Now that our poster scaffold design was underway and confirmed with feedback from both peers and teacher review, the next two weeks (5 and 6) was to create the poster on Illustrator. This would give us our end product being the final project for submission. This stage was not an easy stage for me although but through assistance and YouTube research I was able to find solutions to overcome these issues. I chose a specific colour scheme of black to emphasis the darkness and evil that is associated with terrorism in creating a mood as the secondary colour and then accompanied with red representing bloodshed and evil that terrorism causes as the primary colour.

My planned scaffold for the poster was to develop a poster with a header and sectioned off thirds of the poster. This was the scaffold I wanted and did follow for the development of my poster. The first third being the geographical graph, a type of graph we learn’t out of many in the first two weeks of the project design process followed with short statistical information surrounding. That would then flow into the middle third of the poster and so on. I focused heavily on the specifics of attacks on population to begin. Locations in which are heavily affected around the world with a supporting statistic using type to emphasis this. The middle third would include two graphs, a pie graph and column graph. Both giving statistical information on populations affected by terrorism worldwide. This being the type of citizens most affected by terrorism represented with both a pie graph and shape built population of people for aesthetic, accompanied with the column graph detailing number of incidents, number of deaths and number of injuries caused by a specific terrorist organisation.

With the third section of the poster I created a bandana type of section to split away from the other two thirds of the poster. This worked well as I was able to not only section off those two thirds but it also made it flow into this section with my use of arrow type shapes on the top and bottom of the red bandana like bar. This flowed to further information but explored more into terrorist organisations around the world and most dangerous ones rather then populations of citizens affected. I created out of shapes men in balaclavas to emphasis this idea of crime of the organisational groups as well as icons under the red bandana bar so that the viewer is easily able to gather an idea of the statistics simply from viewing along with a typographic representation of data with an enlarged capitalised number.

Finalising my poster was difficult in the end and most challenging for my whole production phase as I was unable to print out my poster properly. At first it was found to be cut off so with adjustment settings on the size of the page I thought this solution would be fixed but then when I re-printed the entire poster came out extremely blurry, still readable but was not pristine as it should be when working with Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately i was not able to find a solution and reprint due to lack of funds as each print cost $20 as well as time availability at the end. From this I would take away that test printing is a must and I will do so for the next projects to come as I will have available time left to adjust any issue that may arise for some reason like this situation and be people to overcome them.

Weeks three and four of VCD102 for task 1 involved further understanding of the tools of Illustrator and developing our skills abroad on the software that I can integrate into my own poster to make it as visually appealing to the viewer as possible. Both weeks three and four much like the first two weeks of VCD102 was involved with the exploratory phase of the design process for the overall task as we began prototyping for the task.

These two weeks had a main focus around the typography, functional layouts, drawing and manipulation of shapes and colour schemes itself from adobe colour. We explored ways to create graphs created into more visually appealing views for the audience through 3d effects and colour manipulations. This also led us to learning ways that we can represent data sets but without the use of graphs. This was the use of shapes in order to create and manipulate into an icon such as people or houses for example which help to represent a population.

Week 4 was pivotal in learning poster layouts and various settings to do so.

This was best shown in the tutorials where we were given an already constructed document in Illustrator and making graphs out of datas on them as well a manipulating various  shapes or type into something unique. After the commencement of week 4 tutorial I was able to go away now and create my own poster with trial an error with colour schemes and typography as well as manipulating shapes and constructing graphs out of my own data gathered on Terrorism found in weeks 1 and 2. The data gathered giving me thorough statistics on issues such as where in the world terrorist attacks occur the most. The rate of fatalities in the world and who on most commonly as well as the most common ways in which this awful attacks occur the most. 

The final design I have decided i will go with will be titled “Terrorism” with various icons around the title such as a jetplane. Through learning about text border manipulation I was able to put the text at a slant of about 25 degrees to create effect and less simplicity. I will then flow down the page with a world map to give the viewer a geographical reference to where abouts in particular my poster is taking the viewers understanding with facts written into it. This being a geographical graph, this being one of the primary features of the poster. I then will flow down into a pie graph along side a column graph which will include numerous shape built characters to represent population. Then finally to section off the bottom half of the poster I will have a red bandana type bar that will include statistics on terrorist organisations around the world that are most threatening as well as a final feature on the bottom that has type statistics and icon representation. This being a number in bold and big to draw the viewers gaze to and be able to understand the data straight away.

I hope that this poster will turn out as planned so that I can represent my statistics in a visually appealing way for the audience without having heavy verbal statistics all over the poster making it a boring and disengaging read.

The proceeding of week 6 saw us see the commencement of our VCD Task 2 major project. This was a response to the design brief, designing and prototyping an interactive response to the brief, this being an Adobe XD website, game interface, interactive way finding system or app design. For this I decided that I would create a music festival for a certain genre of music in which I go further in depth to.

To begin the project proposal phase of the design I had to define what I was to do. For something so broad a mind-map was perfect for this. Funnelling down the essential details such as what genre of music festival I would do, location in which I would hold the event, who would attend the event (artist). As my original mind-map created in class was destroyed due to water damage from rain I had to re-create one online. I had to brainstorm all possibilities that would need to be considered into the entirety of the music festival. I had to make sure that I considered things that would play mass factors into the festival such as the listed venue, time and date and names for example. As well as looking out the goers of the festival by considering the transport to and from the event.

MOOD BOARD –

Next was to create a mood board, this is a gathering of competitive sets of ideas that I found similar to those of current music festival websites and ideas for the rap culture already. This means finding similarities that I find visually appealing from these music festival websites. I included icons in which I will include into my own personal rap poster such as the Sydney harbour scape as this will resemble to the viewer  the location straight away due to the recognition of Sydney Harbour. I have included pictures of music festivals today that are current and throughout the season of summer to express the relaxation and chilled vibe of a summer festival. Everyone coming together and enjoying the same music, along with icons that resemble summer to a viewer. The colour palette in which I have included in my mood board will be what I use for the websites identity and I will be sticking with this.

Goals in which I wish to exceed for this site is to be an easily navigable website for the user that includes cool visuals throughout the site. I will base my site roughly from the similarities to the Rolling Loud posters. I want my site to have lots of visual cartoon icons, things such as a Lamborghini driving into the sunset with a city scape depicted in the background followed by the artist lineup for the event. Simplicity is always key with things such as a website so I am happy to work beyond a basic poster of work. I want the users experience to not only be easy but also real them in. Creating an appealing site is key to keeping the viewers attention at all times. I plan to include interactive icons so when a user clicks on something such as the Lamborghini icon, the car will drive forward and then it will take you to another page with the artist lineup. The colour scheme I have chosen is the one attached in the mood board, a black/grey to purpley colour. I chose this as it is a nostalgic colour scheme that is not too in the face of the viewer when they are in it. I have decided to use the “flood std”    as it is a grungy-hard rap typeface which I feel as though perfectly suits the music festival hip hop theme. The motif I am going to follow will be a theme of Rolling Loud. This in the words of its creator Tariq Cherif “Rolling Loud is an experience for all in which the billboards and websites created are intended for all viewers to easily read but be drawn in at the same time. The theme of Rolling Loud is hip-hop which is a cool hype vibe theme”. I too want to follow along this hype vibe on my website by creating pop art icons that grab the viewers attention.

The design process stage of the project major work is to come up with an overall design of your logo and website and link it back to the fundamental idea of semiotics and its science of signs. As well as gathering key icons, symbols and indexes and realising how they can come into play with your own design. The design process is an overall analysis and at this stage becomes an evaluation of how I personally got to where I am in the project and how I got there, making me question things I could’ve done better and/or changed to make my entire process better.

Initially I gathered my thoughts and ideas for a logo from the internet as well as using semiotics to brainstorm some ways that I can use a symbol or sign to signify something to the reader, the fundamentals of the science of signs. After our lecture in week 5 and from learning about it previous semester in another subject my understanding of semiotics was thorough. I realised that if I want to perceive something in my logo without having to write it I would have to use the idea of semiotics to make this work. Of course in my logo only people with good geographic knowledge would be able to recognise the location of my festival as it is an icon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This enabled me to display the location within the logo without having to write it making it seem un-formal. I also used the science of semiotics in my middle icon being a microphone which is a symbol of the idea of what the festival type is… music.

The process of the design process was that of lots of brainstorming and researching ideas that are out there now in regards to hip hop music festivals and festivals in general. From this I narrowed down to four main music festivals that I used to gather ideas for my own logo, Listen Out, Groovin the Moo, Rolling Loud and Field Day. I then made sketches of ideas that came to mind once viewing these festivals. I then decided I would buy a sketch book from the Unishop on campus at Wollongong to keep all my ideas in one place. I began drawing up 9 logo ideas that are all related to genre of hip hop and rap as well as would incorporate the symbol of Sydney in it as well, obviously meaning I would need a city scape. I did some iterations and duplications with other designs I came up with to give my this final design concept.

Next I constructed my website layout as I wanted to have an idea of how I was going to present all my pages of the website into a visual form that I could edit and come back to without properly starting and making effective changes. I too researched various music festivals around the world that all have a website to go with their festival and analysed their layouts theyve chosen as well as how each animation or click works and where it takes you. I noted key headings that I would need to include in my website being a splash page, lineup page, info page and contact page. All in which take you to various pages within pages of that. I did this by sketching all my various ideas for each page down onto my sketch notebook and making any noteable changes I thought could be removed or added as well as visual effects that work well for the website. Attached is the images of this.

The prototyping stage of the major work consisted of various sketches and illustration concepts of designs for our way of thinking of our website logos and website layout. I purchased a small notebook for this stage of the project as i could draw out my initial sketch ideas and duplication that I came up with of the sketches and then put them into an illustrator page and make further duplications and iterations to the design whilst also bringing it to life at the same time. This idea of the notebook also worked well when drawing out my website layout as I had all the layouts in order and in the one place so I did not lose them.

The goals in which I stated in my rationale in which was to create a music festival specifically hip hop… in the Sydney region of Australia for patrons over the age of 18 whom all share a great interest in hip hop music today. I also outlined my intent to follow along the roughly similar scheme of Rolling Loud and Listen Out in creating a visually appealing website and more importantly make a statement with the logo and splash page of my website, something that the viewer will be drawn into and remember due to its colour explosion, details included and the way in which its laid out.  The prototype in which I created is more of a two part, the initials that you find is a city scape with a car driving into it on a road with a plane in the sky, Sydney harbour bridge in the background and the sun too but in the middle you too see a microphone image with Hip Hop written inside which is what I mean by the second part of the logo as that branches off seperatly throughout the website, purely because I could not have this huge image on every page everytime so making it into a segment worked best creating a sense of two parts.

This concept meets my desired look as it is very colourful and draws the viewer into so many different aspects and parts of the image with its various symbols throughout. The logo without needing to be written conveys to the viewer where the location is with Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background and the city scape in the foreground as well as the idea of the season in which it is held, summer. With the sun in the background blazing heat. The overall logo of the microphone tells any viewer that the festival is that of a hip hop genre due to its name of the festival and it being written in the centre. The words Hip Hop worked perfectly with the microphone idea as they moulded perfectly around the microphone shape i.e. the microphone handle to resemble a hand in a way?

I gathered feedback from peers in two ways. The first way was the exposure of the logo design to the class as my teacher showed the class what I had done. This was both for an instructional tutorial on how to use Adobe Capture as well as becoming beneficial for me as I gained verbal feedback from my peers when they commented on the picture saying, “wow that really cool!” and “oh you drew that yourself ?”. I also gathered feedback from another peer when I showed them my concepts (9 various ones) and asked their favourite and then revealed my chosen final idea. This feedback was good as the one in which my peer selected and commented… “I like this one the most as it relates to the genre as well as this one as it shows the location within the logo”. This made me brainstorm and realise that I could mould two of my designs together to make the ideal logo as well as fitting the rationale I intended.

For our VCD102 we were required to construct a poster through Adobe Illustrator to be printed off as A1 print in which would entail a large scale digital visualisation using data in which we found on a specific issue on-going. Including overall visualised representation revealing the relationship between the data sets that are being analysed. In this weeks BLOG posts we were required to include the way in which we founded and constructed the idea to elaborate on in our posters.

Mind maps are essential in configuring a brainstormed idea on narrowing down onto a topic. For me, I did a rough google search of things that are currently issues or topics around the world today with statistics widely found. I discovered a helpful website called “6 Global Issues to Watch in 2019”. This was where I found 4 topics that gave off the best statistical data sets in which I too could work with, “Violence, Wastage, Terrorism and Unemployment”. This was made the research task more difficult then first thought as I found myself changing topics regularly, trying to keep the data accurate and too concise with the topic was difficult to find.

Attached is my mind map in which I constructed to throw down all the topics to elaborate. Deciphering which had the best data sets that had plenty of statistics and reliability. Finally I found a global issue that has a previous history on the topic to this day that has varied over time, this being terrorism.

As we went through the week tutorial of week 2 we learn’t about infographics and the importance of it. I thought I would use this to research data presented today on the topic of terrorism (attached). This became a point of which I would follow in creating my own infographics for the topic.

From the research I gathered I found that in the year of 2017 there was an astonishing 1,414 terrorist attacks in Iraq alone. I found this from https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism in which holds several different terrorist attack statistics, ranging from fatalities, number of attacks in general, injuries etc. With many statistics on this one topic it came as both a beneficial and hard topic as there is thousands of statistics given on this one topic. It came as a benefit as there was lots of data in which I could decipher through but too on that difficult in finding how reliable the data given actually is.

Sketches conducted in the design and research phase was the varying types of graphs that I would include, diagrams and icons. This would also be the way in which I would set out my poster to be created. With workshop knowledge that I have gathered over the 4 weeks I was able to use these new found skills to manipulate how too my poster would turn out. Attached below is the beginning of my poster is to be intended to begin like… 

Included in this was my first idea of diagrams that I want to include into the poster. This being a fact sheet form that I was able to gather from the https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism website. Also in addition will be various sets of visual data such as bar and line graphs.

I look forward to the final product of this poster on the world data of terrorism to date.

Monograms are essential for businesses whether they be small or big for customers to recognise a company. Monograms are the first thing in which customers associate with a brand, much like an identity. Built up either an image, a small phrase or title and even just letters such as initials.

OLD MONOGRAM: 

This unrecognisable logo is the formally used ‘BP’ logo for fuel. It is a basic monogram that consists of two letters and a shield surrounding the lettering to form a guard like image. This monogram was important for the company of BP as it allowed customers to visually recognise where a fuel station was. Using a monogram with such little detail to it works in a beneficial way, it creates simplicity in recognition as their is minimal imagery that can distract the viewer from the main subject. This monogram was created for BP when monograms weren’t the main focus of business. Monograms such as these were only really used for labelling on property of the premises. They were as stated above pivotal for advertisement recognition although.

NEW MONOGRAM: 

This monogram attached is the new BP emblem. It is the emblem we see across our TV’s, Newspaper, Billboards and the likes. As too the older monogram in which BP used is something that enables customers to recognise the company purely from recognition of their monogram.

But as time and technology has evolved monograms are required more and more so that they can too be plastered across advertising materials making it more useful today then ever before. Monograms also entail meaning behind what we see in them. As the environment is changing for the worst petrol and automobiles are becoming one of the main blames of this destruction. In this monogram BP has included a flower type design that is blossoming. The association with a flower and fuel ? This can only mean through their monogram BP is depicting its focus and attention to helping to lower fossil fuels emissions.

Over time the use of monograms have changed a lot. They have become a more useful tool for company’s around the world. They are essential in advertising across various platforms for customers to see. They have become more vibrant and less ‘boring’ with meaning going into what we see daily. “A picture is worth a thousand words”

Designers and typographers have created a new way or art expression in the world. Through things such as quotes and typography, designers are express personal meaning or thought. David Carson is an A-

merican graphic designer and art director. Carson influenced the word is his experimental us in typography works. Carson has extraordinarily done work for big company names of the likes; Pepsi Cola, Ray bans, Nike, Microsoft, Budweiser and many more.

Upon my research of the works carried out by David Carson and the many pieces that people are exposed to daily just from his works with these big brands I was asked to find a ransom quote by a designer or typographer. For me I knew that David Carson was the best graphic designer to look further into for this task. From his varies quotes he has constructed from his experimental work with typography such as; “The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer” and “Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does”. But the one I chose to explore was Mr Carson’, “Don’t mistake legibility for communication”.

This typographic quote expressed and constructed from David Carson’s own pure belief “Don’t mistake legibility for communication” caught my attention as it was a truth Carson is trying to express to the viewer that you cannot mistake the plainness for a way of commu

nicating. This quote really challenges other designers to understand what communication really means and how it talks to targeted audiences. Meaning, if communication is the what is trying to be achieved then the aim is simply more then just making it legible. Just beca-

use something is legible does not mean it can communicate and further more even the right thing. It is explained that communication is all apart of a process; the sender, a message, a medium (the way its delivered) and finally a receiver of the message. As shown in attached image.

For me as a designer, Carson’s quote “Don’t mistake legibility for communication” has taught me, as Carson himself wants the audience to reconsider and that is for designers to consider the way they communicate and what it really means to communicate rather then focussing completely on the idea of the legibility of the message. Merely the idea that to communicate does not mean the designer requires to send a message which is legible.