Beach life.

With Unit 5 finished I've found myself with a considerable amount of free time (this, of course, means disregarding the 'souvenir project' which is due in a week and a half, but y'know, good weather takes precedence). Today was baking hot, at least in comparison to the months and months of cold weather that we've had - and so it seemed fitting to leave our work behind and walk down to the beach for a barbeque.

We had an abundance of sausages and it was a really great day - it makes me remember why Fal struck me as such a great place to live, I very much plan to have numerous days such as this before this term is over - I know I will miss the beach when I'm back in Surrey. I thought photographing my last couple of weeks here would nicely document a time I will look back on fondly. I really cannot believe the first year of my degree is already up.

So, its been a while.

I'd like to say I've been too busy, that there's been lots of important happenings going on but sadly no - I just forgot about this blog, too lazy to update it; so here's my attempt to rectify that.

Unit 5 is finally finished, the last piece of marked work for Level One Graphics! It really is bizarre to think I've completed a year already. So, briefly, this unit was great because it really gave us the freedom to do whatever (literally). Three initial briefs; 10 Things You Should Know About.... , Red, Blue, Green and First Things First, or Not. I chose 10 things, and within that picked famous disasters - I really wanted to avoid something disgustingly cliched like, for example; 10 things you should know about surviving an earthquake, or something equally uninspiring. My projects to date, have been fairly sensible, and really not that playful, so this time I decided to do something I would find a bit more fun.

So I wrote my own brief which gave my project the title of; "10 Things You Should Know About (avoiding) Political Disaster". I initially did a lot of research into examples, and actual politicians, but this morphed my idea into more of a fact-file rather than something satirical, or tongue in cheek - and really quite dull. So I kept away from using specific examples in my outcome, and I think this really benefited the piece.

So here is the final outcome; presented in book form and (hypothetically) designed in dossier/manifesto form to give to new or prospective leaders of political parties...

This was the front cover; I designed my own "typeface" (in the loosest definition of the word, I think) - the corrupted, worn geometric shapes were meant to mirror the breakdown of politics (supposedly). Though to be honest it was just a bit of fun doing something more "hands-on" for once.

My ten chapters.... (I tried to keep the visual theme of the red/blue throughout the book)

Just an example of a double page spread. I used two bupa-esque characters to help illustrate each of my ten chapters, I think it helped animate my book (and also cut down the amount of text I had to write).

... and again. I actually put quite a bit of effort into writing the text for each of the chapters, trying to get across the ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone of the book - though I think this is quite easy to overlook.

As the (final) final outcome of the year I am quite pleased, I rarely like my pieces after staring at them for a month of project work, but actually, now, a couple of days after the hand-in, I think my grids and layouts work quite well. I just wish I hadn't made such a hash of the binding, but oh well, you can't have everything.