This project is all about outcomes. Despite being criticised for a quick research process and a fast production of work for the past two years - that's what this project is about. So I'm excited. There's lots of briefs to choose from, we have been asked to complete 3 but I'm hoping to do more than that.
The briefs are:

• Portraits
• T-shirt design 
• 'Rules of the trade' posters
• Kickstarter
• Drink cans design 
• Cereal boxes
• Editorial
• Vignettes
• ABC book

For each brief we have to make a 'series' of work; so at least three pieces per brief. 

I went to Morrisons to look at all the funky cans for some inspiration and I noticed that the cans for ready mixed cocktails are all quite boring and similar to each other so I'm going to fix that. 

Keeping on the redesign theme, I found a list of discontinued American cereals and thought it might be fun to give one of them a revamp. Crazy cow cereal had a similar gag to coco-pops in that it made your milk chocolatey or strawberry depending on the flavour you had. I'm thinking of adding a third flavour to the line but I'm not sure what yet. Banana would be the obvious option because banana milk completes the trio but I think banana cereal would probably be a bit disgusting so I'm thinking either toffee or blueberry. Toffee makes more sense but blueberry is a more fun colour. 

My finished cereal boxes look fine but I think the type is missing a bit of punch so I went back and just changed the type for 'crazy cow' to something hand rendered - and I made the colours stand out too. I also made the cow a bit bigger. 

Not starting with much of a strong idea but I think I'm going to just go for it and see what happens. I'm wanting to work better with text so I'm thinking of quite type heavy designs - and going on things I want to be better with I'm also thinking hands. So, my one idea is to take the Sam Fender lyric; "I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now" from Seventeen Going Under and to do something good with the type and add an illustration of a fist with bloody knuckles. Obviously this needs to be a series of t-shirt designs so I'm not sure yet if I'll make the link be Sam Fender, or hands, or just lyrics that resonate with me. Think I'll bash out this first one then see what I'm thinking. 

I decided to just pick some lyrics from Sam Fender songs that mean something to me including lyrics from his song "Dead Boys" about male suicide and a line from "Seventeen Going Under" that really resonates with me. This brief is about fast outcomes but I do want to spend a little more time on these ones - I spent a day each on the previous two so I'm thinking more like 5 days or so for this one. 

If you've ever really wished there was a collection of references of hypersonic missiles, bloody knuckles, replica guns and aggressive dogs... well you're in luck. You're welcome.

So I have the illustrations and as predicted, I am struggling with the type. I thought I wanted something handwritten so I've tried a load of ones I've made myself and others I've found online and its just not working for me so I need to reconsider. 

I put some big fat type on there, they're bold lyrics and deserve to be big and sexy. 

This brief comes from a penguin books design competition to redesign some book covers. We have been asked to do two of the three covers provided by penguin over a four week period.

This is an adult non-fiction book written over the course of a year in an autistic boys life about his relationship with nature, struggles with bullying and severe anxiety and a passion for wildlife conservation. 

I started off by reading parts of the book and reviews, anything to get a feel for the content. I took down some notes of themes and also the different animals/plants mentioned. I already had an idea of what I wanted to do but it took me a while through thumbnailing to get to where I wanted it to be.

I started off making myself some thumbnails to scale, I worked across the full back, spine and front to avoid anything feeling disjointed and I eventually knew I wanted the design to wrap the full way around. The next thing I did was figure out a pleasing layout for the title since it has to be there so why not start there. Once I had that, I just used my handwriting font as a placeholder and made up some more thumbnails ready for some illustration. As I mentioned earlier I had an idea in my head it just took a little while to get it onto the screen. I started to experiment with a ripped paper - scrapbook - type style and again using my handwriting font as a placeholder (although it doesn't look bad) I sort of mocked up the look I'm aiming for. 

I wanted to have a look at some different styles of wildlife illustration because I like the paper textures and the colours I have going on but I think I want a sort of field notes, scientific drawing sort of style to it. Not sure yet, and that's why I need to have a good look. 

I really love the simple animal sketches so I'm going to try out doing some like that but since I want to incorporate the orange I'll have to figure out how to do that. I also found this beautiful blue and orange colour palette so I'm going to have a go changing the green to blue since that was my plan in the first place but I changed my mind because I thought green made more sense. I wanted to include blue as a subtle nod to the authors autism as blue is the colour chosen to represent it so I would really like to be able to have that in there - I also like the darker end of the blues on the palette so that's what I think I'll focus on. 

Once I decided on a font I went ahead and drew up the wildlife - I decided to incorporate the orange with semi-transparent circles overlapping each other and the illustrations. I really love how they look on the sheet on their own but I did have some doubts about how it would all come together. Below is the 'finished' version and I do like it but its very busy so I'm leaving it alone for now and since I finished it so fast I started to put together another one which is also below and again isn't finished. 

Both of them need adjusting and lining up and a fair bit of tweaking but I actually much prefer the frog one. I'll see both of them through to completion but thanks for the frog idea Dwayne. Also - I made my own font for frog one and I think it looks pretty cute. 

I went back on both covers and made sure things were lined up and looking good, the more diary looking one looked great all lined up with the grid, the blue one I used less of a grid but still kept everything within the lines I set and payed attention to spacing more than I did with the first time around and even cut out some of the animal illustrations to make it look less crowded. 

This book is a confusing web of stories following 12 women and their lives, relationships, identities and careers. I love the concept but man is it hard to get your head around. I did try though.

I first put together a list of the characters and reading from a summary I jotted down their important notes that define them in this story, at this point I really had no idea where to go from here. My initial idea was to have an illustration of 12 items that could represent each character and have them intertwined somehow but I'm not sure if that's going to work now. 

Above is a rough crack at what I'm trying to do. I'm happy with the text placement which means the knot and ropes will have to move to work around it. Still not sure what I'm going to do about fonts and colours so that's next on the list.

I made a pattern inspired by traditional African fabrics for the background, it was initially more pale tan tones because I wanted it to be quite subtle in the background but it looked strange to I managed to boost it up to a more saturated orangey colour. I used blues for the text and illustration to contrast the orange. 

For this project we are working as a group to make an exquisite corpse book. We each randomly picked four numbers that have a character associated to them; mine are:

#2 - Miss Scott of Cavendish Square
18c. courtesan, average looking but amazing at her job. Particularly amorous.
#19 - Fulvia Capito
Roman oracle, used pasta to predict the future
#21 - Dev
Time travelling mime artist, genderless, from a distant future where humans live underground
#27 - Pandora Moon
Earth Goddess, frequently attended 1960s music festivals, was last seen at the 1971 Glastonbury festival.

Before any illustration could start we needed to decide together on how this would work logistically so we picked a size template to stick to and we made a lot of other decisions too - one being that the print company can't accommodate for us all doing all four of our characters so we can only do two each for the book.

I didn't do a great amount of planning for each of my characters, I let them develop on the page as I went really. I've done them all digitally which is fine but I would've liked to do something a bit more exciting with them.