Rubber stamp Shop

Before I start I must thank Richa for dragging me (rather reluctantly) to this hidden craft shop, its on Bury Place, Oxford Circus.I recommend it strongly to anyone and everyone!
Wether your into patterns or colours,art or craft (or both),sane or insane,too bogged down by VCT essay submission or just out of inspiration visit these guys.Its a nice quaint place with the most amazing collection of rubber stamps and the paraphernalia included.Don't miss the basement, is a treasure trove of brilliantly patterned paper.

Typo-Mania

This is Paul's assignment to document at least 20 types that we found around us.The need to complete this assignment was not only educative but made me unusually aware of my surroundings. Always keeping an eye out for interesting designs and quirky fonts or interesting patterns unknowingly created by the most banal things in unusual arrangements.

Like the way the "O" nestles the "Y" making it look like a stick figure.

It's a simple Linotype Handle Gothic font but looks amazing because of the steel finish set against a grey-black background

A long awaited Indian touch:)Was quite surprised to find this piece (Pron:"Accha")Its Devanagiri script.Liked the intent of the words trying to bring in the colourfulness of India.










A simple folding of paper produces this font
(I'v tried this in my collages as well).Liked the simple white placed against the Christmassy background.








"So good we named it twice" is the tag line need I say more?













This is a printing press near Shoreditch,with a friendly old man who is more than happy to show you around the shop and teach you a thing or two about book binding.                                                                  

This picture is slightly hazy because it is taken from my camera phone,liked the way the mad contorted logo goes on to write the text.Troubled minds?

Choice no.1 for VCT essay

When we actually started out doing our VCT essay I had set my heart on talking about Noma Bar's poster/brochure design for BAFTA 2009.Here are some of his illustrations which are strikingly simple yet cheekily clever.

Do check out Alex Bucktin's blog (http://a-bucktin0710-dc.blogspot.com) ,it was in her blog that I found Mr.Bar.

One down two to go this term!

Though I have hardly written anything about my VCT classes,I realised how much it has influenced the way I see pictures and better still write about never thought I could finish it on time...but now its done(well not really!)This is the image I had picked:-

Tavis Colburn's poster for BAFTA 2010

Nail Art

Was just randomly skimming through blogs when I found the works by Marcus Levine,who is a steel nail artist from Yorkshire.Its amazing to see the shadowing in his work,like a double shadow!

It reminded me of a huge montage like mosaic,where the work can be truly appreciated when one looks at it from a distance.

Creative Oppurtunities

Today's class with Catherine made us feel...as one of my classmates rightly put it "ignorant".It was surprising to know how surprised we were to know, how surprisingly less we knew about design companies!
We were given www.creativereview.co.uk to look into and research design companies who's work intrested us the most.Each group had a pattern, some choose companies for they liked their work with typography and some just liked the black and white templates used and we as a group seemed to have an eye for companies which did good illustrations.

Inspiration 1. www.automatonstudio.no/

They are a silk screen printing studio in Oslo.There mission being able to provide screen printing services for all with professional help.For some odd reason I'v not been able to upload pictures most of the work that has been produced in their studio.Here is one done by Ernst Føyn and Tone Emblemsvåg for thier club night Play skool

Love the colours used,gives an awesome neon light effect.It can easily pass off for an Illustration..but its NOT...enter screen printing.

Inspiration 2.www.indiantypefoundry.com


A type foundry that produces Latin as well as non-Latin fonts.It was a joint venture between  Peter Bilak (Typotheque),Rajesh Kejriwal (Kyoorius Exchange) and Satya Rajpurohit.Some very interesting styles and customisable fonts are made here.

Inspiration 3: www.rayandkeshavan.com

A design company based in India.They have helped some of the top companies in the world launch/revive their public campaigns.The reason for their popularity can be seen on their website,where they give a detailed breakup of the work they have done and the reasons why they came to that decision.

Inspiration 4: www.centralillustration.com

It is an agency based in Mayfair, London.Working with a diverse group of designers producing contemporary art work for Advertising, Design and Production.With some brilliant Illustrations and Graphic Design,I particularly liked the work under the heading Typography.

Inspiration 5: www.bigactive.com 


An award winning design consultancy firm who specialise in art direction and graphic design.Again a group of very talented designers who have worked for and on many campaigns including Apple and Harrods.

LCC through our eyes for theirs!

After getting lost a zillion times we (Georgia, Stefano,Richa and I) finally managed to get around LCC and discover some hidden secrets!Its amazing the kind of products that come out of the insanely creative minds at LCC at the Letterpress unit and 3D workshop.

Down the colour lane(found right outside our Open access computing Lab)

With ancient letterpresses, Stefano's antics, mad rush to come up with a plot and a story line for the prospective students(which btw was our task:LCC through our eyes for theirs!) and parched tongue(Don't ask!) we created a map of LCC using Iconography.

The first thing I did after Karl's class on the 26th was to enroll for an induction in the 3D workshop!For all those who haven't...visit the workshop!

Chondria Philia Phobia and Divya

Flying through the timeline of typos Paul showed us the origin of alphabets and words to what they are now I uncovered some interesting pictures:

This is from Johann Gutenberg's font type very Black Gothic its taken from the the first ever bible ever to be printed
 











Out typo class with Paul was an eye opener to people who (like me) are blissfully unaware of the various Typographical jargons.Its amazing to see how typefaces have evolved since the 1420's when the first font was actually created!

Learning about typefaces.seriffs.curves and tails. Our first task was to find out what the smallest elements in a paragraph were..We chose dots and some interesting ideas were flying around eg Paul talked about this one incident when a student had to type a mail without a single space ashisspacebarwasnotworking....we realised that a dot on top of an i or j was not necessary either...full stops as a whole to mark the end of a sentence was not necessary either.Think about it!






Playing around with typo






Just out of curiosity I tried to make some of my own font gallaxy heavily borrowed from Alan fetchers version of the same which is coming under experimentations shortly

Snip Snip

The word "crop" has 11 yes Eleven verb definitions from grazing to clipping off ears to geological meanings to cutting the head off! (refer http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/crop)

Our narrative workshop started out with me completely lost to going crazy snipping people's  heads and toes and everything in between;) But at the end of David's session I was thinking differently, with respect to physically cropping images and then having a storyline using random images and employing narrative sequences such as Moment to Moment,Aspect to Aspect etc..I'm trying out similar things with the Indesign Software,will post those shortly.

The best part of the workshop was how we could come up with witty/dark/slapstick humour/liberal/democratic/run of the mill/out of the box tag lines for random images.Scroll down for a laugh!

Crops to highlight,my personal favourite is the first one of the swimmer(Close up of detail)