We looked into how to write ourself a brief as studio brief 4 is self-directed. We have to find a problem that students suffer from when they first start university and solve it. Below are a few initial ideas I came up with for briefs written as a problem which i would have to solve.

The Design World

A large majority of students that are new to Graphic Design are unaware of culture trends and the world that surrounds it.

Come up with a solution to introduce this awareness to the first years as well as a way for them to keep up to date with things like blogs, news sites and websites that educate on the culture of Graphic Design

Background/Considerations

1. Look into Graphic Design blogs
2. Think of what format/media you will use
3. Consider the tone of voice and your audience

The Design Process

Many design students find it difficult to work and often are struggle to plan their work, which makes the design process messy. Create a guide which will help new design students plan their work for a smoother design process.

Background/Considerations

1. Think of what format/media you will use
2. Consider the tone of voice and your audience

Socializing

A large majority of students find it hard to make friends and socialise in the first few weeks of university.

Come up with a solution, that will give students advice with socialising skills, places to go and information of social clubs.

Background/Considerations

1. Look into current things trying to resolve this problem.
2. Consider the tone of voice, platforms you can use, content

I think that i will go for the design process brief as it is something that I personally suffered with and I have since found out ways that personally help me stay organised and meet deadlines.

I received a lot of feedback telling me that my design was very eye-catching and interesting, but there was a lot of confusion as to whether the person in the design is a ninja or a hostage.

To resolve this I would like to illustrate a sword infront of the characters face with a reflection of her enemy in hopes that it will be made more obvious that she is a ninja in training. The image below is an example of how I would like it to look although I don't have much time to design it and also get it screen printed. I will wait for the final crit this friday and see what other feedback I receive and whether it is worth it.

As it was my strongest design, I chose to take the blindfolded design forward to screen print. Below are the positives for black (left) which went onto of the red (right).

The final outcome is great. The red is really vibrant and really stands out from a distance. I received a lot of positive feedback from the prints, although again, a few thought that the woman is a hostage.

I went onto IMDB in hopes to find some memorable quotes from the film that I could hopefully use on my alternative movie poster design. 

The 3 quotes below are possible phrases that I could use although they may not fit with the design and may not make sense to people who haven't seen the film.

Below is a screenshot from the film which depicts a blindfolded ninja in training, which I believe is quite iconic and connotes 'Lady Justice'. 

The lady is justice blindfolded represents objectivity, in that uprightness must be given out impartially without fear or favour. It should be fair and consider all.

I began using a wacom tablet to draw the outline and hair.

I then used the screenshot I had to create a halftone of the image to layer onto my image.

I wanted to use blue as it connotes the American flag which is very important within the film, but it doesn't seem to work. I created some red stripes which gave the poster more depth and made it look as though the character is coming out of the design slightly.

The black, white and red design had a lot more impact and was far more viewable from a distance.

Feedback in the crit showed that a lot of people were unsure whether she was a ninja or a hostage, but the design is very engaging and interesting because of it's ambiguity.

The design above focuses around a small, explosive, fly-like device that is used throughout the film that is quite interesting. Feedback showed that this is quite interesting and the colours would look good screen printed. It was suggested to try white on black as this may look better screen printed.

 This design was not fully developed as I believed it was not interesting enough to catch the eye of the audience. Feedback showed that this design would not be particularly popular and would not make the audience watch the film.

The vector illustration above is meant to show how outnumbered the G.I.Joes are throughout the film.   Feedback in the crit showed that this was clear, although it was far to dull to interest the audience at all.

Feedback showed that the design above is interesting, but needs to be developed further. It was suggested to take on a similar style of illustration as the blindfold design.

Here are a few of my favourite movie posters with a short explanation to why I believe they are so effective:

There are a lot of amazing Polish movie posters which put the original American posters to shame, but my favourite by far is this poster for 'Return of the Pink Panther'.

The design of The Godfather posters is very simple, yet so effective. The use of black and very little white gives a very sinister tone to the design of man which a very sinister facial expression. The colours have connotations of death and the red rose also adds to the theme of death. Just from this poster you can tell the general theme of the film. The puppet master design on the type also gives you a hint at this man being powerful and in control of other people.

Drive is one of my favourite films. The design work on the film is amazing and fits together with the music perfectly to give it a really unique vibe to the whole film. Drive is a 2011 American neo noir crime thriller film directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, and Albert Brooks. Although Drive shares several characteristics with the similarly-named 1978 Walter Hill car-chase film, The Driver, it is actually adapted from the 2005 James Sallis novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Hossein Amini.

Because of Drives strong and unique visuals it has inspired a lot of alternative movie posters. As you can see in the few examples below they use a specific colour scheme. (pink, dark turquoise, yellow, black).

The design below is a great example of a 2 colour poster that makes good use of both colours. The design has used two icon pieces of imagery from the film and merged them together. The film revolves around a guy who is an expert driver (thus the car) and in a few scenes he uses a metal hammer as a weapon.

The poster designs below were created by the British Illustrator, Olly Moss, who has a created this silhouette style that many people have started mimicking and adapting. The style is so successful because the silhouettes are of such iconic characters that anyone who has arched the film will recognise. The additional details within the silhouettes are of yet more icon scenes from the films. Olly moss' designs are particularly popular because of how he uses the background content to add to the foreground silhouette in a very smart way.

Since we decided to use Wordpress to create our blog, we have been busy creating content that people can look at. We are all happy with how the blog looks and functions and are now simply having fn getting in contact with designers and students who want to be featured on the blog.

Click here to see the website in action.

The blog features a social network sharing system which allows viewers to share our blog to there friends which ultimately will help our blog go viral. As you can see below people have been using this on twitter and Facebook.

What's great about blogger is the great amount of statistics it can gee you about the traffic visiting your blog. As you can see below our views are increasing every day since we started and the amount of views is very relative to the amount of content we post on that day.

We can also see where the visitors are coming from to our website. Facebook is our top 'referee' but also twitter and reddit. 

We can also see which countries most of our viewers live in. We have a lot of views from the United Kingdom, but also Columbia, which may be due to us featuring the Columbian designer, Pellisco on our blog.

We have also set up a Facebook page which features posts that are linked to the website. Below is how the post is viewed by people who like the page.

 Twitter is another platform which we can use to increase the popularity of our blog. We post a photo of the work in the post as part of the tweet so that the viewer can see what the link is about before clicking on it.

To promote our type blog, we have chosen to create some screen printed business cards with our blogs details on them. We have chosen to screen print them as we feel that the process fits better with our designs and is cheaper to reproduce. We had a little bit of trouble aligning the front and back when screen printing, but came out with a good amount of cards in both black on white and white on black card. Bellow are a few photos showing the cards throughout the process.

'Keeping an eye on type' is a slogan that we came up with that fit well with our name as a concept and had the friendly tone of voice that we wanted for our blog.

We are happy with the final outcomes although we have had some constructive criticism that the card hold not change its orientation either side as it can be confusing and leave the viewer looking at the other side upside down.

I went through the film again to take screen shots of any imagery that is unique or iconic in the film.

A scene where the protagonist has a shooting competition with a cupcake as the target.

The enemy, 'Zartan', uses nano-technology to disguise himself as the president.

A recurring weapon used in the film is these robotic bugs that explode on command.

An iconic G.I. Joe enemy, 'Destro', makes his first appearance.

'Snake Eyes' training with his new partner.

Arch enemies, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, meet for a battle.

Close-up of Snake Eyes' mask

Snake Eyes shoots shurikens that are being thrown at him

Unique ninja fight swinging from ropes on the side of a cliff.

Head of the G.I. Joes reveals ridiculous amounts of weapons hidden around his house.

Screen showing every countries' jules being set of.

London being blown up by the Cobra operatives

Storm Shadow cuts a bullet in half that is being shot at him.

Cobras in space weapon of mass destruction.

Main Cobra agents together.

'Road Block' using a mini-gun.