Josh Norris OCA logbook

This exercise focused on two things, the different ways of folding paper and how to properly visualize your ideas. Overall the task asked me to design a leaflet for an organization inviting people to volunteer for a task. The task I chose was restoring a garden for a church. Now once I found my cause I decided to experiment with different ways of folding paper and also ways of conveying information. I started drawing thumbnails to get the ideas from my brain to paper. However sometimes my problem can be that I jump on ideas too quickly, I settle very quickly. This was my sketching page I experimented with multiple different ways of folding the paper. I had an idea where I would have a square piece of paper and fold in the 4 corners, on the back It would say 4 reasons to volunteer, and each of the 4 corners would pull back to reveal a reason on an image. The full square would open up to have a full image on it. Now even though I thought that this would be an enticing and interesting ...

The brief for this task was to research the works of HG Wells and create 3 book covers that would be displayed in a set. My first task was to research his work, I googled some of his most popular work, I chose to go with: The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit and The War of the Worlds. What I then did was brainstorm the key parts of the story and the key ideas. The War of the Worlds featured themes of, free will, Fate, and Imperialism. The Wonderful Vist has themes of mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England, whereas the Time Machine has themes of Entropy. War of the Worlds: I've never read the Time Machine so I briefly read the synopsis of the book, the book is about Time Travel and Morlocks. I then went and researched previous covers for The Time Machine and a lot of the covers feature cogs and clocks which is appropriate. I tried to feature the Morlocks into my work but that would require Illustration which isn't an aspect of design I want to rely heavily o...

A collection of Banksy work Josh Norris For Christmas 2016 I got a Banksy desktop calendar, every month is a different Banksy piece. This is where I started properly looking at Banksy work, I understood who he was from a younger age but being older it allowed me to value his work a lot more. This research task is both secondary research and some visual research as I want to experiment with using his art style inside my own work, ready for the first exercise ( book cover design). Banksy has one of the most unique and identifiable art styles in design. It's unquestionable that his work is world renowned, this is why I think an art style this strong is perfect for my book covers. I'm not going to flat out copy his work but the stencil style street art is something that is so inspiring. Furthermore, the social commentary that is tied into his art is so powerful and goes beyond just graffiti on a wall. This is hands down my favorite Banksy piece, It discusses an incredibly ...

Problem Solving is the next part of the course. It begins with an exercise called working to a brief, the task is to read the 3 briefs and analyse them. Asking yourself a series of questions. I'm going to go through each question individually throughout this post so I won't list them here. What I began doing is highlighting the key parts of the brief, these include the medium of the design, logo packaging etc, as well as the target audience and key words that can really help to get the vibe right. BRIEF ONE: The first brief was to produce packaging for Quaker's new ' Chilled Creamy Oats . I've highlighted both 'packaging' and 'Chilled Creamy Oats', packaging tells me exactly what needs to be designed and because it's packaging for a product, I need to know what the product is because there would usually be an image which goes onto the packaging which represents the product inside. This means that if I was given the brief directly from...

So, before writing this I may have googled "25 names every graphic designer should know",  as a budding graphic designer I'm surprised that I've never properly looked at other designers in depth and studied their work. Because they're the professionals and studying them (for me at least) is a massive part of my progression. These designers are behind some of the most recognizable: book covers, branding, posters and logos. Studying their designs and processes inspires me in my own designs and gives me an insight into what works. The first designer I came across was Chip Kidd, he's a very upbeat and inspiring designer, I first browsed his portfolio of work online and then went onto watch his TED talk about some of his book covers he's produced. One other reason I wanted to research Chip Kidd, is that in the next assignment I'm going to have to produce 3 book covers and Chip designs book covers. So it made perfect sense to research him first. His most...