Blog Post 4 - February 14th - 17th - Hours 96-128

Monday 14th February – Hours 96-104

I started today with some more illustrations for the Baresca menu, these were a coffee cup and saucer and a cauliflower- although seemingly easy to do, there was a lot of development and changes that had to be made throughout.

The coffee mug went through a lot of different stages, starting with a very flat design and turning into a really nice rendered illustration in the end.

Final Version

The cauliflower on the other hand had a lot of minor changes, this illustration was much more detailed than the mug so therefore took a lot longer to complete and get right.

Tuesday 15th February – Hours 104-112

To start with today I was assigned to remake some drink illustrations for the Baresca menu, these were Vermouth, Pina Colada and Gin Spritz. This was a fairly easy task to complete as I was able to use quite a lot of elements from the original images such as colour.

With this task in particular, I was able to tell how much faster my work-flow has gotten since I have been here at Stencil, I don’t feel rushed to do projects, but I also do things more naturally quicker.

Wednesday 16th February – Hours 112-120

Today I was briefed on a new project, this

was to design a wedding stationary set, I was told that this project in particular would take a lot longer than most of the other projects I have been working through the past couple of weeks. I was briefed on the parameters of the designs and given some examples of the type of work I’d be creating. Following from this I was almost able to get started right away.

I started with pairing the two names together, this was a much more important and difficult task than it seems, trying to find the right font, weight and layout took me quite a while to get right, by the end of this stage I had a huge amount of development and ideas which I could then present and get feedback, this then transitioned nicely into the next task which was creating a monogram which would be repeated on the different items of stationary, this was made by using the same fonts and such from the name pairing, this again was not an easy task, going through many different stages of development until I created something that we were all happy with.

One thing that was a constant challenge doing these was the conjunction, I had three main options, ‘and’, an ampersand or a plus, we all agreed that a plus sign would really push the modern aspect of the stationary set so that’s what we decided to go with.

Thursday 17th February – Hours 120-128

I continued with the wedding stationary today, branching out onto print design, I made some initial invitation ideas and was able to get regular feedback on these, although by the end of the day I did not think the work I had completed had hit the brief, but it gave me a great starting point to develop further.

A lot of what I had produced was quite ‘heavy’ and not modern enough for the brief, it was not as subtle as wanted and I overall was not pleased with the designs.

I have really enjoyed working on my own brief this week, it has given me a lot of ‘initial design workings’ which was lacking from other briefs where I had started working halfway through the project, although a big task I am looking forward to working through the wedding stationary even more.