Kieran Marrable

TypographyIn order to create my typography design, I followed some simple steps. I used the Text tool to type the number ‘0’. Then I made the number large enough to occupy the entire page. Once I did this, I inverted the colours, making it white. Then I went onto blending options and added a thin black stroke around the number. This would act as an outline and guide to follow for the rest of the typography. Then I typed out a smaller 0, which would fit inside the original zero, went to the Edit tab and clicked ‘Define Brush Preset’. Then I went to the brush tool and selected my brush preset and then added the number onto my outline. Once I did this, I rotated the shape using the Transform tool to make it look more erratic. I then repeated this stage around 400 times. Then once I had covered half of the number, I selected all the layers apart from the main outline. Once the layers were selected I duplicated them all, then went onto the Transform tool, right clicked and selected Flip Horizontally. Then, once the entire shape was filled, I deleted the original template.

The industry example will have been produced in a similar manner to mine, however certain steps will have been done differently. The outline was, assumedly, done the same way as mine. The brush tool will not have been used within the production of my industry example. This is because all of the letter ‘A’s used were written in different fonts. This means the text tool will have needed be used each time to manually change the font. Apart from this, it appears that the same method was used. The industry example also opted to make the entire letter out of different fonts, as opposed to my approach where I designed half of it then duplicated it and flipped it horizontally. I could have used a letterpress printing technique instead of doing this. Letterpress is a technique of relief printing where a copy of a design is made into an impression on a raised surface. Once this is done, multiple pieces of paper are placed into the letterpress machine. The raised surface has ink on it which means the design is ‘pressed’ onto the page. This technique would be effective if I planned to make thousands of copies of my design. Letterpress requires a metal ‘stencil’ to be produced, which is not financially viable if the design is not going to be mass produced. Below are results from my research into the cost of letterpress printing. This is from the website ‘letterpresscommons.com’. The costs are specified very well.

Industry Example/stimulus: http://goo.gl/Nyk5wQCost of Photoshop: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/catalog/software._sl_id-contentfilter_sl_catalog_sl_software_sl_mostpopular_uk.html

Industry Example My design

Kieran Marrable

The plates cost $80, the paper costs $25 and custom Pantone costs $20. These are the material costs, which is already quite expensive. Then the labour costs are $75 for press time, $15 washing up, trimming $10. This all comes to $225 after being marked up to make a profit. Using a generic printing method would be cheaper than this. Making this into an A6 postcard would cost ‘printing.com/uk/’ £136 for 250. These designs do not require a press to be made our of metal, which makes them much easier to produce on a smaller scale. One can be produced for the same price as 10, 100 or 1,000.

My design is effective because it has an abstract element to it. It is a simple concept, but gives a very nice effect. This is because it is a shape simply composed of different sizes of its original shape. The use of rotated versions of the shape makes it look more random and erratic. This is something which is fashionable currently. The use of just black and white is also fashionable as it is sleek and simple. The use of colour may detract from the impact of the image, however colour could easily be added using the fill tool.

The original stimuli would have been quite cheap to produce, as long as the producer already had Photoshop and a device which can run Photoshop (Mac, Laptop, Desktop). Photoshop would cost either £10 per month, or can be bought permanently for £700. A device which can run Photoshop would cost an additional £200 at the very least, ranging up to £1500+. The piece was quite time consuming too which means it would cost some money in man-hours. In total, the piece took me 7 hours to

complete. Paying the designer the UK minimum wage would still require the business to pay them £45.50, (supposing it took them the same amount of time as me.) If the piece were to be mass produced, it would not be too expensive to produce profitably. The design is something which could be sold as something to put onto a card, for example. The company could then profit from every card, which is sold. The investment into producing the design would, then, quickly begin to seem very

small when compared to the investment. The card could be a Christmas card. The typography could be made to create a Christmas tree shape, using Christmas related words. This would look effective and have a contemporary feel to it. This would be different to the conventional Christmas card style, which is becoming

Industry Example/stimulus: http://goo.gl/Nyk5wQCost of Photoshop: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/catalog/software._sl_id-contentfilter_sl_catalog_sl_software_sl_mostpopular_uk.html

Kieran Marrable

extremely generic and ‘boring’. Most cards nowadays are merely the words ‘Merry Christmas’ accompanied by a Christmas-related image.

One advantage of this technique is its versatility. It can be put onto anything. It has been used to make up somebody’s face, landmarks, words, animals and many other things before. It is a useful technique to learn because it can be applied in a plethora of areas of the subject. It is also quite simple to perform. Once the technique is learnt, it is merely a case of repeating the same step hundreds of times. Another advantage is that the technique can be used on a range of different mediums. It can be used digitally on something like a logo, or on a card, to name a few uses for it. It is not something that is very specific and that can be used on one particular design.

A disadvantage of this technique is that it is very time consuming when the final product is taken into account. It is merely one number, but it took over 7 hours. This is mainly because I had to rotate the number every time I added a new one in. This became very time consuming as I used over 800 layers. To rectify this I could not have rotated the number each time, but this would have sacrificed the random-look I was going for. Alternatively, I could have just filled up a quarter of the outline, then duplicated it three times. This may have made the design look too uniform and ruined the effect.

Industry Example/stimulus: http://goo.gl/Nyk5wQCost of Photoshop: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/catalog/software._sl_id-contentfilter_sl_catalog_sl_software_sl_mostpopular_uk.html