Navy uniform. This being the only picture means I’ve never actually seen his tattoo (John Bradley died in 1966, when my Dad was Ten so I never actually met him). My father however has a tattoo on his arm that was done by his older brother when he was eight years old. He told his brother he wanted a tattoo like their Dad so without missing the chance, his older brother used a knife and pen ink to tattoo an anchor on my Dad’s forearm.

 I love this story because of the difference in times, it would be and is unheard of of any child getting tattooed, but somehow nobody who was around at the time finds this story remotely out of the ordinary. I actually got the same tattoo at the beginning of 2017. I’m not necessarily a sentimental person but I just thought there was something funny about three generations of fathers and sons all with the same tattoo. The tattoo is of an anchor and this started me thinking about what the symbol means. I began my research into the symbolism of the anchor and found lots of different meanings some Christian, some nautical and some prison related, but I couldn’t find anything that represented my family. So I decided that I was going to rebrand the anchor as a symbol for my family. The anchor, although a device that weights down a ship at port can also be a symbol of journey and letting go, which made perfect sense for this project as I had leaned a lot of the journey through the MA course and I was about to leave to start my life outside of education.

 I started noticing that the anchor symbol was all around me and I simply hadn’t noticed. The restaurant where I work has a mural of all things American on it and in the centre is a huge anchor, which makes no sense in the theme of the rest of the mural. My girlfriend also has a tattoo of an anchor to commemorate a family member. Stockton-on-Tees, the town I grew up in is a huge port town that has anchor motifs and actual anchors plastered around the town centre. All of this I started to realise as I began my project.

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High Horse

At the very beginning of the year I found myself wanted to do something more illustration based as I missed the discipline that I had spent so long getting comfortable with an I did not want to slip and have to learn everything I had done again. So I bought a sketch book and some pens and I began drawing. Just simple doodles that didn’t mean anything, it was nice to get back into it. As I often do while I’m drawing I was listening to a podcast and was tuning in and out of that and my own thoughts. As I started listening to the voices in my headphones again one of the presenters had told someone to “get off their high horse��. This phrase made me laugh. I don’t know why I find that phrase so funny, perhaps it’s because I find horses rather humorous, they’re very weird animals. A lot of people see the horse a s a noble and proud creature but when I see them plodding around with their heads bowing it makes me laugh, they seem to be in a perpetual state of embarrassment and although I’m sure that’s no fun for the horse, its lots of fun for me.

I started sketching a horse instantly after hearing that. I gave the horse drooping eyes and a vague expression and drew its tongue hanging out. I assume I was subconsciously playing on the word ‘high’. Once I had drawn the horse I was really happy with the image, it made me laugh and it was quite an accurate drawing as far as horse anatomy was concerned. I wrote the words “Your High Horse” underneath and left it at that.

The next day I scanned in my drawing of the horse and began colouring it on Photoshop.

Once I had coloured the drawing it seemed to have lost a lot of its charm.

I couldn’t decide how to fix the problem and my knowledge and ability with Adobe software at the time was basically non-existent. So I decided to leave it and come back to it at a later date.

 A couple of weeks went by and I had developed my skills with Photoshop and illustrator so I revisited my high horse and began to colour it again. Although the second attempt at this highlighted one of the major issues. I had been very sketchy with my lines when drawing the first draft of the horse, so if I hoped to make it look good as a digital piece I had to redraw it. I knew that drawing it again defeated the reason I liked the drawing in the first place but I knew I could use an outline with so many scratchy lines.

I traced the original drawing and made the lines much cleaner. I also used Photoshop to create realistic looking clouds that the horse was flying above. Once it was all coloured and looked a lot more professional than the first one I left that alone too.

 Near the end of the year I was looking back through some of my old work and I found the second draft of my high horse. I was incredibly shocked that I actually thought it was good. The colours were mucky looking, the font and type face were appalling and the whole composition was ridiculous.

So with my new found Illustrator and Photoshop skills, I took a third attempt at drawing the high horse. I traced the horse again making sure my lines were thick and clean, I then scanned it in to illustrator and traced the lines. I made each part of the horse its own vector so the colours could be changed easily. I spent a lot longer researching which colours to use and which colours go with which. I used vectors for the clouds too to give the drawing an overall theme.

Once I was done with that I had finally produced the high horse piece that I was legitimately proud of and knew was good.

 I liked the piece so much that I actually decided to use it for the branding of another mini project. I had been talking to my friends about the nice graphic design on a lot of local craft beer cans and we had mused on the idea of creating our own individually. With it’s bright colours and creative design I though the high horse would be perfect for a craft beer label.

So I changed the colours three times creating an IPA, a Grapefruit infused beer and a Dark Ale.

I chose the colours correspondingly.

 Overall I really enjoyed this mini project as I feel it is an accurate and obvious timeline of my experience and improvement over the past year. It is funny looking at each one of them and accepting that at the time that image was the best I was capable of and also up lifting as it means I have learned a lot in my time on the course.

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Using my Work

I was unsure what I could use all of my Snake and Rat illustrations for. I knew they were good and lots of people had encouraged me to carry on drawing them and using them for bigger projects. It is hard to ague when so many people think the same thing so I decided it was worth a shot.

I went to my go to plan when I had to apply something in a project, I went to Logos and Branding.

I definitely am an illustrator rather than a Graphic Designer but I still enjoy design work very much as it is new and free to me.

So I began to think of what I could use the Snake drawings for. I remembered that there is a brand of beer in a video game (FarCry4) that’s called ‘Shangri-Lager’. I really like this name, purely because of it isn’t to be taken seriously and because it sounds good. I would have no such luck coming up with a name as good as that but I could still design beer bottle labels.

I had thought about designing labels for beer and other kinds of alcohol as I find that a lot of the same drinks will have very similar design styles. Red wine will often have deep reds and purples with images of grapes or high class typefaces that give the bottle a sense of luxury. Vodkas will often use clear glass and blue design work, to evoke the sense of cold and beer is often quite rustic as if it’s trying really hard to be a hard working man’s drink.

With this in mind I began designing a lager called ‘cut snake Lager’. Not the most inventive name but I wasn’t very concerned with the name at the moment.

That being said I didn’t actually find that I liked any of the design I had come up with and decided to stop working on it at once and find something I was more interested in or was more worthy of my time.

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SNAKE

The Rat drawing that I had been doing had been working really well. I now had a series of them and enjoyed making more. The biggest problem with the Rat drawings was that there wasn’t a strong enough narrative. The project didn’t really need a narrative so long as it was diverse, but repeated drawings of Rats in bins were not very diverse at all.

I started thinking about ways to give my Rat a narrative. As he was a cartoon I started thinking about other cartoons and what made their simple narratives so exciting. The answer appeared to be a villain, if a cartoon character has a bad guy that is always trying to harm the main character then the show seems to work (example; Tom and Jerry, or even Bart Simpson and Sideshow Bob). So I started drawing the rat in compromising situations with his enemies. First I drew him being carried away by a proud Bald Eagle, which I thought was funny as the hero of the story usually outsmarts the bad guy and gets away, but I thought it was more in keeping with the tone of my drawings if the Rat was perpetually in danger.

The next character I wanted to add was a snake. I love the way snakes can be drawn and given they have long thin bodies the designs can be very interesting. I was however quite cautious when drawing a snake and I knew it has several different meanings as a symbol.

 Growing up in a catholic school the symbolism of a Snake was most famously an evil one, as the Devil appears to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as a snake. I wasn’t too worried about this though as I knew I wasn’t intending the snake to symbolise anything other than a snake, but just to be o the safe side I decided to research more into snakes as symbols. I came across two images that I was very interested in. One was a drawing of a snake cut into pieces and the pieces had been labelled and the other was a flag of a coiled snake with the words “DON’T TREAD ON ME” below it, this was known as the Gadsden flag. The Gadsden flag is a historical flag named after the American General Christopher Gadsden, it was designed by him during the American Revolution. Today the flag is used by the American Tea party and in different political movements.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted my simple illustrations to be seen as anything other than what they were.

 The other image I came across was a drawing of a snake cut into eight segments with the words JOIN, or DIE under the snake. Each segment was labelled with one of the American colonies. After some research I found that the drawing was actually a political cartoon drawn by Benjamin Franklin I 1754 for the Pennsylvania Gazette. It was to Illustrate that the American Colonies and regions. Traditionally there were Thirteen colonies and regions but New England was marked as one segment instead of the four that it was at the time, Georgia had been excluded completely and Delaware was not listed separately but instead included with Pennsylvania, thus there were eight segments instead of thirteen. Franklins cartoon helped illustrate the importance of unity amongst the colonies and is now used today as a symbol of freedom.

 I had a discussion with one of my friends about not wanting to use she symbolism of a snake in case its perceived as something it’s not. He quickly extinguished all of my concerns with a joke.

“pffft. What’s so great about cutting a snake into pieces anyway, one snake is a problem, if you cut it into pieces… GREAT more snakes to worry about.”

This is exactly the kind of mentality that works with my drawings so I decided to start designing my snake. I used the same method I had used to draw the rat cartoons but I had spent a ot longer on the finished product this time and I believe it pays off.

I wasn’t sure where to take the snake design from there so I simply changed the colours for some variety and moved on to other parts of my project.

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RAT

Whilst doing some artist research I came across an New York based Graphic Designer named Jon Contino. I looked through his portfolios on his website and searching him on YouTube to see if he has any interviews or skill share videos that might give me an insight in to how he produces the kind of work he does. One thing I really like about Jon Contino’s work is how traditional I looks. Although a lot of his work is digital it looks as if it’s been done by hand. I desperately wanted to achieve the same style and finally found a video of his where he designs a banner.

From what I could gather his process goes something like this:

·       Sketch out the initial idea

·       Scan the drawing into Adobe Illustrator

·       Make the design even and work out all of the maths, to make it more accurate and pleasing to the eye

·       Print that

·       Draw over the top of the print to give the lines a more hand drawn feel

·       Then scan it back in.

I really enjoyed the video of his process and couldn’t wait to try it out myself to see what kind of results I come up with, but first I needed something to draw.

I thought for a while about what to draw, I knew I wanted it to be authentic so I began looking through my old sketchbooks and I found a small doodle of a rat that I liked. So I redrew my rat drawing but drew the character in a trash can. There was no reason for this, it just seemed like the right thing to do aesthetically. Once the rat was drawn I scanned it in to illustrator and traced over the lines with the pen tool to make it look a little cleaner. I like think lines in my graphic design and wanted to use them in this piece also. The final product worked really well. I actually decided to skip a few of Contino’s steps as I thought it might be a little bit overkill for such a simple drawing.

I can’t really explain why but I was encouraged by lots of my peers to do more things in this style and to carry on using the Rat as a continuing motif.

 I had also been adding phrases to my doodles, I have always added text to my work. Not because I like to give my work a title or anything like that, I just think that the combination of text and image is always interesting and more thought goes into it than you might first think.

Especially in today’s meme culture and everyone around a certain age suffering from mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression and finding comfort from self depreciating humour, I realised that my illustration of a rat who lives in a bin would fit right in with that. So I started adding little maxims to make the image both lighter and darker at the same time.

I don’t think too much about what I’m writing down, I just look at my drawings and write the first thing that comes to mind, recently it’s been everyday phrases used ironically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYDqYxVLNeQ

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Photoshop

When I started the MA course in Graphic design, it immediately struck me that Graphics Design and Illustration were two very different course. I am no good with computers but literally every student that was on the Graphic design BA was sat with their own computer in front of them. I knew I would have to learn a lot of new skills but I was confident that they would come in time. I had very briefly used some Adobe software in my final BA year but not enough to hit the ground running. I was slightly familiar with most of the tools on Photoshop so I could at least get away with doing some digital work.

After some discussions with the other students and overhearing other conversations I quickly put together that using Photoshop in Graphic Design was not thought of as the proper thing to do. Everyone here was using Adobe Illustrator and was adamant that it was far better than Photoshop.

Now, in my naïve attitude towards the Graphic Design scene I promptly stopped using Photoshop and started teaching myself Illustrator.

I watched YouTube tutorial after YouTube Tutorial and asked all my friends to show me little shortcuts. I now believe that I’m fairly competent when it comes to using Illustrator and have produced some good looking artwork and designs from that program.

I did later realise however that illustrator is for illustrations and Photoshop is for Photos, I also understood at long last that when I was told not to use Photoshop I was merely being told that Photoshop wasn’t the right program to use for the kind of work I was doing, not that Photoshop is just a poor program.

I did feel a bit stupid for not realising this but I didn’t think too long on it. I started wanting to learn more Photoshop skills and began teaching myself the same way I ad taught myself illustrator, by watching tutorial after tutorial and asking my peers for tips and shortcuts.

I also researched different Photoshop techniques that were trending and came across a series of photos that were edited and used for Spotify. I liked that style very much and began practicing it.

 I want to learn more techniques and use them more competently throughout my work.

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Rugby

At the beginning of 2017 I was contacted by one of my tutors from my previous BA course and asked if I was interested in taking part in a project that Heritage Quay (the information, records management and archive service at the University of Huddersfield) were spearheading. I am always looking for new creative things to do and the proposition sounded interesting as I wasn’t too familiar with what Heritage Quay did and wanted to discover more.

So myself and two other illustration students met up at Heritage Quay to look through their archives and browse through different boxes of old photographs and things they had there. The brief was to create something that was to go in the archive. They wanted a piece of artwork from each of us that had something to do with the upcoming event they were hosting about Rugby. We were told that as we were the artists anything we produce would be fine and they have looked through our work and are sure they will love whatever we decide to produce.

I didn’t have any real idea on what I was going to produce but I had some rough thoughts about what I wanted to aim for.

 On the day of the event myself and the two other illustrators were invited down to Heritage Quay to listen to the lectures and talk to people to find out about their history with their club and hear the stories they had to share about Rugby. We spent the whole day there sketching out ideas and chatting to some people and overall I think it was a successful day drawing wise. However, I still didn’t really know what to submit for the brief and I was also unsure as to what Heritage Quay were expecting. So a few days later I went to Heritage Quay and spoke to them about what they wanted me to produce, again I was told I am the artist and they trust whatever decision I make, this didn’t really help but I thought if they ally mean that, then I’ll just have to come up with something.

 I decided to work on a poster for Rugby. A very simple idea but I had been working a lot with posters in my coursework and found that I enjoyed doing them. I looked through the rugby archives at Heritage Quay and found that a lot of what they had there were boxes and boxes of photographs and caricatures. I knew that our pieces were just going to be place in the archives with these things so I wanted to do something slightly different. I was aware that they had a lot of cartoons about rugby and a lot to do with the players, but I was not finding a lot of things dedicated to the fans.

 I had really admired the fans that I had spoken to at the event, most of the older people I spoke to were very vocal about not being patronised with talk of the ‘Glory days’ as they (quite rightly) pointed out they were still alive and were still fans of the sport.

 I wanted to do something that showed the power of the fans, so I designed a poster that was orientated around respecting the fans. I’m not sure if I could have done anything differently. I enjoyed doing the work but I did feel as if I didn’t do enough. I think he one thing I should take away from this project is the understanding that I need to use my time better and not worry about what people will think of my work and just do something I am proud of.

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Bonus Post

I forgot to post about the BBC workshops that we took part in.

One of our first meetings as a group was in the BBC workshop that took place in one of our Wednesday slots. We were asked to complete a number of exercises that would play out certain things that a group who are working together would overcome, things such as decision making and mapping out your ideas. At the time though I don’t really think we knew exactly how useful these techniques would be.

Simple ideas such as dot voting went don’t really well with my group and it was something that I tried to incorporate into our work later on in the project. In actual practice the dot voting didn’t really work, the problem was that we all had similar opinions so didn’t feel the need to dot vote. So some of the work that we did in the workshop with the BBC was very useful but I honestly couldn’t say that we knowingly applied any of the techniques to our group. I enjoyed working with the people from the BBC and I will employ some of the techniques I learned in future projects, however I would assume that in the future most of my projects will be solo efforts as working with groups isn’t something I’m going to pursue willingly. I enjoyed working with this particular group but the reason I enjoyed it could have also been the reason it wasn’t as successful as it could have been and that was because we were all friends.

In one of the exercises we had to construct something out of three sheets of paper that would fly as far as possible. We as a group sat and frantically thought for a while and then made the decision to crumple up the paper into a ball and throw it. We laughed about this and thought with it being just a brief exercise we would do it anyway. Funnily enough it ended up going farther than all of the other groups except one who had formed some weird kind of boomerang looking thing. This was something to think about though, although we took the brief in a light hearted fashion we did actually meet the requirements and ended up being quite successful, and I think that that was a theme throughout our time working together.

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My final thoughts about the project...

The end result of our efforts in the group project can mostly be reviewed when looking at the website (https://u1362174.wixsite.com/timeismoney). I feel like the group experience can be summed up by looking at the blog. The work looks great the idea is strong but I don’t personally feel like it goes as deep as it should into the core issue we are trying to resolve. The problem with that is I’m not sure if me or any of the other members could find a way to make this product work in a short amount of time such as we had. I believe that if we tackle a concept that didn’t have such a vast amount of moral and technical complications (such as how much time is worth) then we could have created something achievable that we would be very pleased with.

With all group projects it’s almost mandatory to have certain problems, but in this particular group I feel like the problems we encountered were actually, in some ways, positives. We are five designers who have very strong design ideas. So initially it would seem like a great idea to put five very strong designers in a group together, when in reality the amount of respect we had for each other’s work, in some ways, meant that none of us were as happy with what we actually achieved. Although I can say I am pleased with the amount of work that went into the project and I do believe it was a good idea, I feel as though if we all did the project individually all five would have been stronger. This is just an issue that comes with group projects and it is important to recognise and overcome. I do think that the group I was in handle problems in a very calm and efficient manner and if we could start the project again knowing how things would turn out, I trust that a lot of things would be done differently such as time management, decision making and communication and quite possibly the actual execution of the final idea.

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Second persona attempt...

I really didn’t like the way that the personas I had drawn up looked and I was determined to find time to redo them in a better way. I knew that drawing them in pen and scanning them in to colour was not the best way to do it. Instead I had to find a way to draw them digitally to accomplish a much better design. So I took some time to look at artist who made avatars and things but didn’t really find what I was looking for. So I decided to just go into illustrator and start working with different vectors to create something similar to a person.

 I started to feel like these worked really well and felt like the rough ideas I had come up with will definitely turn into something much better than what we had previously. At the time that I created the illustrations I didn’t have much time to run the final images by the other group members but all of them at some point had seem what I was working on and seemed happy with the work in progress. Once they were finished I submitted them the group and they went down much better than the previous ones. I would like to practice more with vectors as I feel it would be a really handy skill to quickly mock up some drawings on illustrator especially with things such as animation (Something I am looking to get into.)

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Survey

We decided to actually do some primary research, which was good.

We thought a good way to argue that our concept would work was to ask people if they thought they could use something like our app to help save money. So we all came together and thought up questions for our questionnaire and then sent it out and awaited results.

 We decided that only people who earn an hourly wage would be able to use our product so we started off with that. The people who did earn an hourly wage were then asked questions based on their spending habits and how much they think before making purchases. Our results showed that the majority of people think that they handle their money well but could certainly make some changes to improve.

Not only did we have answers that backed what we thought in the first place we now had indisputable evidence that there was a market for TiM… even if it was quite small. TiM had a purpose and we all felt very good about that.

 With all concerns that nobody would care about our project well and truly gone, we got a little ahead of ourselves again. In my opinion we had been working well as a group, we had created an idea that definitely responded to a global issue but we just weren’t there yet and I had no idea how we could push on to making something that had potential into something that worked.

This problem was very frustrating for everyone in the group and at our next tutorial we each voiced some of the things that were bothering us. This discussion helped us a lot because I feel that we had the opportunity to be a little more honest and also identify problems in a controlled way. The general feeling was that we need to be more productive and communicate better when we’re not in person.

 Things definitely started to get better after that.

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We need to do some research, you guys.

After out tutorial every one of us felt a little defeated and to be perfectly honest we deserved it, we spent a lot of time focussing on how good we could make our concept look that we totally didn’t realised that it didn’t work… at all in fact.

 On the bright side website looked brilliant and the colour choice and branding was spectacular (If you’re going to create something that doesn’t work I’ve always felt you should have the decency to make it pretty). I wasn’t involved heavily in the branding and marketing of our concept but the decisions never went forward until we all had confirmed we were happy with it. This was the strongest part of our group project, we definitely had a solidarity with each other and everyone’s point of view was taken into account and respected, this did lead to a good group dynamic but there were also some issues with this that were yet to be discussed.

 Initially we were going to submit the idea to the RSA, so we chose colours that fit the brief. We use a dark blue and white combination as we recognised that a lot of banks use these colours as they are neutral and comfortable. But then we missed the deadline and everything kicked off.

 We were no longer submitting our idea to the RSA so we could go crazy with the colour choice, not literally though as colour is important to all of us and we’re all very particular.

The choice was then made that we use a shade of red, it was definitely more interesting and exciting, however it did feel quite heavy and invasive. Red also has a lot of negative connotations so we felt it best to avoid it completely and think of something else.

The colours we settled with for the branding in the end, I felt were very successful. We chose a green and a blue that were neutral, they looked good and definitely felt right for TiM.

 However, all that aside we still had no primary research and needed to get some ASAP.

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Drawing personas

I feel like one of the biggest problems with our group were basically communication and time management. Due to everyone’s availability we could only meet as a whole group two days out of the week. When we did meet we talked about what we wanted to achieve that week and who was going to do what.

Most of the website related stuff was left to the people who knew what they were doing, although I am always wanting to learn new things I thought it best if I just help in ways I know I can be productive rather than try and learn things from scratch in a situation where time was not something we had a lot of. I turned my attention to creating personas, we all had come up with some ideas of personas so I illustrated them.

The way I had decided to do this was fairly simple, I just looked online at pictures of people and took some inspiration for the kind of person I wanted to draw.

 Karen

 Karen was a middle aged woman who, by the sound of the profile, was quite stern and didn’t like any nonsense. I already knew how I wanted her to look so I sketched out an idea and showed it to the group. Everyone was in agreement; I had drawn Karen.

 Dominic

 Dominic was a young man and liked video games, that wasn’t too hard to imagine because I know a lot of people who like video games so I had a lot of ideas for him too. So again I sketched out what I thought he should look like and again the group agreed they thought it was a very good representation of Dominic.

 Steven

 Steven was very easy to draw as I had been given very simple instructions

 “Just make him look like Frank Ocean”

 and I did.

 Once I had drawn all of the personas and coloured them digitally I didn’t really like how they had turned out, but the group seemed pleased with them and we had other things to do so I left them as they were.

 Throughout the middle of the project I felt like we were all enjoying working on our own projects so much that TiM (Time is Money, the name we had created for the project and concept.) was not a priority to us. This became a bigger problem once we had another weekly tutorial and realised we had literally nothing new to show.

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How we tackled the brief

Once we had the idea of what we wanted to do we started sharing ideas and talking about the best way to approach this.  We talked about the reasons why we could use an app that helps you save money. As we are all friends we joked about different situations you’d need to save money in and at first we talked about the pub. We discussed an app that reminds you how long you have worked to afford a pint based on your hourly wage and it may deter you from buying ‘one more drink’. We also thought of a wallet that locks itself if you are drunk and a breathalyser would be required to open it. Obviously these ideas were kind of weird but we all felt that there was definitely something there we could use.

 We came to a decision. An app that translates the price of good from currency to hours worked based on your hourly wage. That was the basic idea. We all thought it would be a great way to think about money, to start thinking more about how much you value your time rather than how much you value materialistic possessions. We also believed it would improve people’s self-worth.

 So far everything was going really well… and that’s when things started to fall apart.

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Reading the briefs

On our first meeting was a group we sat around a table and discussed how best to tackle the situation. We were to choose one of the RSA briefs and work together as as a group and work to an outcome. So we printed out all of the briefs and went through them individually. We went into great detail on each one and had a process of how to analyse the briefs. We would have decided if it initially sounded interesting to us and if the majority of us agreed it did then we would read further on. If the brief did in fact sound interesting the we go into detail about the brief requirements and we would have a very basic conversation about whether we could do it, whether we could do it well and whether we actually wanted to do it. After reading all of he briefs we had two that we all agreed could be interesting to do. One was about designing a wheelchair, the conversation sparked with ideas about what kind of thing that we would do and there were some very interesting ideas but we found it difficult to come up with how exactly we would do it, obviously we were inn the preliminary stages of the project and could have worked it out but the general idea was that we should go with the money saving brief instead as there would be more reasons to use the skills our team had and it also met some f the members personal interest in.

 I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the briefs, I found it difficult to be enthusiastic about the project but found a bit of comfort in the fact that I enjoyed working with the people in my group. Later in the project I found that working with these particular people would help my practice a lot as I learned a lot about how to properly choose a font or at least wha6 to consider when choosing a font. I understand that it takes a lot of practice to be good at what you do but it certainly helps when someone who is experienced in something shows you the faster route to take when making decisions. So being in a group with four very talented designers definitely benefited my work but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the group experience as a whole.