My Design Process

So there hasn't been much creative work lately, its all been lectures and tutorials, today was electronics, maths and mechanics. But for the lecture tomorrow I have had to, on an A3 paper, illustrate my design process.

This is based mainly on what I did for AS and A2 D.T but is a good representation of what I would do naturally. So this is all for tomorrow when I will have a lecture from a very good speaker,and the head coordinator of the course, Paul Turnock, which everyone is looking forward to.

Brunel Product Design Day 1

Today marked the official start of the product design course here at Brunel. It had a leisurely start at 1pm with a quick lecture on what to expect in one of the modules, Design Communication, which we would be taking for the whole first year. The module is based around learning to use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to create and present realistic and professional design solutions.

 Once the lecture was over the class began work on a series of tutorials for each program. Each tutorial gave a simple do it yourself example to follow, allowing individuality in the work. For Photoshop, a car was to be cut out of its background, Illustrator traced a profile and InDesign created a small booklet.

 

 This is the logo I made, tracing around a wolf's head, and then changing the brush strokes.

And below are the front, spreads and back page of the booklet I made. The text is some Latin that is often used as sample text called 'Lorem Ipsum'. You can try and translate if you want.

But there we go, my first day of the course and not too bad a start. And only one short lecture tomorrow, WIN!

London Design Festival 2011

Ok so no post for a while, which I can put down entirely to Freshers Week which has been great but has also just finished, I may go into that in detail in a later post. But anyway the result of that was that I was unable to put up this post about the design festival when I went on the first day on 17th Sept.

The Festival runs officially from 17th-25th Sept (some aspects run for longer) and is spread across the entirety of London. In a way this is good as it shows all of the diversity of London, but is does make it quite a trek and difficult to do much in one day. The festival provides guides, both online and on the day and I used these to navigate my way around.

The centre of the design festival is the V&A museum and here I went first. The two exhibitions I saw here were the very impressive 12m high timber wave outside the main entrance and the Power of Making exhibition, showcasing some of the unusual projects created by designers and craftsmen around the world using various methods such as CAD/CAM and traditional skills, including a Gorilla made of coat hangers. I also took note and sketches of the items on display that appealed to me.

I also visited the natural history museum for a small exhibition on material structures, to be honest it was a little disappointing.

 

In Covent Garden there was also a small surprise, a greenhouse made out of Lego. While it was again a little disappointing due to its size, it was quite fun.

Finally I also visited the Aram Shop, which has on sale and available for trying out many classic and iconic designs, including the Ron Arad Bookworm, the Verner Panton Chair and Gerrit Rietveld's Red Blue Chair, which I sat in and must say is more comfortable than it looks, but still not very.

All in all I had a really good day, despite the rain at the end and got some good inspiration that should help in the course ahead.

Knight Poster

This is a large digital painting I made in photoshop. I may end up getting this printed off as an A2 poster. Below it are some variations on it.

That is all thanks.

GCSE DT Key Fob

So some design stuff today, there's been a lot of art recently (and still more to come). This is a return to a design I did while doing GCSE D.T.

The brief was to make a simple key fob (ring) out of metal so that it could then be dip coated. As you can see below I didn't quite get that with my first design which was the biohazard warning symbol. The 3D render is done in Google Sketchup.

 

So this is the revised design where I stuck with the same sort of idea as before but just simplified it to the radiation warning symbol. Again Google Sketchup.

So this is how the key fob ended up at the end of the project at school. As you can see I never got round to the dip coating stage, but no one else did either as we ran out of time (mainly due to the thickness of the mild steel it's made out of).

 

 So I returned to this today and with some sandpaper and wirewool I got rid of the small bits of rust on it, cleaned up the edges and surfaces and attached a small chain thing I had lying around.

 So there we are. Thats a sort of closure for this miniproject, thanks bye.

Perspective...

For my A2 art exam the title was exploration and discovery and I considered painting up the image below, but decided not to. The image is a combination of a photograph of earth and a quote from the astronomer Carl Sagan. The picture itself is special as it is the furthest photo of earth ever taken, taken by the last action of the Voyager 1 space probe as it left our solar system looking back towards the sun (the coloured lines are lens flare from the sun. The picture is named the Small Blue Dot, which is a quote from Sagan, the same text where the quote I have used is from. So yeah, perspective.

Fantasy Tolkien Duel Watercolour

Click on the images for higher resolutions

So this is one of the two promised large water colours. I am very pleased with how this has come out and has ended up.

The subject of the painting is a scene from one of the lesser known works of Tolkien, The Silmarillion. This covers the history before what is seen in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The scene is a confrontatio between the High King of the Elves, Fingolfin, and the Valar(god) of Darkness, Morgoth (Sauron was his lieutenant). So quite epic stuff. The text follows:

"Thus he came to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth in open combat. And Morgoth came....

...And he issued forth in clad in black armour; and he stood before the King like a tower, iron-crowned, and his vast shield, sable unblazoned, cast a shadow over him like a stormcloud. But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail was overlaid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice.

 Then Morgoth hurled aloft Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld, and swung it down like a bolt of thunder. But Fingolfin sprang aside, and Grond rent a mighty pit in the earth, whence smoke and fire darted. Many times Morgoth essayed to smite him, each time Fingolfin leaped away, as lightning shoots from under a dark cloud; and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds, and seven times Morgoth gave a cry of anguish, whereat the hosts of Angband fell upon their faces with dismay, and the cries echoed in the Northlands.

   But at the last the King grew weary, and Morgoth bore down his shield upon him. Thrice he was crushed to his knees, and thrice arose again and bore up his broken shield and stricken helm. But the earth was all rent and pitted about him, and he stumbled and fell backward before the feet of Morgoth; and Morgoth set his left foot upon his neck, and the weight of it was like a fallen hill. Yet with his last and desperate stroke Fingolfin hewed the foot with Ringil, and the blood gushed forth black and smoking and filled the pits of Grond.

   Thus died Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor, most proud and valiant of the Elven-king of old"

So good dark climactic stuff. Anyway the working pictures for this are below if you are interested, thanks.