Close, yet far...

With only 2 weeks left to go I'm feeling an enormous sense of achievement. Only it looked unlikely that I was going to complete the A7 assignment having fallen behind due to illness and then not taking advantage of the Easter break to catch up again. However with the support of my tutor and friends I'm pleased to say that I've turned things around. With just 2 weeks of the assignment I find myself in a good position to complete the assignment not only on time but also with work I can be proud of.

Now that I've caught up I'm really beginning to enjoy this assignment again. Re-imagining CD artwork, logos and designing magazine adverts amongst the other tasks, have proved to be a great challenge.

My release was Kangding Ray's Automne Fold album and whilst not ordinarily a genre I'd listen too (I'm mostly a punk fan) I really enjoyed the albums minimalist electronica sound.

This helped a great deal when I was coming up with the concept for the album's digipak artwork:

http://www.ian-thompson.org.uk/a7/digipak_outer_final.pdf

http://http//www.ian-thompson.org.uk/a7/digipak_inner_final.pdf

The concept was simple: Automne is French for Autumn, so I decided to use some photos which i took at Hatfield Forest as the starting point and then using Photoshop to manipulate the images and to introduce warm, autumnal colours.

As my knowledge of Photoshop techniques is not as advanced as other members of the group, at times it was frustrating when trying to recreate the imagery from my designs onto the screen. Having said that I'm really pleased with the results and can't wait to recieve the postcards we ordered from Moo:

These were designed as another method of presenting our artwork. For my postcards I opted to use the image from the front cover and the inner of the digipak. I used the inner image rather than the back cover as I simply felt it was a more interesting image.

Now I've just got to get cracking on with the Wire advert and web interface and hopefully finish the year with a bang!

Tomorrow comes a day to soon...

Where has the year gone?! Is the question on my lips as I sit here to write this latest journal entry. The time from when we arrived to begin the course back in September until now, where we are working to complete our final assignment of year one has genuinely flown by.

Flicking back through my sketchbook I’m amazed at how much knowledge has been accumulated in a relatively short space of time. I now know the anatomy of a font and can even identify some font families by simply looking a single character. Throw in learning about colour harmony, visitors from the design industry, how to use images effectively, using X-HTML and CSS and you still haven’t begun to scratch the surface of how much I’ve learnt.

There have of course been ups and downs to the first year. The up’s have included making a great new set of friends, the knowledge and skills I’ve acquired thus far and a real sense of achievement at having a designed and built a web page that a friend kindly described as looking “ like a real web page”.

The downs include seeing 2 members of the group leave the course early, referring assignments and at times feeling like the work I’ve handed in hasn’t really been of the highest quality.

Hopefully A7: Rasterised will see me end the year with a bang. Being asked to re-imagine and reinterpret Kangding Ray’s “Automne Fold” album artwork as well as redesign the Raster-Noton logo is a great assignment to end the year on. It requires us to put into practice all that we’ve learnt so far as well as encouraging us to think outside the box. I’m hopeful that by sticking to my production schedule and using the Easter break constructively I can produce a final product to be proud of and put me in good stead for starting the 2^nd year.