HEX-Clothing Designs

Following the completion of my capsule collection branding, I shortly moved onto clothing designs. During the development of my brand, I was already aware of several ideas I wished to create. Like my logo text, I knew that the majority of my designs would be created using a graphics tablet to help their styles match that of the brand. I had several desires for these clothing designs since the creation of this brief, trying to push the boundaries on the placement of my designs, 

The first idea I chose to create was that of an octopus, something I have been drawing whenever I was bored for a long time now. I knew the tentacles would be one of the most features if this is what I wanted to draw which lead me to the idea of having one wrap around one of the sleeves. As I mentioned, I wanted to try more unusual design placement with my designs because of the amount of common placements that are available today. This resulted in the entire design being placed in the upper right of the shirt, not only does this achieve my desire for unusual placement, but it allows my wrapping around the sleeve idea to be created more easily. To help make this shirt more recognisable as part of this HEX brand, I felt the need to connect the two in a obvious way. I added a globule of ink, appearing to be launched by the octopus placed roughly in the centre of the shirt. Within this I removed the filled black, constructing the word 'Hex' in the process. While I do personally love this design, in terms of practically, this would be very difficult to create in practice due to limitations with common printing. The process behind creating this piece involved me simply sketching the image straight onto this stock image using a graphics tablet. This process took some time but in the end achieved great looking results despite its real life impracticality. This process took too long however to justify it being used for future designs. This also has the limitations of being difficult to to transfer from one stock image to another or across to other clothing items. For the future designs, I decided I would construct them separately and then focus on placement upon completion.

I ended up creating four new designs (to go along side the HEX logo) to be placed on clothing. I decided the basic idea for each design during the construction of my brand logo and now had reached the stage where I would create and add to each idea.

The first idea (top left) was an attempt to create another tiki mask style image, crossing over with a oni mask theme. Once the design was complete (again using the graphics tablet) I placed the HEX text between the horns to fill the gap where something appeared to be missing. The second design (top right) was based on my desire to draw an owl like design. There was some cross over between this and the last with the noticeable feature of the horns, developed slightly more this time around. I wanted to keep this idea looking more simple then the last, using the horns to still draw the viewers eye. My following idea (bottom right) was another owl based idea. Trying to add a little variety in the style of my designs, I paused my use of the graphics tablet and instead constructed this piece using the pen tool in Illustrator. One of the most recognisable features of owls are their large eyes, this is something I wanted to maintain in this design, using gradients to help these stand out further. For my last design I decided to take a different route from my sketch style, this time leaning towards the use of shape, like that of my logo. Quite simple to make, using the pen tool and ellipse tool, I constructed my last design.

Placing everything in situ was a rather time consuming and delicate process, but in the end, I was very pleased with the majority of the results. For each piece of clothing I placed the tiki mask design below the neck at the same place at the same size. Depending on the colour of the item of clothing, I altered my designs to black or white. My four designs from above were fairly simple to place, I leaned towards as large as I could place them. On the hoodie designs however, I added something to the actual hood, whether it was the horns that matched the designs or a segment of my shape design. I also had the idea of having my HEX logo wrap around the body of each clothing piece, which, while it would also be difficult to practically create, the design itself is something I found quite successful.

HEX logo Final

After taking some time to step away from my logo development, I came back with fresh eyes and took another stab at developing this logo into a successful piece.

My first attempt took my second logo idea across to photoshop to for a hand rendered re-working. The idea of the overlapping characters still appealed to me at this point hence my pushing of the idea. However, during the construction of this logo I ran into several problems, the most crippling being the lack of legibility of the text when it was all black. After adding the white stroke (by hand) and taking a step back, I felt that the logo had become far too busy, if presented small anywhere, I feel it would become unrecognisable.

In the hopes of solving this issue, the only solution I could think of was to take a step backwards and remove the white stroke again, then rearranging the characters so that they  remained legible. Despite this solution however, my overall feelings towards this logo remained unaltered.

I soon felt that my feelings towards this design idea would be incorrigible and so decided to revert back to my original logo idea, this time however, rather then spending hours searching for a font that would work, I took it upon myself to create a suitable font using the Graphics tablet. After spending some time trying to get the style to match that of the mask design I soon settled on the italic upper case type that you can see above. The type works well with the tiki mask, because they were both made by my hand and so share the same sketched effect. By extension, my future illustrations for clothing should work well with any logo placement I do and will match the brand.

Self Branding

This is something I found especially difficult, particularly when it came to thinking of a name as I did not want to just use my name. First of all I used the idea of teeth as frame for the text. This resulted in 2 quite interesting ideas both of which I was quite happy with even if the name 'Connor Design' is ridiculous. 

To try and add a bit of diversity to my brand ideas, I tried to go down a different route in terms of the images. I thought I would go down a more unusual and less common route of lots of tone and detail with a heavily sketched appearance. For this I decided to draw an crazy evil robot head with the name 'Roboticus' next to it. The name came from a play on my surname, Roberts-->Robots-->Roboticus.

(When I sketched it, I did not anticipate that it would not fit the page)

While out of my designs, the robot idea is my favourite idea, however it seems a little unsuitable for a brand logo, it would also take along time to vectorise or sketch with a graphics tablet. The heavy tone and detail could work against the logo is the sense it will be void of bright bold shapes to catch the eye. You could argue however that due to the large image, sketched tone and font, that it would stand out amongst the simpler, more usual logos.

In the end I decided to go with the 'Braces" idea, out of the 2 teeth ideas I preferred this one due to its darker feel. Not only that, but I feel that the text stands out more and includes more specific details such as the brace wire wrapping around. I also feel that, because it has been scanned in from my sketch book, the colour from the lines have a faded appearance, which looks far nicer then if I were to go over it in the graphics tablet.

Project 3-Ministry of Sound Poster

At the beginning of this project, we were given a choice between designing posters for the Ministry of Sound 'Saturday Sessions' or designing a spread for the Typographic Circle. As you can see, I chose the former. My reasoning was that the Ministry brief would offer much greater freedom in terms of imagery whereas the Typographic brief would be more focused on layouts. As you can see from my previous posts I have attempted to vary my creative methods using tutorials and graphic tablets. Due to this diversity of ideas I feel I have produced reasonably final pieces that matches this brief in most respects. I say most as I did not stick to the provided colour palette, I simply felt that the colours chosen were not ideal for the poster designs, for example the purple provided was far to dark which I felt did not coincide with the Ministry of Sound vibe.

My idea of the separated logo is the center piece of these posters. This was one of my most original ideas for this project, the intention was to split the logo up so that it was still recognisable on the individual posters, but would conjoin to create the complete logo if the posters were presented together. I successfully manages to create this effect as well as chance the colour scheme per poster to, what I felt was the most sensible options. I felt, keeping this element consistent throughout the posters I was able to signify them as a series, which was part of the brief. One element of these posters which only came about towards the end of the project was to include a bold, defined to pronounce the month the poster is representing. This was another part of the posters which remained consistent throughout, only  the colours of the fill and outline changed slightly to best fit the individual posters. One other, less noticeable feature I added towards the end of the project was the date headings on the posters. While subtle, I find this feature really helps to the consistency of the posters. My strengths for this project I feel lie in the creativity each poster contains, the way the draw in your eyes, and in terms of colours chosen. My weaknesses I feel lie in layout, I am not 100% happy with the layout of my posters, I feel, on review, that I may have focused to heavily on the imagery and making that stand out that the text is lost slightly.

Targets 2!

I successfully managed to augment the Ministry of Sound logo to make it look titled back and 3D. This was very simple to do, I simply flattened the image using the re sizing boxes, then I used the pen tool to create the 3D effect, of course afterwards I was informed I could have simply used the Bevel tool.

I have also decided on the imagery that will be placed on each poster, one will have 3 birds over lapping, another will have a collage of old wooden amplifiers and the last will have several tentacles invading the poster. So far though I have only managed to construct the 3 birds.

My next set of targets then will be to choose a font for both the Saturday Sessions logo and the text for the dates. I will make this decision after some experimenting in my sketch book and researching some fonts that may arguably be suitable.