V&A illustration competition

I have entered my recent panda illustration to the V&A illustration competition

E-mails

Result! I am over the moon. Jelly replied asking for available dates and Clearsilver said they would get in touch next week.....

Inspire Create Leeds

Yesterday I went to the free Inspire Create lectures and seminars at The Faversham. I booked myself in for a fairly full itinerary which was exhausting but so worth it!

I managed to get so much networking done and got some really good advice and contacts.

First off I spoke with Clearsilver who offered some really valuable advice about placements.

I then spoke with Brand_Nu and Chris from Jelly - this was my ultimate goal of the whole event. Although I would obviously love my poster to win and get the mac and the placement with Brass, Jelly are an agency that I dream of being a part of. The designers they have under their umbrella are some of my biggest inspirations at the moment so it meant a lot to here his lecture and meet him in person (even if I did have to stubbornly lurk behind him until the opportunity arrose!). He gave me some great insight into getting a placement with them and what it would involve if I got one. I showed him my poster design in the exhibition and explained my concerns about my practice - whether I should stick to what I love or keep my skill set as broad as possible so that I am more commercially employable, and he said that he thought an internship with Jelly would help me decide this. It seemed like a positive meeting and  he told me to contact them with more samples of my work. I e-mailed Georgie (the woman in charge of submissions) and cc'd chris in as well as e-mailing him personally to say it was nice to meet him and let him know I had e-mailed in my work. He responded saying 'see you when you come in....' so I am hoping for the best.

If I hear nothing back I plan to follow up this submission with my premature christmas crackers that I am planning to send out next week to a few agencies.

I also e-mailed Clearsilver thanking them for their advice and asking them to take a look at my work in light of a placement or studio visit.

I also spent some time talking with Adam, the head of Creative from Logistik - who are offering an iMac as part of the prize for the winning poster. He said he would welcome a visit and would be prepared to talk about internships. He was really friendly and inspiring and just seemed keen to get people involved and aware of what they do which is great. I have written a draft e-mail to him that I will send after the winner of the competition has been announced. I have written it in the view that I have lost - so it might seem pessimistic to send it before the winner has been announced!

7 finalists for inspire create leeds

I made it thorough to the final 7 for inspire create's design competition, along with Sai and Ailsa - winners to be announced tomorrow at the exhibition/lectures tomorrow, which will be a really good networking event whether any of us win or not!

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Michaela

Exhibition Finalists


Thank you everyone who took the time to take a look at each of our entries and cast a vote!!

We closed our voting yesterday morning to pick the top 6 submissions. Due to some over-zealous voting on a few of the entries, we had to take a) positive votes, b) negative votes and c) unique visitor numbers into consideration. Each entry was scored in comparison to the other exhibits.

Believe me when I say, we tested a few scoring methods to make sure that we were keeping everything fair and reflecting on the artworks!

So… results of scoring actually meant we had a tie-break for 6th place and we will be having 7 pieces of artwork on display at our exhibition tomorrow(!)

Please say a warm congratulations to the following (in no particular order):


Entry Title:
Processing Exhibition promotion
Submitted by:
Ailsa Marrs,Graphic Design Student, Leeds College of Art


Entry Title:
Ornate Chicken
Submitted by:
Ben Boothman, Graphic Arts & Design Student, Leeds Metropolitan University


Entry Title:
Evolution of the Dot
Submitted by:
Antony Kitson, Freelance digital designer & owner of OneTenEleven Media, Leeds


Entry Title:
Life’s Not All Lollipops & Candy Canes
Submitted by:
Polly Williams, Graphic Design Student, Leeds College of Art


Entry Title:
Adding Value to Your Home Infographic
Submitted by:
Thomas Harvey, Freelance Graphic Designer


Entry Title:
I was going to make an A0 poster….
Submitted by:
Sai Uennatornwaranggoon, Graphic Design Student, Leeds College of Art


Entry Title:
Letter Bubbles [GAME]
Submitted by:
Jimmy Forrester-Fellowes, Freelance Web & Mobile Developer

crit feedback

business card development

I have decided to slighly re-design my business cards so that they reflect the Ponya branding I have developed for the book fair. I plan to have these left my by work so that people who are interested in my design work at the book fair can take away my contact details for free. I think that using black and white will help people associate the two things together. 

Contacting studios...

Progress surgery

Flyers for the social

This is my second live brief from the Hyde Park Social Club. This week I was asked to design a flyer to be attatched to the exising flyers as an invitation to the Social to the residents of Ash Grove ( the street that the social is on). The spec was that it had to be half standard flyer size and had to contain the following copy : 

A fair bit of copy for a small space!

It was quite a hard brief for me as type and layout are two areas I struggle with and choose not to work with a lot of the time, but I feel that these briefs will be valuble as they will force me to experiment with what works and under strict time restrictions. I had one shift to create this flyer (9pm-1am) whilst also serving cutomers. This means that my usual practice methods such as hand drawing type to then work with on my computer is just not time efficiant or even possible. I have no preparation time as I am usually briefed on the phone at the start of my shift. I enjoy this pressure and hopefully I will get some good work out of this for my portfolio.

Initially I focussed on the hierarchy of information and font sizes to reflect this. I chose a simple list style layout as due to the space limitations and volume of information I wanted to use the space to the maxiumum. I then played with font choices and colour to make the design a bit more interesting.

I didnt want to use too many fonts or make the design too fussy as the information is the most important element.

I experimented with colour to make certain elements stand out.

Notes from Joe Gilmore talk

Notes from DandAD lecture

Cargo collective

I have spent this afternoon/evening working on my cargo collective profile. Despite feeling so adamant that I was going to create my personal website in dreamweaver, I think that this is a much quicker solution. I have paid for a cargo account so I can use my own domain name and then transfer it to my website when it's finished. 

Experimenting with the various themes : 

This is the final result :