PANIC @ NOISELAB

The Countdown

Panic slowly encroaches upon us, getting more and more intense until we fully acknowledge the fear. The familiar sense of counting down the days, hours or minutes until an anticipated moment is something we all know a little too well.

On Wednesday Rachael, Helen and I were invigilating our PANIC exhibition @ NOISE in Manchester. I was very impressed with the layout, display and overall curation of the exhibition.

PANIC

My submission for the Noise Lab exhibition 'Panic' by Design & Art Direction third year students.

"Panic slowly encroaches upon us, getting more and more intense until we fully acknowledge the fear. The familiar sense of counting down the days, hours or minutes until an anticipated moment is something we all know a little too well."

MMU Degree show pitch...

Rachael and I decided to work together and pitch for the Degree show identity. We both found ourselves being unusually inspired by Neil Grants pie charts.

I found it really inspirational working with Rachael we just took off one day into Manchester and photographed our surroundings. We were really excited bouncing ideas off of each other as we both felt like we were on the same wavelength. We were inspired by pie-charts, fans, wheels, cogs, factories, music, manufacturing and arrows.

We wanted to make use of all of the facilities MMU had to offer, considering letterpress, screenprint, laser-cutting, photograhy etc. We hopped into letterpress to get inspired.


We took the idea into a structure, ideally we wanted to create this large scale poster with all these mechanical elements to it and photograph it in the studio and produce that as the poster. The time constraint of three weeks really got us thinking outside of the box. We produced giant jigsaw like posters with movable parts. We created 3 looks, a neon one, a bright coloured on white and a re-cycled looking one.



Inspired by these windmill, pin-wheel structures we looked at their nets and tiles and began thinking along the lines of...



Towards the end of the project we did a little art directed photography around the buildings using textures within some square frames which we had made. I really enjoyed doing this, with each shot we considered the placement, distance and layout. We made a little concertina booklet and hope to make a poster of this little assignment.

Design Mark

On Thursday I represented the University as a student ambassador at a workshop at the Big Bang fair at the GMEX. The workshop was organized by The Design Council and Design Mark.

The Big Bang Fair is mainly a Science fair for primary and secondary schools with walking robots, chocolate structures and a Formula One stand! - I was quite jealous that I never got a chance to go to something like this.

Design Mark is an organization which awards specialist schools a Design Mark status. A school must demonstrate a high level of design teaching to obtain the award. During the day I worked with four girls from a Design Mark school.

Working in a group of four we were given the Design Councils 'Design against Crime' brief to tackle. The designer Andy Walmsley (Creative Director) from Wash design was there throughout the day to help the two groups towards finding a solution to the brief. It was really interesting to meet Andy, his design studio work on many different projects some in the field of architecture, animation, advertising and others. His websites pretty cool too.

I never really thought of teaching or working with children but I found it really inspiring. The girls in my group were really smart and came up with a great range of concepts in response to the brief. Keen product design students they really thought about our 'product' a solar powered roll-up mat which charges and backs up data for a variety of electronic devices (camera, USB, mobile.) The girls chose the name 'The Core' and here were some of their sketches.


and some of my logo ideas!


It was really strange performing this supportive role. I had to really stop myself from leading the ideas and being the designer. I had to really identify the moments where the girls had an idea and then encourage them to develop it, push it and question it. Andy gave me some great advice, being a Creative Director he is leading and pushing his team all the time, keep looking back at your ideas but always move forwards. I was quite proud of the work the girls did and they pitched it at the end of the day.

The design and idea process is really incredible and I felt reassured looking at the result of our conceptual development and the mess which we'd made that we'd really pushed our ideas.


A great opportunity which I enjoyed and I'm glad I said yes to.

Saatchi & Saatchi Summer Internship Programme

So back in January whilst I was sifting through jobs and internships on the net I came remembered Saatchi & Saatchi. I checked to see how to apply for a summer internship for this year. Man was there competition! So in true S&S style a competition bonanza was held to weed out all unworthy applicants....I think there was around

Challenge no.1 was to create a Facebook Group and get as many people to join as possible...well! This was a toughy as I came into the competition a little late but I managed to get a good following.

You can see the group I created here...
I remembered there was around 800/900 groups some about loosing biscuits in your tea, a lot about Cheryl Cole, some claiming to giveaway freebie Uggboots and such and others actually claiming to be the Saatchi & Saatchi Summer 2010 Internship group - well def some genius ideas there!

The group which did the best was 'YOUR OWN LEGO MAN:FREE'(approx. 249,00 members)
The group which came second was 'Secret London' (approx, 201,00 members) This group actually became a start-up business thanks to its success!

O.k so I had like 200 members! o.k so actually 265 current members. However all I needed to do was be in the top 50% which was actually achievable. I resorted to pure creativity and interaction to try and overcome so of these uninspired groups. I managed to wangle myself through to the next round. 800 went down to around 400. Second round....

S&S posted a quiz, a special quiz that had Saatchi specific questions (like what is written on the stairs at the London offices) some Advertising questions and some random ones (like if Facebook was a country where would it sit in terms of population...)

So in result although I did the quiz within the time my score wasn't high enough to put me into the top half....then along came wildcard round....

Are you familiar with the recent 'we can't go on like this' (heavily airbrushed) David Cameron billboard. Well if not here is the original.



The poster was heavily criticized and the online world took it upon themselves to design their own versions, plenty to see available here. BACK TO THE CHALLENGE! So wildcard round posted (meaning if I re-made my own decent witty, funny and brilliant version I could still go through.)

These are some of the idea's I'd come up with...



My final submission being...



Witty? yes, clever? yes, funny....probably not so i wasn't surprised to find I failed this hurdle. I was surprised however to see the winning ideas (Alistair Campbell chose two himself.) Little disappointed but onwards and upwards.

Alexandra Arts

Jenny (Davies) and I decided to work together on the Alexandra Arts brief. A quick(ish) turnaround of about two and a half weeks, we've just completed it and I'm happy to say its off to print! The brief was to design an identity for Alexandra Arts (An organization which provides accessible arts and crafts workshops for local communities in Alexandra Park.) I think Jenny and I worked really well and didn't quite know each other before it but soon realized we had a similar style and could work well together.

We had to produce on A3 poster along with a double-sided A5 flyer. After seeing some work which Lotte liked (by Miami design)

We also knew that she liked the work of Si Scott. This is the solution we came up with...

We designed this logo which references the historical importance of the park and also by using a circular shape to reflect the unique eco-system of the park and its community.