This final assignment is an opportunity to consolidate the understanding you’ve gained so far, reflect on the work you’ve enjoyed and your achievements. It allows you to create certain parts of the brief yourself so that you have the maximum capacity to show off your interests and talents. Choose one of the briefs below. Then…
Tag: Graphic Design Level 1 – Core Concepts
Exercise: The French Hen
Newton and Ridley, the brewers best known for their pub, The Rovers Return, are opening a cafe/wine bar nearer the city centre. The bar is designed to appeal to younger women and sophisticated young men. The brewery has identified a gap in the market and wants to provide a ’sophisticated and relaxed’ venue for the…
Exercise: Poster and flyer
This exercise is about how you deal with two different spaces to work in. You have been asked to design an A3 poster and an accompanying double sided A6 flyer to promote a singing course run by an organisation called SingOut (all one word). They have very little money so want to print these posters…
Exercise: Birthday List
For this exercise you are going to make up a poster list for yourself. It is intended that you keep it pinned to a noticeboard or wall to remind you of the dates and, as it will be there a long time, it needs to look good. Start by collecting all the birthdays of your…
Exercise: Giving information
Find some examples of information graphics. For example bus timetables, city maps, diagrams or representations of statistical data. Look at the way they are designed and try and work out the decisions the designer made. What can you learn from them and when would it be appropriate to use a similar design solution? For this…
Exercise: Judging a book by its cover
Choose a book by an author you are familiar with. You are going to design two different covers for it, one using illustrations or photography and the other using just type. Design the whole cover including the spine and back page. Include the title of the book, the author’s name, a brief description of the…
Research point: Paperback books
Many hundreds of paperback books have been produced over the years. Look at as many variations as you can find to see how different publishing houses designed their covers and how the covers fit together as a series. Select a particular publishing house and describe their design style in your learning log. OCA Graphic Design:…
Assignment 4: Show me…
Context Typographers and type foundries (the companies that commission and produce typefaces) have always had to promote their latest designs to printers and designers to show off a particular typeface, its different fonts in a variety of sizes and contexts, and the unique features of it. Once Specimen Sheets were the main way of doing…
Exercise: Hierarchy
Brief Using about 500 words of Lorum Ipsum (or other dummy text) you are going to design three different pages: • an interview with a TV actor in a listings magazine entitled: Will Sheila tell the naked truth? • a review of a new piece of hardware or software in a specialist computer magazine • a book review…
Exercise: Lorum Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum is dummy text with more-or-less normal distribution of letters that makes it look like readable English. It has been used for many years and some desktop publishing packages now use it as their default model text. If you don’t have it already, go to http://www.lipsum.com and generate as much as you need. Now…
Research point: Magazine Layouts
In this research point I was asked to collect some magazines to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of layout. I don’t have access to many paper magazines and I didn’t want to buy any for the sake of this experiment, so I begun by looking at magazines online to see what I…
Exercise: If the face fits
The brief – Part 1 Create your own sample book of typefaces on your computer that you can refer to. Organise them into: • Serif for continuous text; readable at small sizes and those suitable for headings. • San-serif for continuous text; readable at small sizes and for headings. • Script fonts that look handwritten…
Research Point
The alphabet is only part of a typeface that contains lots of different characters such as numbers, punctuation, mathematical and monetary symbols and ligatures. Ligatures are where two letters are combined together to make printing easier. Explore you computer keyboard to find some of the other characters. You will need to use your shift, alt…
Exercise: Playing with words
The exercise (from the OCA training material) Using the following words create typographical representations that present both the word and a suggestion of its meaning. Sad Safe Sardonic Saucy Scholarly Serious Shadow Shattered Shy Short Silly Sinking Skimpy Sleek Smart Snowy Sodden Soothing Sordid Sophisticated Speed Squat Squeeze Stiff Stodgy Stoned Style Supine Swagger Sweet Start this exercise…
Research Point: The History of Typography
Typography is a fundamental building block of graphic design. This form of visual communication has been developing and and evolving from the early scribing of the cave man to today’s emoji’s. The prehistoric era In the prehistoric era pictographs such as cave paintings were mankind’s first way of communication efforts, these were representing objects, activities…
Exercise: Working to a brief
These are extracts from briefs set as part of a student competition. Your task is to read and analyse them. Ask yourself: What are you being asked to do? How will the client will judge a successful outcome to the brief? What are the keywords? In addition log any other questions you would want to…
Graphic Design 