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.

Targets 11!

Now that I had completed my research for this project, I could alter my previously uninformed ideas into something far more suitbale for this project. I then decided too, having realised my previous initial ideas were not entirely suitable, create some more initial ideas, using both, my new found inspiration aswell some of the developments on my previous ideas.

After looking at Little White Lies magazine covers, as realising that most of the previous editions had only one portrait on the cover, two prominent ideas became apparent to me. The first of which is to simply have the character George Smiley on the front cover facing forward keeping in line with the modern editions of Little White Lies covers. Obviously, being the main spectical of the cover, the plan would be to make the illustration something special, for me, this would mean focussing heavily of the darks in the illustration as well as paying attention to detail and tone. So to create this idea, I would first all need to draw the portrait using one media I am more comfortable with, such as fine liner, biro or pencil. then scanning in the image and editing it on photoshop. As you can see, the text will be placed at the bottom of the page, being clearly visible while not getting in the way of the detailed portrait I plan to create.

The rest of my ideas play on my previous idea of having the four charcters that bare the names Tinker, Tailor, Solider and Spy on the cover. As I said, the previous Little White Lies magazine cover tend to have one character portrait on the cover, and so as I feel strongly about the four charcters idea, I felt the only way I could make this work would be to have all four characters split into quarters made to form the shape of one portrait. So my other three ideas are the most promising ways I could split up the four characters and form one portrait. These inclde, a broken glass idea, diagonal segments and horizontal segments. I feel this developent shows improvement on my behalf, not only showing that I can take influence from my research, but that I can only develop my own ideas based on new research. I feel the way I tackled the issue of my conflicting ideas (wanting one protrait and four characters) shows increased skill. Unfortunately, I am currently torn between these ideas so in the mean time I will solve other issues, therefore, my targets for this week are=

• Create character sketches for the purpose of both, getting used to drawing the film character and discovering which media I am most skilled with so that I can eventually create the most detailed sketches that I can.
• I will also sketch the most promising layout ideas on a larger scale, giving me a better idea of which ones I should take forward

Targets 10!

Now that the Easter holidays are over, I am pleased to announce that I successfully managed to complete my To Do List. In the last week I complete some more research towards the project by looking at Juxtapoz magazine covers. I also managed to create some initial layout ideas, looking different ways to present the content of the cover. These layout covers were designed based on the idea that the cover would have the four characters that bared the titles of Tinker, Tailor, Solider and Spy respectively. Therefore my layout ideas focused mainly on separating the page up into 4 parts.

As you can see, I have tried to be somewhat diverse with my layout ideas while try to work around the Little White Lies header as well as giving each character a similar amount of space. Unfortunately, after looking at them all, it seems that none of the characters really have enough room where, once my illustrations were made, they would be recognisable.

Due to this realisation, my targets for this week are as follows=

• Complete more research on magazine covers, in particular, look at previous editions of Little White Lies magazines.
• Create some new/develop some initial ideas based on what I learn after looking at previous editions of Little White Lies magazine covers.

NHS Development

Initially, as you would expect, I began by simply drawing out a few different ideas in a few different ways. I instantly took a liking for the text being aligned on the left hand side so the N, M, P were stacked. I then simply tried putting friendly looking shapes to by the side of the text to see how it worked together.

Aside from the success of the text layout, I also felt quite positively with the curved wing like shape that I had made as it looked both friendly, and matched the clients wishes that the logo avoid going down the photography/camera route. Despite this positivity, I felt I required more initial ideas to work with.

The next few ideas I had focused more of the photography style logo, while the client was not so keen on the idea, I felt that it may have been the best route to go down considering the name of the department. The top idea (my favourite) was simply using a segment of an aperture shape but in particular, I like the way it wrapped around the text, being inline with the text at the bottom and then spilling over at the top. Considering that the ideogram is not all inline with the text, I can not help but feel that the logo still works very well. The 2 logo ideas below it were based on the viewing screen that is found on digital cameras, initially I thought this idea had potential as the edges of the shape could be manipulated to meet the top and bottom of the text. The bottom left and bottom middle ideas were supposed to be the corner of the camera fading off at the top, with a strap being the main focus of the ideogram, however, as you can see, it was not the most successful idea.

From this then, I developed 2 ideas on the computer, one of which I made up while digitalising the other and so the idea is not featured in my initial development.

The top idea came to me while creating the bottom idea on illustrator. The process was quite simple really. I simply created the initials using Arial Black, rotated the text box, created a new layer, and then created the 3D effect using the pen tool. After that it was a simply a matter on scaling it right, choosing a colour and getting it to work well with the text. Choosing the colour is what I found the hardest, I was very undecided and struggled to  find an appropriate tone. I began with it being a light grey, but when coupled with the grey text, it worked quite poorly. Eventually I settled that blue would be a suitable colour and that a lighter tone would give a friendlier appearance. Overall I would say that, although I am happy with the logo, it may not be the most suitable for this brief as it looks possibly a little too boring. My second logo however, I feel works much better. The text for instance matches my favoured layout that I decided upon in my initial ideas. I also developed the segmented aperture idea by having them overlap and then using blending options to make them appear transparent. I found that this gave a much better effect then having a space between them. Overall with the layout and the colours chosen I feel that this is easily the most superior of my 2 logo ideas.