Cups of Tea 0909 - 0915

Creativity is a strange thing. It manifests itself in such strange and limitless ways. Even if you think your not creative, I believe that whatever your job through time and the tiniest bit of dedication, each person improves a post in his or her own way. Be it slightly lowering a shelf so people can get a product easier, being able to judge the speed you need to impact a tackle to allow a turn over ball, or even cooking the egg precisely so the yolk is drippy but the white hardens, all of this, each little decision, skill and act of independent thought is branched under creativity in my eyes.

It's all a matter of perspective. The way that you see this world in which we eat, love, live and eventually die is different to those around you. You may perceive colours slightly differently, you my smell things more strongly or you might just think a little differently and this can make you unique.

I am recently beginning to realize that while I can create pictorially, my creativity manifests itself more in ideas and linguistics. While there is no doubt in my mind that I am not the brightest or most creative person, although I can come across as smug or simple depending on the social situation, when given a pen and paper I can express myself fully and comprehensively through writing. In fact the mere thought of words like 'soliloquy' or even simple little ones like 'opus' make me love the english language. I say this not for any kind of self-praise or egotistical back patting, I just find myself watching this video more and more, wanting to express my own love and share this with you...



Admittedly my grammar is awful and I do occasionally pull people up on wrong quotes from films, even though I myself trip up over words that muddle in my head. Which I admit is both twatish, irritating and sad, but please know I'm working on it. I therefore vow from this moment on to think before I speak. As we all know, I can ramble and I do at times like the sound of my own voice. But I will sort this out, I promise.

The irony here lies in me saying I can express myself and this probably makes no sense, so maybe I'm wrong about that too... but it is 01:25 in the morning!

M x

Cups of Tea 0891 - 0908

A lot of tea and a lot of Sopranos does not a productive weekend make. While alot has been done when I really think about it, not in terms of actual design... It was mostly spent catching up on sleep and i'm kinda angry at myself. But at least the three ideas i'm currently working on are solid and in full swing... while there is a fourth idea I've hinted at in the works, it will have to wait until after christmas... or one of them defiantly isn't going to get done properly!

Anyways, I want an early night so I actually get up at 9 tomorrow...



I'll leave you with this nifty little site, It's fun AND educational ;)

M x

Cups of Tea 0886 - 0890

Did you see that ludicrous display last (to)night? ARGHHH GATLAND WHY?! Awful, Awful game but nevermind...

Little design's been done today, as after a night of french horror (oh la la) I am absolutely shattered... So only a quick entry again as I want to be up for 8am tomorrow to dive into work!

This should suit the purpose to give you some idea of what I'm going to be working on though ;)



M x

Cups of Tea 0884 - 0885

You'd think with the lack of Tea, there would have been a lack of design. Well there you'd be wrong... but it was bread and butter design work that pretty much meant relaying out an older version of the flyer, changing the font (the original designer picked a free font with only upper case...) to Futura so I could differentiate between bands and venues... Sigh, where for art thou creative music jobs gone!!!

Other than that, about to settle down and watch some French Horrors, so I'll leave you with a cool multiple choice diagram of picking the right font... It got linked to me by my friend Ingrid :) Cheers old girl!



Tomorrow, the real work begins...

M x

Cups of Tea 0871 - 0883

Alot of tea consumed over the last two days people. Which means alot is going on in my head... after tomorrow, I'm going to be shut away in this room with no loop to the outside world. Friday / Saturday / Sunday are full work days. 8am - 10pm I'm going to drill out work for the 3 projects I have in my head right now. Will it be a successful weekend? Who can tell, 3 things I know for certain are these.

- I'll have something to show you.

- I'll be able to dress myself (buttons and all...)

- I will finally put to rest my distaste of vegetarians.

Wow, ain't I cryptic? Hopefully this centurion shift of work will get me back in the mood to blog every day, not just every other...

Anyways, Imma make this quick because alas, I have to be up early tomorrow to do some work before I meet the wonderful ms. Anderson and set about a day of watch french horror movies! oh la la (8)

So i'll leave you with this:



I wish I was the sucker who came up with this idea... Damn them... see more here!

M x

Cups of Tea 0861 - 0870

There was originally, a 0861 - 0862 which I posted off of the ipod touch, but alas... it seems to have not uploaded again. How silly!

Anyways, just a quick note to let you all know i'm not dead and that the cogs are turning, possibly with some exciting new things that you (yes, you :O) can all be apart of... but as it's late, I just thought i'd share a neat little link :)

http://makedo.com.au/

Suffice to say, I seriously want one of these kits! I thought the idea was absolute genius!



Hopefully some design tomorrow, chim chim!

M x

Cups of Tea 0857 - 0860

Goddammit! How easily I slip out of posting every day... nevermind, I shall soon fix that... I hope haha!

Today has been a day off of sorts, after seeing Gemma yesterday for her birthday, I got back to mine around 4ish today so I pretty much just sat down and read The Hobbit from cover to cover. while it's kind of dimmed the nostalgic glow that the book once held for me. I remember so well being 11 and reading the hobbit and lord of the rings with friends, all of us reading it together and discussing the parts we got to together as we'd discuss TV shows or games... Did you get to The Mines of Morrior Yet? HAS GANDALF FOUGHT THE BALROG?!"

Which when I think about it, is probably a show of Tolkien's skill to tap the imagination. The only other writer capable of producing such a reaction today would probably be J.K Rowling, but I mean for 7 boys to all be reading the same book at one time was a rare occurrence in the early days of the net, I doubt that thing really happens now off of message boards, which is quite sad.

But it has given me one or two ideas for projects after re-reading it... so look out for something hobbit-esq. soon I guess... But then again, I've got so many ideas for projects rattling around at the moment ><

Other than that, I pre-ordered the 2nd issue of 8Faces, which you can do here. If it's anything like the first, it'll be worth the £10 it costs!

M x

Cup of Tea 0856

Just a quick post as it's late and I want to goto bed. Yes, the dissertation (2035 words of it to be precise) is written... To be honest, I think I'm going to still carry on writing it... I pretty much know where I'm headed with it and believe it's alot easier if I polish it off by christmas!

Still no word back on the sub logo, so I'll just post up this cool video I saw on facebook earlier, it really does make you think! Props go to Rhys.

INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.

M x

Cups of Tea 0851 - 0855

Sorry I didn't update last night! Therefore you get two posts in one day. How's that for a slice of fried gold?

So this is just a quick little update before I crack on with the rest of my dissertation (900 words left...) but some people wanted to see the rest of my steam punk ideas... and now that they're with the client, their kinda in the hands of God anyways... so behold, the other 3 pages of ideas!



There is a 3... jut imagine 3.5 without a drop shadow (client's request...)

Until tonight!

M x

Cups of Tea 0843 - 0850

Not alot of tea drunk because of the old paintball and steam-punk design :o Despite the awesome poetry about not hearing back, I got to do the final designs :) w00t w00t! No word if the logo will be used 100% yet, but hopefully it will... that and it's quite a nice project to have in the folio :)

It's been a busy day on it, I received the concept art for their sub on Friday, I spent the day vectoring it before going to bed bright and early, well... 12. Which is early for me, but alas... I was given free sparklers!

Then yesterday I went paintballing for the first time in forever (I'm talking about 6 years...) It was aces! One death to 6- 8 kills (got at least 4 direct kills, 3 SURRENDERS, then me and Ollie were spraying the bridge in the last game and people walked out dead so I coulda got one or two...) Which was a nice break... even if it did KO me into an early night :o

Today was spent doing all the final logos, there's about 40 in total... I wanted to get some dissertation done but this was kinda priority one... I mean CBBC has Newsround and last time I checked, THE NEWS WAS IMPORTANT! (even the opinions of people my mental age...) Nevermind, tomorrow I think I can crack out the last 1.5k :) I've gotta remember to print off the guidelines however, I left my last load in the seminar room.

Anyways, here's a brief sneeeeeak peak of the logos I've done, the first 2 of 5 pages of idea... They're based on idea 11 from the last post. They asked me to steampunk it up, so I did... Steampunking up the original logo and recreating it totally based of their concept sketches. Then obviously some play with font! The other 3 pages (imho the better stuff...) will be uploaded tomorrow, so be sure to swing back!



M x

Cups of Tea 0835 - 0842

So there once was a grand logo design contest,
that run for two days and it was quite a test,
it was the general consensus that time was pressed,
but design away anyway the class did to their best.

Feverishly they toiled without any rest,
making sure the aims of the brief were clearly expressed,
as the deadline neared they started to stress,
until it was submitted by email, by the client's request.

Then They all cheered at completing their quest,
to the best of their skills, all points addressed,
But they got no reply, they were all depressed,
when 12 hours later, no reply was possessed.




Sigh.

M x

Cups of Tea 0822 - 0834

By jobe, what an uncharacteristically moody weekend! Possibly due to illness (my ears are still abit stuffy and I have a bit of a fever) but I generally felt like crap over the past three days. Nevermind, despite a rock start this morning I seem to be on the mend!

The dissertation has finally been started. And to tell you the truth, while I feel I haven't done nearly as much reading as I probably should have, I feel like I could easily finish it by Christmas if I set my mind to it. Not to be arrogant or snobbish, but much like swimming comes naturally to some and rhythm seems to for others, I've never really had a problem with words, so 8000 really isn't that daunting a possibility for me when I really sit down and think about it.

It's just the lack of research I feel will cripple me. I'm finding it harder than I imagined to link the ideas back to design and how they want the essay structured. It's almost impossible to show illustrations in a section based on explaining the current state of a music industry. I could say "This is Ke$ha's new album, it sold X amount of physical copies to x amount of downloads" but it seems an unnecessary waste of words for such a broad topic.

I'm sure I'll figure it out...

Anyways, it was brought to my attention awhile back and I never checked it out, so I now implore you to do so as it really is an interesting read. This is 8Faces, a magazine devoted to type that in a Desert Island Disks fashion asks, if you could only use 8 typefaces for the rest of your life, what would they be?







It sports a very stylish and modernist design and has some great interviews, pity all the physical copies sold out 4 months before I even caught wind of it! However don't threat! It's available in digital format! The cost of the PDF is £3 but I'm sure its available in other, less legitimate places...

Right then. Early to bed, early to write...

M x