Jeremy Tankard
I’ve just discovered this illustrator- really like his work!
(Source: jeremytankard.com)
Jeremy Tankard
I’ve just discovered this illustrator- really like his work!
(Source: jeremytankard.com)
Evaluation of unit 4: Communication through Art and Design
My class began Unit four by photographing objects from my Jar of Curiosity. This was a fun task, but I should have brought a camera in from home because we had to share the college cameras: this made the process of taking digital photographs a lot slower than it should have been, and I would have liked to have taken my family’s camera to college in order to have one to myself! We also individually blogged examples of artwork that we felt was connected or visually similar to the items in our jars. For me, this included Claes Oldenburg’s Dropped Cone sculpture (related to a magnum lolly-stick that was in my jar), the front cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone illustrated by Thomas Taylor (I felt that this was connected to a train-ticket that I had in my jar), and a photograph of some Belgian street-art that was made to advertise Durex (I found this because I had a Durex condom in my jar, and I wanted some interesting artwork to go with it- not the same old graphics that you see in the supermarket). The street-art is brilliant- a real stroke of genius!
We spent a session illustrating articles from newspapers- I chose to work from an article about a disabled woman who designed ‘disabled mannequins’ for shop windows. I found this really hard to do because we weren’t allowed to use writing or iconography to convey the meaning of each picture. I found it really hard not to use words or punctuation marks to add emphasis to the images but managed to produce some nice pencil-drawings.
We then moved on to storytelling: using our objects to devise a story. Because I had a packet of garlic capsules that I take to keep my blood healthy, I decided not to invent a story from all of the objects (like friend and fellow student James Wigmore did), but rather to tell the story of my life from age ten to eighteen, focusing on the stroke that I survived when I was thirteen. I storyboarded my tale using mixed-media: I tried to use a different medium for each image and these vary from watercolour paint to collage or mixed-media.
I grappled with how to tell this story, writing a bulleted list of twelve points from my story, and then narrowing it down to six sentences. Eventually, I concluded that I would start with hearing about the Iraq war on the radio, illustrate myself reaching puberty, jump to being a thirteen-year old stroke survivor in hospital in London, show the transition from hospital to home, create a panel on starting college two years later, and finally stop the story with an illustration of my then-boyfriend and I breaking up the day after my eighteenth birthday.
The title of my story should be “That’s Life”, now that I think about it, because it literally WAS my life and I’ve accepted it and moved on. However, that COULD be seen as just a little bit crude or blathe, and I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood in that way.
After mounting my panels, I presented my storyboard to a very polite class. It would have liked to have been challenged more by my peer group, but, since we were all new to the course and each other, I don’t blame them for being so accepting of my work.
After this, I started looking at ‘object as logo’: I focused on the stripey cat that was in my Jar of Curiosity.
I started by doing several drawings of my cat: a detailed observational drawing, a line drawing, and a tonal study. I then communicated the cat very simply, using a decorators’ brush and black ink. This felt a lot more satisfying than making accurate visual recordings in pencil and was a very enjoyable task.
The following week, my class and I each produced a series of 4cm-square pictograms using black and white cut paper. I continued to play with the image of my stripey cat, making black and white cut-paper thumbnails. This was a nice task, and my pictograms range from being blatantly feline to being abstract shapes.
I also made several big 40cm X 40cm pictograms, using black, white, and coloured paper. I don’t think these worked as well as my four-by-fours, because I feel that something so big should have more detail to it. I’m definitely less satisfied with my big cut-paper pieces than with my tiny thumbnails.
I then began to conclude my project by mind-mapping my ideas for a corporation that I could design the logo for and drawing lots of ‘thumbnails’- ideas and sketches for my final logo- on layout paper. Once I had completed several A3 sheets of small line-drawings (these include typographical and pictorial designs), I was ready to take the plunge to use Adobe Illustrator to finalise my logo.
I learnt to draw on Illustrator by making lots of ‘points’ on the screen- a bit like drawing on a dot-to-dot puzzle, except that the dots are not already on the ‘paper’, they were in my head! This created a very strange cat-shape with lots of corners. I edited the lines to make them curvier and smoother, which made my work look a lot more illustrative and less graphical. I made several versions of my cat: one line-drawing (black on a white background) that shows the cat standing there smiling and another, coloured-in, version of the same cat, and two logos that show a cat in an armchair with the word “mew” shown as a part of the picture: the letters ‘M’ and ‘W’ are on each ‘arm’ of the chair, and I chose to illustrate the cat curled-up on the seat, forming the lower-case ‘e’. One of these is black on a white background, and the other is white on a black background.
Overall, I have really enjoyed this unit! I feel that I have succeeded in using images to convey a story and hold people’s attention, and that I have met the challenge of producing logos digitally very enthusiastically, despite being less-than-skilled with Apple computers!
If I could change or redo any of my work, I would go back to my storyboard and do the captions on it again, because I really liked Adib’s colourful, artistic, captions. Mine are just written neatly in fineline pen, with the initial letter drawn as a two-dimensional illustration, but I realised when I saw Adib’s captions that I could have done SO much better than the ones that I produced.
Jasmine
This is my armchair logo coloured in black and white. I think this helps to focus attention on the word “MeW”, because the white areas stand out from the black background. I also filled some of the back of the chair (a very thick outline) with white, because this was what made the illustration look like a cat lying on an ARMCHAIR, rather than a gate or a fence! I have not given this cat ears, because I didn’t feel that they were important to the design. I think that drawing a cat WITHOUT ears looks quite naive and childish. This piece is certainly far more of an illustration than a corporative logo.
Here is a colour version of my earlier logo. I used the same technique for the outline, but filled the shapes with colour. I chose to make my cat pale blue because I felt that it is a fairly ‘cute’, catty colour. I’ve just realised that this was probably subconciously inspired by Pilchard the cat (from Bob the Builder). I haven’t seen Bob the Builder for years and years, so it definitely wasn’t fresh in my mind or a deliberate attempt to mimic the style of the TV show. http://www.welovebob.com/characters/pilchard.htm
The resemblance is horribly uncanny, which makes me like my work a lot less. There is a part of me that feels terribly plagiaristic now.
I chose this version of my logo from sixty design roughs that I had produced the previous week. Using Adobe Illustrator for the first time was a not entirely new experience: it is a very similar programme to Adobe Photoshop, which I’ve practised using at Art College for the past two years!
In order to make the logo on Adobe Illustrator, I had to use the ‘pen’ tool to create lots of ‘points’ (dots) which connected together and formed two-dimensional shapes.
I liked the idea of incorporating lettering into the picture which forms my logo, so I drew a very tall, thin, sans-serif ‘M’ the right size to fit into the left-hand ‘arm’ of the armchair. I then copied and flipped this letter in order to make a ‘W’ that was exactly the same size and proportion. Using my ‘move’ tool, I placed this letter in the right-hand ‘arm’.
This is the first ‘Mew’ logo that I did on Adobe Illustrator. I chose to make the cat look friendly, hence the smiling mouth and round eyes. Illustrator was strange to draw with after being so used to more traditional media. However, I put a lot of effort into learning how to illustrate on a computer and I have achieved a very satisfying result. I love how smooth and curved most of my lines are!
The only aspect of this illustration that I’d be sorely tempted to re-draw is the ears. These are supposed to look like an ‘M’ (for Mew) but I think that this is too subtle. If I drew this logo again, I’d do the outlines of the ears in a bolder line or in colour so that the ‘M’ shape stood out from the rest of the illustration.
This Nasa logo is made up of simplified letters, which are bold and use the colour black on a white background. The simplicity of the (lack of) colours makes the logo’s audience focus on the shapes of the letters. These are smooth letters with curved corners, using a sans serif font.
The logo isn’t strictly a picture, but the As resemble arrows pointing up into space, or rockets that are launching. This simply depicts what Nasa does best: space exploration! This logo addresses the world, I think, and possibly even other worlds that we on earth cant see! It does this by SHOWING the huge audience what the company is about.
The Luffthansa logo is of a bird taking off, framed by a circle, as if you were looking though a telescope at it. The bird itself is quite abstract, with a pen-shaped body (its head looks like the lid of a pen) and a huge wing that forms a rectangular shape that looks a lot like the American flag. It looks a bit like a heron, which I take to mean that the logo is attempting to covey smoothness (of flight) and gracefulness.
The colours used in this logo are deep blue on a yellow background. Deep blue is quite a nice, calm colour, whereas yellow is sometimes associated with fear (as in “yellow-bellied”) or with optimism. Emotively, these colours clash, but in terms of Art and Design, they are split complimenaries. Deep blue is also, historically, quite an upper-class, even regal, colour.
I think that the logo addresses people, particularly Germans, who want to fly to other parts of Europe. It is attractive because the bird looks graceful and trustworthy, while the fact that the company is German makes me think that its flights are well-organised.
SewPerfect’s logo is made up of two smooth, continuous lines, boken only where one crosses the other. The lines form a stylised ‘S’ and a needle hanging down: a needle and thread. The associations are obvious: smoothness, stitch, sewing! The feelings that I get from the logo are smoothness-of things going smoothly (perhaps if you buy their products, things WILL go smoothly), of crafts- particularly needlecraft, for the obvious reason that the logo depicts a needle and thread, and (another blatant one) of stitching and sewing.
This logo is black on a white background- this could be associated with simplicity, or maybe with a graphic designer who didn’t want to colour the logo in. Let’s say simplicity, and possibly blatancy: The logo sends a very clear message about what it’s advertising.
This must surely advertise a company that sells needlecraft tools and cotton, that sort of thing. However, I could not find the right company online: the logo only seems to appear on graphic design websites. From my initial ideas of what the logo advertises, I have to say that the logo speaks to people who are interested in sewing.
This is the Air Algerie logo. It is made up of two flowing, maroon, arrowlike shapes, which are trapped within, and connected to, the outline of a maroon oval. When I was looking at the logo on it’s own on a sheet of paper, I thought it might have been designed to be an abstract portrait. Turned at a right angle, anti-clockwise, it reminded me of a picture that would be on a totem-pole.
The logo looks masculine, adult, and upmarket, which makes me think that the Air Algerie logo is trying to grab the attention of businessmen and women: people who might fly to important conferences.
