Last up in my lil Honours Project series is the one about my poster series. Carrying on from the first two posts (A Run Through and Meraki App), the last of these is the thing that pull everything together into a series about encouraging designers through their concept development and the tools they use. 

The posters I created then compiled some of the views I had on these areas and then I screen printed them because 1. who doesn't like to get their hands messy? and 2. screen print is damn fun to do! But in all seriousness, the whole project at the end was an exploration into creativity in the digital age but initially, it was more of a play and test of tools within the creative process so it makes sense to take the things I'd tried and make them part of the final "product" too.

So below is some shots of the screen prints. But they will make way onto my online shop at some point too so keep an eye out for that! In the mean time find out more info and read about the full process on my website here: http://www.ohhaystudio.com/#/empower-the-designer/ and again through my honours project blog here: lh-honoursproject.tumblr.com

So in my last post I shared a run through of my honours year project and outline very briefly the key turning points and aspects of my going through it. But in this post I wanted to focus on the first of two outcomes- a social media app/network that allows, specifically, young creatives to share work with, connect and explore a much wider creative world/community. The second is a poster series about empowering designers to think about their creative process, but that'll be in a separate post!

The main outcome then, the app, was the large focus to my project due to the amount of work and the ideation process that happened within it. But I'm not going to bore you with that entire ideation process in this shortish post, so if you fancy reading it all, check out my honours project blog here.

Anyway, so the app initially was something I was developing as a concept because of the stuff I was doing for #Cbloggers and I wanted to create something that would be a tool for creatives to share their work and connect with other like-minded individuals while also being able to be inspired by the things they see. Through a lot of searching and brainstorming I eventually found a name that fit the whole idea for it which is "Merkai".


In terms of developing the visuals for the app, it was kind of a straight forward process. I knew I wanted aspects of the visuals to be hand drawn while other parts would be obviously vectors. With having the logo hand drawn, it then made sense to have the rest of the text as a standard font, then the icons used throughout as these illustrated assets.



Putting together the app once the visuals was created was simple too. If you hadn't heard about it yet, Adobe brought out a new software called Expierence Design (Xd for short) back at the start of the year which is a more WYSIWYG interface compared to their other software- Dreamweaver. The software was so easy to use and made it possible for people to interact with the design in real time. (You can still do it, play around here: http://adobe.ly/1Slyp8B) 


The last aspect of this project and honestly, I think my favourite part of it, is the promotional material. The idea of the advertising was something I had been trying to brainstorm for a while but it finally came to me one night when I wasn't sleeping which was to go back to the meaning of Meraki. And get people to think about how they do their work and make them become part of the advertising campaign as well!
That's essentially all the aspects to this part of the project then. I had the intentions of just having one final outcome post but I feel it's quite long as it is so I'll make my poster series another post!
In the mean time, you can read a bit more about this project on my website here: http://www.ohhaystudio.com/meraki

Hello again! It's been a few weeks since my last blog post but thought I'd try get back into things with a little run through of my honours year project as I said I would in my degree show post. Anyway yeah, last year after I finished my BA Year I shared a few blog posts summarising all the work I did for my modules and spoke a lil bit about the project and all that sort of stuff so felt I would do the same thing again. So in this years summary series I will have two posts, one will be around the development and process of how I got to my final work and the second will be a more of an in-depth explanation of the final outcomes. 

This year my honours project unlike some uni's actually lasted the full length of my final year- so about 7ish months. And I guess due to the fact that during my college time we would work on projects for about 3-5 weeks and then go onto a new one, I knew I couldn't spend those 7 months focused on only developing one concept or idea, so instead it was largely a focus on the creative process, mixing different techniques/processes/materials and seeing how the affect the outcome. 

If you read the second uni update post from my Honours Year last year then you would have known a bit of what my plan was during these months- which was to pick briefs from places like D&AD and BriefBox. Although I ended up straying from this quite a bit and more focused on the actual creation of illustrations and hand lettering to expand skills in these areas, they were there as options when I felt stuck with what I was doing. 

So this was essentially what I spent my time doing up until about March, which was when we had out Feedback week/presentations. It was then around this portion of time that I started spanning my work into the areas that resulted in my final outcome- which was motivational hand lettering and also thinking about the social media aspects of creativity in the digital age. 

With one of the aspects of the feedback from my presentation in that week, it was revolved around the question of "Who is this for?", which did help shape my thinking and in the end, made me develop the concept of the social media app (more in the next post). 

However, because I had spent a lot of time during this year exploring tools and materials I wasn't satisfied with having only one outcome that largely only explored the social media aspect of creativity. So because of that then, and the fact that I had been doing a lot of motivational and thought-provoking hand lettering at this time, I started thinking about how I could tie these things all together as well. This resulted in my 'Empower the Designer' poster/screen print series which you may have seen already through Instagram. 

Anyway, I think that's a fair break down of the project development without going into too much detail... But if you'd like a more detailed version of this, my Honours Project blog is still live so I can read all about and see much more of the work I produced here: lh-honoursproject.tumblr.com

At the start of last year I shared a post titled '2014 Favourite Design Projects', it was pretty much a time capsule of all my favourite design work that I had made during the year of 2014. And now that we're a few months into 2016, I realised I really wanted to reflect on what I had produced within 2015. 

Throughout 2015, I worked on a lot of different things, including the final design work for my 3rd Year Uni Projects, #Create365, 4th Year Uni Work and the odd bit of freelance things here and there. However, I definitely didn't work on as many personal projects last year compared to 2014,  even though it was something I wanted to try and produce more of. 

And that's it! My favourite projects from 2015 and a lil background about them. I'm so excited to see what 2016 will bring, especially with me graduating and that opening up and array of new opportunities too! Plus, I've made and done a lot already this year that I'm so happy with that I honestly can't even begin to imagine what I'll do over the coming months!
Please share below your thoughts on my work and share some of your stuff too! 

So I shared in Part 1 of this my original concepts and stuff I played around with but this post is more my final designs/work that I submitted. It is the work I'm really proud of and will appear in my portfolio/behance.

After my initial play around with ideas, structure and media I took the bits and pieces I enjoyed doing most or felt could be developed further to create my more 'final' designs. My main one though was one based of more what I read, found and thought about during the project which I put together into a Zine. The other pieces were either my 'hand drawn lettering' truths about social media and my mock Social Media app poster/ad designs. 

To see the full version of my Zine I've uploaded it to Google Drive so you can see it here. 

Pages from The Zine 

Poster Designs*

'Life Studio'

I'm actually thinking of developing this concept more throughout the Summer to actually look like a proper app. I don't have a huge amount of UI design so it would be wise of me to expand this just to have some design work with it more predominantly with it. It'll probably be like a cross of Instagram and Pinterest but with a more sleek, minimalist design.  

So yesterday I shared the final stuff from my Communication and Interaction project and I just want to say firstly, thank you for all the lovely comments about it! Made my day. Today I'm sharing work from my self directed project for Creative Research.

For my Creative Research I had a big kind of turning point this term with it, or according to my lecture I just had an 'epiphany'... Either way this semester this project changed quite a lot to what it was in my last update, which I'm actually glad about because I created a few things I'm so, so happy with!

But yeah, what was my epiphany this semester? It was basically a decision to just step back from the very narrow idea I was working on and just start creating things I wanted to do because it was fun or a bit different but still within keeping alongside the same theme I was originally doing. My theme I had been working on was Social Media but by the end of the project it really turned into how we are effected by Internet Culture and what we think of it.

To start with I'm going to split this into two posts, this one I want to more show some of my original development work which really took me into my final designs. I haven't shown much of this project throughout so it'll be nice to see what you all think of this as well.