Got another website up and running

(it's not quite finished yet tho!)_

www.greatteymetalcraft.co.uk

it's only taken me all night to make it work... but now it does, so it's all good :)

Undiscovered design work I did to try and get job...

Alas, I didn't get the job, neither did I hear from the company (even after spending a whole evening designing these), just thought I'd show them on here because I kinda like them.





And I did the obligatory "what it would look like if it was being use for real" malarky.

I don't know whether it's just me but....

...did Comic Relief copy my typographic stylee? minus the giant red dot.



Well, I'm sure they didn't (obviously they didn't), but at least I know I must be doing something right :D good times.

NB. I am not accusing the BBC or any of its affiliates of copying me or my work. LOL.

I have a shiny new website which has taken me a little while to design because I'm only just learning Dreamweaver...but I think it looks ok, so that's the main thing :D so I'm very happy now!
www.martynhazell.co.uk

Oh...

...and join me on twitter where I'm more twittually active @martynhazell :)

While I'm updating new design work...

While I was at LapSafe Products, I helped complete a whole new redesign of the companies logo and brand image. After a few ideas were developed, we showed them to the MD's to look through, and after a lot of fine tuning and editing, the new logo was decided, and launched after Christmas.




'The LapSafe® logo refects how its products are mobile. The idea of the circular design creates the look of motion, movement and revolution. This movement suggests progression, that the company is always moving forward, and the revolution suggests that the company is innovative with its products. Combining the circular shapes in different positions made it look fresh and modern, the positions make it look continuous, and shows that LapSafe® is a strong brand that is reliable.
The font is strong, and compliments the logo in a fresh way. The colours both differentiate the words and make the overall design more visually interesting, as well as emphasising the word ‘safe’ in bold. The unique ‘a’ style is modern, and refreshes the whole logo name, complimenting the circlular style throughout.
Using the different shades of colours on the circle, it creates the idea of depth, layers and perspective, that the company is at the center because it is the brand leader. Product development is at the core of the LapSafe® brand, and as LapSafe® was the original creator of the laptop security trolley idea, it seems fitting to produce a logo that reflects this creativity.'

The new logo is being used for all new product literature, business cards, letter heads etc, as well as for their exhibition that has just taken place in Olympia, London.

My new skills in Dreamweaver

So before Christmas, I signed myself up to a Dreamweaver for beginners course because my web design skills seriously were lacking, and all of the jobs I seemed to be finding wanted experience or a little bit of knowledge of website design/updating. So I did the first 6 weeks before Christmas learning some basics of Dreamweaver (albeit learning VERY SLOWLY because of the amount of old people who kept asking questions and didn't really know how to use a computer - the first lesson, which was a whole two hours, was spent on file management... aka moving a file to another folder). I got the jist of it (I only really wanted to know the very basics of where to start, and from there I've been able to play around with everything myself), I have created a website for a sheet metal company based in Great Tey. So this is the website, it's still very basic, doesn't use any of the real photos, and has very little text (as I haven't got it all yet), but it shows the basic frame of the website, which i'm quite proud of. My next challenge is redesigning my own website, and then I've got a couple more websites to design after that, so I'll be keeping myself busy!

I updated my website...

Now it has the whole of my final major project book on it, called 'The Uncooperative'.



Still no luck with jobs yet either, if any employers are looking at this (I don't expect so...) EMPLOY ME :D

My Final Major Project book is BACK...

I got it back from the printers today, so I'm very happy, but I've still got to make my box, which is very frustrating, and I've got to cut my jacket to fit, but apart from that, i should be all good right now :D

Some website lovin;;;'

So I just pretty much finished the website for our college show. We've yet to decide on a name for it, but I think that it'll be decided by the end of tomorrow, mainly because we're going to put them on the postcards. I have used all of the images of the deskspaces as the gallery, and used each individual desk space on each persons page. I have also created thumbnails of their portfolio work, and created a image preview application where a preview appears above the page with the larger versions of the images (this took me bloody ages to figure out), but they're looking good with everyones work (except for jasons whos image sizes I need to sort out)). So there we have it.

Block Foil Front Cover

Wow, second post in the same day.

I must say, that doesn't normally happen. So my book is nearly finished, it's been printed and is currently being bound. I've made a poster of the spreads from the book, which I like, for my exhibition. Here it is.

UPDATE: I changed it a little to look like a receipt, as I'm going to have it attached to the top coming off a roll of paper.

So we're not allowed to eat in the studio.

So what do you do when you get told this information?

You make a poster. Like this. Just in case a scalpel falls into your sandwich.

Some Typographic Transcipture.

A double page spread of a transcript I made from a set of conversations I recorded at a supermarket between a supermarket checkout operator and customer.

My 15th Post - iTunes Top Played Song

So I got an email along with the rest of the class from the lovely Lauren Baker of Graphic Media Year 3 at Colchester Institute: School of Art & Design (and Tiny Sketchbook blog) with the following brief:
"Most people have an ipod/mp3 player of some sort. If you don't, you get to make yours up ;) in your itunes/media player of choice there should be a 'top 25 most played'. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to illustrate your most played song (which is technically your favourite song, i suppose) ... a few people asked if they could make theirs up and of course there's no way of telling whether you do or not, but it makes it more fun if you don't lie and we all know if martyn's isn't a girls aloud song then he's definitely bending the truth a little (I'M KIDDING)."

I'm not going to say I was overly happy with the last bit, but I guess it's slightly true :P (but unfortunately, I didn't have Girls Aloud in my Top 5 :( (the highest was number 27 as a matter of fact).

So I had the idea for mine whilst in bed with manflu, I had a rough idea, but then adapted to be in a similar style to a designers work that I found online that I liked. I thought this would be a great opportunity to experiment with something a little different to what I've done before too. I wanted to make the songs look a bit like movie posters, with a line of the song as if it were a tagline, and a really simple three-colour colour scheme with only text and blocks or lines of colour as the image.

I have uploaded them in the order of my Top 5 on iTunes :)

A complete little part of my book

This is the first part of my book that I have designed. It is for my Final Major Project and is a piece that I will photograph within the supermarket. The idea is that all the offers are rubbish, but the overall look emulates the styles that are used. By copying this style, it will mean the reader may be initially unaware of the subtle changes, as I have focused of language that is normally used within this environment, such as Buy One Get One Free (Buy One Get None Free) and Two For The Price Of One (One For The Price Of Two). I've used darker colours as I don't want the offers to stand out, whereas normal supermarkets use bright primary colours to attract attention. And although the overall project idea is to hightlight crap things that go on in supermarkets, doing so in this subtle, dull coloured way reflects the complete opposite of what supermarkets stand for.

My Shiny New Website

I just redesigned my website www.martynhazell.co.uk.

End of Year Exhibition Promotion.

This is my deskspace. I used my Macbook Pro at the center of the image, because I feel that I couldn't do any work without it. I used books to the left and redesigned their covers with quotes that related to my studio practice (even thought you can hardly see them). I displayed my typeselecter as it shows my interest in typography, and having diet coke and a donut in the foreground, it showed my love of fizzy drinks and unhealthy food. I wanted my desk to have a slightly cluttered feel, but at the same time be quite organised, because that is the way I work. Displayed on my laptop is my website (www.martynhazell.co.uk), and the sheets in front of the books are my CV designs. Draped over the chair is my Harry Potter 'Gryffindor' scarf, with my Harry Potter book in display on the stack of books. Finally, I used two images on the wall, the photo of a group of us meeting the legendary Neville Brody and a quote that I find really relates well to my practice and my dissertation.

The idea behind the desk space photographs for promotion was when Neville Brody at a lecture in November 2009 said that many degree courses in design have limited class space, let alone an individual desk space... of which we have :). This, therefore, does not just reflect our own way of working, but the college as a whole.

Photograph taken by Laura Potter, you can view her brilliant work at: www.laura-potter.com, or visit her blog http://laurajpotter.blogspot.com/.

ISTD True Stories: True Geographies Finished :)

So I finished my ISTD brief, here are the final photos with added envelope. Im rather happy with them now. Ask me a few weeks ago, and I would have said different lol.

ISTD True Stories: True Geographies

Experimenting with the story of a night out has allowed me to incorporate many aspects of design, as opposed to creating a purely typographic solution. The nature of the project has given me the opportunity to use photography and my concept choice has meant I have been able to design different medias including the pub posters, as well as the final book.

I feel that my experimentation with the book format takes the reader on a journey and really makes the reader become a part of it through the twists and turns (literally) of the night.

In terms of readability, I realise that the overall design may be slightly overwhelming. Using white text on a black background reflects the night setting, and incorporated with the way the type size gradually increases to give it a drunk feel successfully shows the development of the night. Understandably, readability is slightly lost because of this choice, but I felt this was needed as it gave a great coherence with the imagery. It is because of this that I included design choices such as a graduated colour at the start of each new sentence, as well as a specific typeface to reflect each character. This attempt to increase readability meant that the reader can successfully identify where to read and adds an aesthetic quality the piece.

Different typographic choices for each venue allowed me to reflect my knowledge about the characteristics of typefaces, and how they can be used in accordance with other objects to reflect historical or social features. Choosing serif typefaces for traditional venues, and sans serif typefaces for modern venues and using them in multiple places within the book meant there would be a substantial coherence to the piece.

As I referred to before, I used a graduated colour to reflect the start of a new sentence within the block of text to increase readability. I experimented greatly with different ways to increase readability initially, but found that this solution worked most successfully because I had used the graduated style previously within the path of text that flowed between images on the reverse of the book. Using the idea of graduating the colour of the text leading up to the images meant that the abrupt halt of a newly introduced colour distracted the reader, hence by slowly and subtly blending the colour to match the pub name it allowed for the readers eye to flow a lot easier.

The overall book structure suggests that the nights out are always busy around the town. With different narratives flowing from one page to the next, it keeps the reader aware and having the text dividing itself at certain parts of the page, gives the reader the ability to move on of their own accord. By making the reader consider each different typographic narrative means that they have to work a little to understand the information they have been given.

The complete aesthetics of the piece are interesting and I feel that they successfully reflect the brief through the way the typography is used within media already found around the town, which is then merged with my own typographic narrative. I feel the conjunction between photographic and computer manipulated type work well together throughout the development of the books structure, with the conclusive paragraph bringing all aspects of the concept together.