If I had more time with this brief I would like to have developed my skills in after effects and animate my icons so as to use them for online promotional material. This would help make the icons less static and much more pro-active.

Hobby Con is a convention which encourages the people of Leeds to try out some new hobbies in hopes that one will stick with them. Hobby Con has a wide range of hobby events available with numerous events taking place the whole duration of summer. A large quantity of the events will take place in the Corn Exchange where the Hobby Con headquaters is located. Some of the larger events will take place in and around Leeds at more appropriate locations.

By making the events easily accessible with proffessionals at hand, this will make it extremely easy for anyone to take part. The online presence and printed advertising would help reach a large audience and make the event widely known about in Leeds. The events will encourage socializing with people who have similar interests and help grow a friendlier community within Leeds. The nature of the convention allows for it to become a yearly event. 
The events are colour coded into yellow (creative hobbies), blue (technology based hobbies) and red (sport based hobbies). This helps the audience navigate to their desired hobby easily. The yellow and black colour scheme is used as the base aesthetic to build a strong and more consistent brand ideneity for the convention. The bright colour scheme resonates themes of summer and gives off a friendly approachable look which will only encourage people to participate in the events.

The audience is very wide and the majority of events available to people of all ages with very few exceptions. The design aesthetic is kept upbeat and attractive to this audience with the use of friendly icons that have tick lines and curved ends and corners which keeps in tone with the use of type.

The branding for Hobby Con is kept consistent with the use of icons making up the main imagery. The booklet is split into three sections which represent diferent types of hobbies for easy naviagtion.Yellow: creative hobbies. Blue: technology based hobbies. Red: sport hobbies. The booklet features a small selection of the events taking place in June. A new booklet will be available in July (blue) and September (red). The keyrings and t-shirts are a way in which the convention will encourage and remind the participants to keep up their hobby with the addition of the Hobby Con calendar which can be used to mark down when they will be attending events.

Initial concepts began with the idea that ones sub-conscious self manipulates dreams for ones conscious self. This was visualised as seen below with a person manipulating the word 'dream' much like one would a puppet. By depicting a pillow and bed, the word dream also can be seen as a mobil which is used to make children go to sleep. The overall image looks quite sinister which is not what I want.

I began working on something more abstract, depicting a silhouette of the author, Sigmund Freud and visualising the idea of psychoanalysis and dream psychology. This concept also shows that this book is a look at some of Sigmund Freuds own thoughts and findings.

The design above is very flat and quite dull. I began looking at some more interesting ways to produce it and introduce a better way to present the title. I began trying some hand rendered type which incorporated a sense of fluidity which keeps in theme with idea of dreams.

I found that the thought bubble looked quite like a brain and could be used alongside the silhouette as seen below. The hand rendered type began to look like chalk when inverted. This style began to suite the books educational content.

The type lacked impact, so I began producing a heavier version which would be more legible from a distance.

I still found the design lacked impact and felt flat.

further experimentation with the silhouette did not lead to a less flat design

After many experiments I chose to surround the type with a squiggly mess which shows the complexity of the human brain.

It was planned to have a similar squiggle design on the back surrounding the blurb and other content, but I found that it was too messy and was much easier to navigate without.

To make Hobby Cons seem more legitimate. I began thinking of things that I could produce which could act as part of the design work for Hobby-Con. I then began to produce the hobby icons as keyring which could be sold at the events to encourage people to keep up a said hobby. The keyring were laser cut from a 3mm mdf. If this were for an actual event, I would rather have used a plastic or rubber as they can bend and are much more durable, but tends to burn under the laser cutter.

The MDF had quite a nice aesthetic when cut. The burnt edges were quite visually appealing with the clean cut icons. Despite this, the wooden icons did not fit in with the brands identity.

I gathered my icons and began experimenting with ways in which I would colour them

I found that paint was too thick and dried very badly on the keyring.

Ink took much longer to dry but gave a much thinner coat which had a slight shine when put in light. Ideally I would have preferred a denser matte finish which would better suit a large scale event like this one.

In addition I have mocked up a series of t-shirt designs which could be worn by event staff or possibly sold to the public. The t-shirts are coloured using the designated colour given to their category. The icons on the front will help event go-ers easily see what hobby event the staff member is part of.

Below is a great summary of Freuds beliefs within the field of Dream Psychology:

Freud  considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form. 

Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates. 

On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of his theory. He had been worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud in fact blamed himself for this, and was feeling guilty.

Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party and examined her.  He then saw a chemical formula for a drug that another doctor had given Irma flash before his eyes and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by the other doctor. Freud's guilt was thus relieved.

Freud interpreted this dream as wish-fulfillment. He had wished that Irma's poor condition was not his fault and the dream had fulfilled this wish by informing him that another doctor was at fault. Based on this dream, Freud (1900) went on to propose that a major function of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes.

Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what the dreamer remembers) and the latent content, the symbolic meaning of the dream (i.e. the underlying wish). The manifest content is often based on the events of the day. 

The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called dream-work. The purpose of dream work is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continuing sleeping. Dream work involves the process of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration.

The process of condensation is the joining of two or more ideas/images into one. For example, a dream about a man may be a dream about both one's father and one's lover. A dream about a house might be the condensation of worries about security as well as worries about one's appearance to the rest of the world.

Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about to someone else. For example, one of Freud’s patients was extremely resentful of his sister-in-law and used to refer to her as a dog, dreamed of strangling a small white dog. Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law.  If the patient would have really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty. The unconscious mind transformed her into a dog to protect him. 

Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling images in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content.  According to Freud this is why the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events.

In Freud’s later work on dreams he explored the possibility of universal symbols in dreams. Some of these were sexual in nature, including poles, guns and swords representing the penis and horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse.

However, Freud was cautious about symbols and stated that general symbols are personal rather than universal. A person cannot interpret what the manifest content of a dream symbolized without knowing about the person’s circumstances.

The existing book cover designs for Sigmund Freud's 'Dream Psychology' feature some quite abstract imagery. The design below features some imagery of a circuitboard which suggests content that relates to technology which is very misleading. The design has a retro-futuristic look due to its use of wireframe imagery of a human.

A more appropriate approach is the design below which incorporates imagery that suggests molecular science which is slightly more appropriate. The dull colours aren't particularly exciting and the background imagery causes the type to be not very legible. The design could be vastly improved with the use of type hierarchy, change of colour scheme and removing the photo of Freud.

The cover below is extremely simple in it's design and does not give much indication towards the content of the book aside from the title.

My own design will incorporate imagery of the mind and dreaming. Strong visuals will draw the attention of the audience and type will become a secondary factor.

The concertina and flyer have an aesthetic which is inspired by the rough, anarchy theme that surrounds the exhibition Type and image have been designed to look like it has been ripped up and stuck into the concertina to add to this aesthetic. The black and white colour restrictions helped in this case as it fits very well with the newspaper style.

The image above is very strong, so can work across multiple platforms including the flyer, concertina and as an ad campaign.

Although the brief required a concertina, I have also mocked it up as a booklet.

Main reasons that young people don't vote

The information is presented in a way that is not targetted to interest young people.

The information is not easily accessible to a generation that is used to having everything at their fingertips.

There is a lack of web present for UK politics. 

We are known as the ‘always on’ generation.Young people are very rarely aware that politics will effect them. 

This causes a lack of interest in voting and general politics.

Lack of knowledge of the politics - Teach students about politics? what affects them and years to come.


To Tackle this we should..

Display information in a appealing way. Interesting to read.

App? Accessibility is an issue with young people. They are used to having everything at their finger tips.

Educate at a young age. Politics-ed in school, college, uni.

Ballot boxes in colleges and unis

Fined in Australia if you don't sign up for voting.

Zine, publication with information? Designed to engage audience.

Make it cool to vote.

Easy Comparison website to help make informed decision.

Branding has to be very neutral. Aimed at young people.

From Barack Obamas political campaign is is clear that his use of web presence helped him get into power. 

Even now he has a very large web presence that presents him as a sensible but quite cool celebrity. I don't believe that this is the way that we should have politicians presented to us as it means that we will take the situation less seriously, but unfortunately this is the only way to keep young people interested in politics.

We need to give UK politics an easily accessable, social web presence that clearly displays the information on each party so that young people can become more aware of diferent policies to allow them to make an informed decision on their vote.

We will do this by:

Creating a imparcial political party comparison website that intergrates with social media.

A corrisponding smart phone application that keeps young people updated on political news in a clear, aproachable way.

A series of Political seminars aimed at students that take place in colleges and universities all over the UK.

Our campaign aims to modernise British politics. Everything about British politics is old-fashioned and quite poorly designed. To modernise the political system we have simplified the parties into separate colours instead of using their poorly designed logos. This should allow the politicians to become the faces of their campaign much like Obama did. 

We have developed a logo used by the BBC that uses all the colours so as not to be biased. 

The logo can then be applied across multiple platforms to build a strong brand that we can take on the road universities and colleges in the form of lectures that educate young minds on british politics.

The website would be very simple and clean design to target the young generation that are attracted to modern design.

The app would take on a similar aesthetic and make the whole campaign more social by linking the content to social networks.