It's Day 2!! So for today's topic it's all about Creative Process. For my take on today's topic, I thought I would delve into my process for creating hand lettering designs. It seems to be the main thing I get asked about, both by people on Instagram and even in job interviews. So I thought I'd dedicate this post to how I do this, from planning a piece, developing the style then working into it digitally and lastly uploading it to socials! 

Step 1: Planning & Sketching

For me step 1 always involves coming up with what it is I want to create a design about or for. This can vary from lettering things into objects, an editorial design or something else for like a poster or merch. 

Once I've decided or know what it's for I write out the words to get an idea about the letters fit amongst each other and to also quickly experiment with the layout of the letters. From this point I'll start working on a medium sized scale in my leuchtturm1917 (usually about a quarter of the page) to define the letter forms a bit more. From here I will occasionally draw it up bigger if I want to add more flourishes and details at that point or it's onto the digital portion of it!

Step 2: Developing the style & digitising 

When it comes to developing the style, as I said it can be developed while sketching or by doing it on the digital side. More and more lately, with my ProCreate app on my iPad I have been developing the design on that. Using the app it allows me to be more experimental with the styling and it also means I don't have to use lots of tracing or sketching paper in order to work out the best way to represent the phrase, word or editorial use. 

Digitising can some times be the longest part of the process, as I will refine the letters and make the size and shape of the letters concise in relation to each other. Although it is also at this point I can realise that once the forms are worked out the way I want them to be, they might not work for the piece on a whole and so it means I need to re-sketch a new layout. After I've refined the design and perfected the colour palette I then save it.

Step 3: Posting to socials

Making the designs on ProCreate it makes the whole uploading to Instagram simple! There are options to share directly to IG but I prefer to save the image and process video instead. However, the app also makes it super simple to take into Adobe products which is great but hasn't been something I've particularly used so far. 

Is there something I've missed out here that you'd like to know about? Leave any Q's below or feel free to tweet me directly too!

Also sorry for the images being a total mix of designs! I planned to have the one design and show the entire process from start to end but then realised I didn't have videos for the ones that would show the best process! Learn for next time right?

Check out the communities posts:

Danielle Warman (Blooming special) - Working for free

Charlotte Kathleen G
Laura Campbell (The Floral Elephant)

Read my other posts from #CBloggers17

Introduce Yo' Self: Day 1
Facing Imposter Syndrome: Day 3

Want to join in? Get all the details in the link up! blog post.

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

Woo! I'm back on track with #CrazyRebelliousArt (well just, I have half an hour till it's the 13th). Apologise with there being a lot of back posting this week but at the end of last/start of this week I just wasn't really feeling it! And although I've got a bit of a cold right now I wanted to try stick and get back into this so I've been doing my hardest! Anyway, today's theme is to talk about "How you get out of a creative block" and I've spoken about this topic kind of before, but that was over a year ago! So today I thought I would just do a list of maybe like 20 or so (I'm just going to keep writing them till I can't think of anymore), that may help you over come creative block! 

Oh wow it's been an incredibly long time since I shared a little update about what I'm doing at uni! Actually, my last update was on my first day back at uni this year, oops! Anyway, with today's post for #CrazyRebelliousArt being a Photo Log of a piece of art work created today, I thought instead I would share what I've been up to at Uni since my last update!

For today's #CrazyRebelliousArt the topic is to speak about our process for a current project. I'm still not really in a place with uni work were I want to talk about it so I thought what else can I speak about, and obviously that's my #Create365 project!

For today's #CrazyRebelliousArt, the topic is to write about one of your biggest successes and why was it a challenge for you. At first I was kind of struggling on what to do this for because nothing came to mind straight away but after a think I realised that actually my most successful project not just in terms of popularity or sales but also in the process and the way it came about was my 2014 Calendar I made back in College.

Depending on how long you have read this blog for or followed me on social media you may have come across my Calendar before and possibly read this blog post speaking about putting it up for sale. Anyway, I spoke in that blog post a lot about the trouble (and success) I had the day of putting it up for sale and that but there is a ton more to the story that I haven't shared before!