[GRAPHICS] CONDEFENCE LOGO

Again, this is just simply finding an idea and drawing it on Illustrator. I've not come up with a final look, but I do think green is the right colour.

Straight or playful?

Does the football work? Player? Brain?

Emphasise the wordplay? Too much?

For sure it's a difficult process. My way of working would be to keep trying and visualising until something feels right. But I haven't yet. The day wasn't long enough.

[GRAPHICS] WEB WIREFRAME

I've been thinking about a business concept for educating footballers. It's not the most thought out plan in the world ready for launch tomorrow, but it's certainly an idea that has been lingering for a little while, and may fruit some day. Don't steal my idea.

Condefence.

Great name I think. Here's the rationale.

And then the wireframe. This is essentially the mock up of the website. How the home page looks. What buttons link where. What each page looks like. How the hierarchy stands. Like a site map.

[GRAPHICS] SETTING UP YOUR BRAND

Thinking ahead to my own branding or my own brand, it's clear we need to be web savvy. Everything happens on the web. Meaning, a good website and good connections are necessary. That is, Facebook, Twitter, LinkdIn and the like.

USP vital.

Connectivity vital.

[GRAPHICS] BRANDING AND LOGOS

What makes effective brand images?

The first task for this workshop was to collate some likes and dislikes of branding examples.

The John Lewis Christmas commercial has been a continuous hit in recent years. I think its due to the core understanding of how we enjoy the holiday, they get it so on point. Its totally relatable and likeable. This year's in particular is excellent I think. Concept is perfect for me.

Nike's logo is so successful because of its simplicity and global appeal. It's like the chicken and the egg, I'm not sure which is established first, but its lack of the word "Nike", the fact that it's one continuous blocked shape, it's incredibly effective at being spotted and recognised from just a swoosh.

Gap had a ridiculous big-money brand revamp, stirring a lot of hype, causing eager anticipation of the change from the bland longstanding logo. Only for it to be revealed as Helvetica with a blue square. They changed back after like a month, it was bizarre. Both are horrible, the stretched out font is really bad.

Whilst IKEA are renowned for their unique mass production of decent quality DIY everything, their logo is quite poor and certainly doesn't reflect on the clean, simple and current products they have to offer. The Swedish colourway is predictable, the typeface is fat and squished, which I find strange considering their well executed use of Verdana (previously Futura) for their campaigns and pretty much everything else too actually. The logo I don't like though.

Anyway, this has been useful in terms of thinking through what makes for a good piece of branding. Is it simply the aesthetics that matter? Its relation and reflection of the brand itself and what it stands for? The concept behind the brand's philosophy and how that is represented?

Note: The Pentagram have designed some absolute beauties. I want their book.

[GRAPHICS] MANUAL TRACING

For more complex images, we can trace manually, using the Pen tool. Clicking adds points, shift+Click adds curves and the Anchors are adjusted for right angles. I took this image from our JFC photo log and chose to trace an outline of the boys.

And by using the Layers, I can control individual lines and layers by selecting what to view and what to hide. In this case, each boy and the ball (blue, orange, black) are all independent Layers, as are the green borders and strap I added. The original photograph is also a Layer itself, positioned at the top to cover the rest, and hidden also.

[GRAPHICS] LIVE TRACING

Bringing in a JPEG image from the web, in this case the new adidas Euro 2012 football, the tracing tool automatically blocks out the image into colour patches it reads. As these 'blocks' are all independent, I can then change the colour of a certain block. Potentially very useful.

[GRAPHICS] OLYMPIC POSTER TASK

To emphasise the importance of computers and the typography that we all have access to, our task today was to make a London 2012 poster using rubbing techniques. That is, laying paper over a ridged bit of existing lettering and rubbing pastel over it to depict the letterform. Seemed a bit like a primary school task but never mind.

The task did have some rules, including compulsory text content (event details), a self-chosen strap line, clear influence of the five rings, and that we couldn't use letters from the same rubbing source next to each other. So having planned a general layout for the poster, decided on a strap line, and counted how many of each letter was needed, we set off in search of rubbings. Letters came from signs around campus and local streets, numbers from house doors, bins, cars, and Os from drains (creative!).

Here's what we came up with.

Not quite the typography class I thought it was going to be. But for sure I'll be looking into it with more depth. I'm gonna be typeface nerd.

[GRAPHICS] INTRODUCTION TO TYPOGRAPHY