Doomben Shoes

This afternoon's lesson was dedicated to working on the Doomben Shoes brief - creating a shoe advertisement in InDesign.

Looking at design elements & creating business cards

In the first half of the class we looked a slide presentation of design elements.

The second half of the class was devoted to creating a template for business cards. Business cards are typically - 55mm x 90mm

To replicate this activity, measurement specifications are:

Layer 1 -

• Page - 210mm x 397mm
• 2 columns
• 10 mm between the columns
• Top margin 20cm
• Bottom margin 27mm
• Each side margin 10mm
• Vertical Guides - at 55mm. 65mm, 120mm, 130mm, 185mm, 195mm, 250mm

Layer 2 -

• Draw in rectangles for where each business card is. Each rectangle indicates the line the guillotine will make. It is best to use a very fine hair line for the rectangles.

Layer 3 -

• Add in guides for bleed at 2mm around each rectangle.
• Draw a rectangle (red) to indicate the bleed area.

Lock each layer as they're created. SaveAs an InDesign Template (.indt)

Looking at letters

Task: We are not coming up with a whole alphabet, but a number of letters to create a text only tshirt design, using Illustrator

Notes:

• Set your preferences - (Edit > Preferences). May choose to use points rather than millimetres when talking about Typographyer
• 72 points to an inch

Tools discussed:

• Path
• Shapes
• Blending modes

We printed out our creations on the colour printer and stuck them into the typography visual diary.

Amination

• Explored a number of Flash animations.
• Use a lot in advertising.
• Should get familiar with the International Advertising Bureau - a set of standards for clients, users, and the hosting medium
• Most animations need to be between 12 - 15 seconds

White Box Gallery

What is the White Box Gallery

• The rise of the modern day gallery arose from 19th Century Europe drawing room.
• Some argue that the birth of the modern gallery arose in the early 1900s with the Russian Constructivists.
• The nature of exhibition changes and the content and context of art alters.
• Art became as much about the process of making as the artwork itself.
• "Art" and the White Box alters the context of objects that are placed within it. Think: Duchamp's Urinal and/or Bicycle Wheel.
• Impressionism - kept the view aware of the paint. Painting and making art became the means to the ends - the paint is the story of the work too.

Watched excerpts from the film - Helvetica.

Creative Thinking - HappyTimes

Contemplation of ideas -

• When you don't have and idea (or are stuck for ideas) for a brief, spend time exploring designs that are out there. Even if you don't have any clue of how a brief might look or what to do, the act of thumbnailing can help.
• Over time, the constistency / repetitive nature of always creating can bring forth ideas.

How to present your ideas (for this class)? Visual diary

Our task today is the development of a logo for Happy times Childcare.

The process involves:

1. Researching the market
2. Gathering benchmarks from the industry
3. Creating pages of thumbails
4. Choosing one or two ideas and developing them to rough stage (including beginning playing with colours)
5. Developing one idea in Illustrator

Difference between Elements of Design and Principals of Design

Simply - the Principals are the rules while the elements are the tools.

A simple definition/distinction is found here.

InDesign - Week 3

We worked through Chapter 3, focusing on -

• creating Master Pages in a multi-page documents
• inserting and placing guides
• creating different master pages in the same document
• re-naming the master pages.

Homework - complete Chapter 3 of the InDesign workbook