All briefs

Brief 1:
Editorial illustration- Pick 1 article a month from the newyorker.com from the week prior and illustrate it within 24 hours. I can either make 1 more detailed illustration or 3 spot illustrations. I need to make each illustration different in format to the previous. Audience: readers of that article.

I want to create some editorial illustrations within 24 hours every month that are informed by The New Yorker (i chose this because i’d really love to do work for them one day) because I am really interested in editorial illustration and want to explore it more. This will improve my creative thinking skills and push me to work to a short time frame and as a result I will have some sort of experience with editorial illustration and work for my portfolio.

Product:
Editorial Illustration

Tone of voice:
Suited to the article that I pick

Audience:
Readers of the New Yorker

Context:
Designed for the New Yorker magazine and the New Yorker online

Mandatory Requirements:
Tone of voice must be suited to the article
Design must not take over 24 hours to complete

Deliverables:
Various editorial illustration produced every week from here up until the deadline

Brief 2:
Penguin Book Covers
Re design the book covers for the Penguin design award. Select 2 covers, design them and submit them.

"Try to design a new cover for a new generation of readers, avoiding the obvious clichés. Originality is key.

We are looking for a striking cover design that is well executed, has an imaginative concept and clearly places the book for its market. While all elements of the jacket need to work together as a cohesive whole, remember that the front cover must be effective on its own and be eye-catching within a crowded bookshop setting. It also needs to be able to work on screen for digital retailers such as Amazon."

The winning design will need to:

• have an imaginative concept and original interpretation of the brief 
• be competently executed with strong use of typography 
• appeal to a contemporary readership
• show a good understanding of the marketplace
• have a point of difference from the many other book covers it is competing against
• be able to sit on the shelves of a supermarket or ebook store as easily as it sits on those of more traditional bookshops

Copyright must be cleared for all images used in your cover design

Product:
Book cover

Tone of voice:
Suited to the book

Audience:
Must appeal to contemporary readership

Context:
Bookshops, online marketplace

Mandatory Requirements:
Clear of any copyright infringed material

Deliverables:
Your cover design needs to include all the cover copy as supplied and be designed to the specified design template 
(B format, 198mm high x 129mm wide, spine width 10mm).

Brief 3:

Big Brief- Illustrated Guide to The Tropical Rainforest (book)

I will illustrate 4 Sections in the book- Forest floor, understory layer, canopy layer and emergent layer. More than 1,200 new species have been identified in the amazon rainforest between 1999 and 2009 and around 40% to 75% of all biotic species are indigenous to the rainforests- people need to know more about these new species and the vast array of life in the tropical rainforest. The book will be at least 24 Pages. It will even be open to further development of posters, activity pack, selected screenprints, wallpaper, card game (like ‘top trumps’).

Audience: children and other people who don’t know a lot about the rainforest but want to find out more or just like really nice illustrated books.
Product:

Tone of voice:

Fun

Engaging

Informative

Playful

Audience:

People interested in nature and botanical drawings

People who enjoy screenprints

People who visit the Natural History Museum- mostly targeted towards families

Context:

Natural history museum- walls, & shop

Could also translated for use in..

                                             A classroom

                                             Tropical world, leeds

                                             Exhibition space

                                             Interactive space

Mandatory Requirements:

It has to be based on the rainforest

It has to appeal to the audience

Deliverables:

5x Screenprints

10x Wall Decals- 2/3 metres tall

Set of products for the museum shop

Brief 4:
Darts Project- Digital art and storytelling. Create a piece of digital artwork of a historical building (a choice of 3 buildings- Corvin Castle) Audience:

I want to complete this brief because of my interest in digital illustration and buildings. This will challenge me to step out and digitally draw a building and as a result I may win a competition and also have a really good piece of artwork on a historical building as well as gained skills in architectural drawing.

"Enter and choose one of the buildings (Corvin Castle in Romania, Villa Rufolo in Italy or the Alden Biesen Landcommandery in Belgium)... for each of them a lot of history, description, documents and photos are available in the website so you can absolutely use these informations to create your artwork or tale by using your digital applications and devices... and win!

Trip back in time, visit virtually the buildings through the provided multimedia materials, read something about characters and their lives, choose the elements of your story and plan your storyboard.

You can imagine fantastic or realistic sceneries... the very important thing is that you create a brand new story or artwork about the building.

Use your imagination or words in a creative way to give new life to the Past!
Have a look and start now..."

Product:
Digitally produced illustration

Tone of voice:
Fun, intriguing, informative

Audience:
Those visiting Corvin Castle

Context:
Existing as part tourist information of the Corvin Castle

Mandatory Requirements:

Deliverables:

Brief 5:
Re-illustrate the covers of the Hunger Games Trilogy as the current covers lack visual appeal and take part in the Penguin book cover design award. Audience: readers of that book

I want to illustrate these covers because I am interested in book cover design and the current ones are lacking in visual appeal for both the hunger games books and the selected Penguin books. This will attract people to read the book and also challenge me as I struggle to interpret large pieces of text and as a result I will be better at book cover design and also will have gained skills in interpreting text.

I will also expand by creating bespoke prints of the covers and a body of promotional material for the book re release.

Product:
Book covers
Promotional material
Art prints

Tone of voice:
In line with the books-
adventure, intrigue, science fiction, drama

Audience:
Fans of the Hunger Games trilogy, potential readers in the brands target market (young adults)

Context:
Waterstones for book covers and products, bespoke prints for the context of to be framed in homes

Mandatory Requirements:
It must be visually appealing and very different from the existing covers
It must promote people to buy the book just because of the cover

Deliverables:
3 x Book covers
3 x Bespoke Prints
1 set of promotional products for the trilogy re release

Brief 6:
For this brief I must create a colouring book that shows children what engineering is and breaks any stereotypes that they may have. It must show a child/children going from where they are now to what they could be in the future. E.g a child could be playing with lego now and this could help them to be a structural engineer in the future.

Product:
A colouring book

Tone of voice:
informative, fun, engaging

Audience:
Children in schools (age 4-9)

Context:
A children's book to be available for download online as well as a to be found in the classroom.

Mandatory Requirements:
a4 size
fits 'bubble'
line weight similar to peers
Black and white line drawing

Deliverables:
3x drawings for the book (printing and collating is done externally)

Brief 7:

‘Fight the Dice’ EP cover. I was asked by a friend to create an EP cover for their band also create a sleeve(s) for Secret 7 submission. (Audience: Listeners of that artist)

I want design an EP cover because it is something that I have never done before and the scope of the reach will be much bigger than a self directed brief. This will deepen my understanding on how to create a good EP/album cover and show me how to deal with a client and as a result make me a better and more experienced illustrator. The secret 7 covers will also be good for me for my skills in building images from text and creating concepts.

Product:
1x EP cover
3x Secret 7 covers

Tone of voice:
Suited to the music and its genre
For the EP it will be- fun, comical, intriguing

Audience:
Those who listen to the music

Context:
For the EP cover- online music stores, Soundcloud, gigs, festivals, social media.

Mandatory Requirements:
Must be standard album cover size and full bleed.

Deliverables:
1x EP cover
3x Secret 7 Cover

Tutorial with Ben

After a tutorial with Ben and speaking about my interest in editorial illustration, he helped me to plan out some illustrations that will benefit me and my practice for the OUIL 603 brief 1 module. My plan for this brief is to greater my editorial illustration skills, Ben gave me practical techniques to help me to not only work hard but to work smart.

We spoke about the op-ed and looked at

Deadlines

It seems that the Digital Arts and Storytelling Competition don't stick to deadlines. Maybe its a cultural difference, maybe its because they have not promoted it enough. 

Regardless, this is good for me as it gives me extra time to create some work for it.

Editorial Article "Interns on Demand"

I have took on my critique from the post previous and have created an illustration that is much more concept driven. Concept is important in editorial illustration (especially if the article is 'dry'). The concept also draws people in to these articles that they might usually skim over. 

For this illustration I focussed on using the creative op-ed style layout where the text was incorporated within the illustration. 

A challenge that I faced on this was learning how to wrap the text around the illustration as I couldn't find anything online explaining- however I got there in the end! I could probably of improved on the shape that i put the text into as there are spaces where it doesn't flow so well. The concept behind this was it was like companies have interns on tap, I wonder how easy it is for the viewer to receive this or if it just looks a bit silly? Maybe it would of been better if the tap was better drawn and the people each had different styles of clothes/hair etc. I would also say that the plug hole at the bottom could of been a bit bigger however if this were printed in the New Yorker, it would be much bigger than the screen here. 

Brief 5

Brief 5:
Re-illustrate the covers of the Hunger Games Trilogy as the current covers lack visual appeal 

Audience: readers of that book

I want to illustrate these covers because I am interested in book cover design and the current ones are lacking in visual appeal for the Hunger Games books. This will attract people to read the book and also challenge me as I struggle to interpret large pieces of text and as a result I will be better at book cover design and also will have gained skills in interpreting text. It will also create some really exciting work for my portfolio.

I will also expand by creating bespoke prints of the covers and a body of promotional material for the book re release.

Product:
Book covers
Promotional material
Art prints

Tone of voice:
In line with the books-
adventure, intrigue, science fiction, drama

Audience:
Fans of the Hunger Games trilogy, potential readers in the brands target market (young adults)

Context:
Waterstones for book covers and products, bespoke prints for the context of to be framed in homes

Mandatory Requirements:
It must be visually appealing and very different from the existing covers
It must promote people to buy the book just because of the cover

Deliverables:
3 x Book covers
3 x Bespoke Prints
1 set of promotional products for the trilogy re release

Brief 2

Brief 2:
Penguin Book Covers
Re design the book covers for the Penguin design award. Select 2 covers, design them and submit them.

"Try to design a new cover for a new generation of readers, avoiding the obvious clichés. Originality is key.

We are looking for a striking cover design that is well executed, has an imaginative concept and clearly places the book for its market. While all elements of the jacket need to work together as a cohesive whole, remember that the front cover must be effective on its own and be eye-catching within a crowded bookshop setting. It also needs to be able to work on screen for digital retailers such as Amazon."

The winning design will need to:

• have an imaginative concept and original interpretation of the brief 
• be competently executed with strong use of typography 
• appeal to a contemporary readership
• show a good understanding of the marketplace
• have a point of difference from the many other book covers it is competing against
• be able to sit on the shelves of a supermarket or ebook store as easily as it sits on those of more traditional bookshops

Copyright must be cleared for all images used in your cover design

Product:
Book cover

Tone of voice:
Suited to the book

Audience:
Must appeal to contemporary readership

Context:
Bookshops, online marketplace

Mandatory Requirements:
Clear of any copyright infringed material

Deliverables:
Your cover design needs to include all the cover copy as supplied and be designed to the specified design template 
(B format, 198mm high x 129mm wide, spine width 10mm).

Brief 1

Brief 1:
Editorial illustration- Pick 1 article a month from the newyorker.com from the week prior and illustrate it within 24 hours. I can either make 1 more detailed illustration or 3 spot illustrations. I need to make each illustration different in format to the previous. Audience: readers of that article.

I want to create some editorial illustrations within 24 hours every month that are informed by The New Yorker (i chose this because i’d really love to do work for them one day) because I am really interested in editorial illustration and want to explore it more. This will improve my creative thinking skills and push me to work to a short time frame and as a result I will have some sort of experience with editorial illustration and work for my portfolio.

Product:
Editorial Illustration

Tone of voice:
Suited to the article that I pick

Audience:
Readers of the New Yorker

Context:
Designed for the New Yorker magazine and the New Yorker online

Mandatory Requirements:
Tone of voice must be suited to the article
Design must not take over 24 hours to complete

Deliverables:
Various editorial illustration produced every week from here up until the deadline

Submission to the Darts project.

http://www.e-darts.eu

I have sent in my application for this competition. Making the image itself was fairly straightforward once it got going. I spent a good amount of time on it and am excited to see what happens with the submission. I feel as though my submission is fairly strong however I wonder how it will compare to other pieces as it is open to all types of digital art (which include animations).

I struggled to get the colours right at first, after a lot of trying and testing I feel as though the colours that I have used work well together and also suit the building itself. I feel that the strong whites, pink and blues that I have previously tried, retract from the character and history of the castle which is why i chose that specific palette that I used. 

 I have tried the best I can do with my way of working so I will just have to wait and see. 

Editorial pinterest board

I have made a pinterest board full of editorial illustration that I like. Most of the pieces that I have picked are concept driven. I feel that the idea/concept is usually what drives the whole illustration and the process comes second. Many of the pieces that I have documented here rely on metaphors documented in a visual way. This is something to bear in mind for my own work. At times I feel my work lacks in the idea (like the previous post). I will try and work on it to make it better.

Editorial brief 1- Bento Boxes and the Grade-School Power Lunch

This is my square sized illustration. I am really happy with how it has turned out, I like the mix of colours and the way that i have illustrated it. The concept in this piece wasn't very strong; it is quite literal. I do however think that it really suits this article and illustrates it well. Looking back now that I have made it, I wouldn't change too much about it. Maybe the 'Hello Kitty' symbol made out of rice is a bit silly but when I made this I felt it represented the Japanese children's culture well. I like that the work isn't all clean lines but there are some more organic ones in there too.

Overall I am happy with it and feel that it would sit really well with the article.

Here is the article text:

"In “Bento Monogatari,” a Belgian short film that was released in 2010, a woman makes her husband a bento box for lunch each day, in an attempt to salvage their marriage. Traditionally, bento is a single-portion meal, served in a box that contains small amounts of several types of food. In Japan, bento, which dates back hundreds of years, is highly aesthetic, reflecting clean lines, ordered geometries, and uncluttered space; today, it often includes food shaped into adorable characters. And so the wife in “Bento Monogatari,” who wears Harajuku-style dresses and fills her house with Japanese tchotchkes, molds rice balls into elaborate rabbits and piglets. Her husband, however, is more interested in his beautiful male co-worker, and he throws away the food. When the wife finds out, she explodes. “Don’t forget that I wake up at five every morning to prepare this ‘garbage’ for you!” she snaps. But the allure of bento prevails in the end: in a surreal twist, the husband is transformed into a bento character, and the beautiful co-worker eats him for lunch.

The film played at Cannes, in 2011, a small part of a wave of international interest in bento over the past few years. A decade ago, it was difficult to find bento supplies outside Japan. Now bento-dedicated blogs and Pinterest boardsabound. There are bento contests and bento how-to books. As of this month, the best-selling lunchbox on Amazon.com was a set of three-compartment “Bento Lunch Box Containers.” This year’s flurry of back-to-school media coverage included reports on bento from the “Today” show, the Guardian, and the Halifax Chronicle Herald, to name a few. The term “bento” has also spread beyond lunch, to describe balanced, compartmentalized, and aesthetically appealing design in any field. In fashion, for example, the online retailer MM.LaFleur offers customers a stylist-curated bento consisting of three to five base garments and an assortment of accessories. (“We often hear from customers that they feel like we ‘know’ them and have solved a major problem in their lives,” Sarah LaFleur, the company’s founder and C.E.O., wrote to me in an e-mail.)

It’s in the realm of food, though, and especially food for children, that bento has become a status symbol. The trendy version of bento depicted in “Bento Monogatari” follows mainly from the contemporary Japanese practice of charaben, which features food sculpted into intricate and adorable characters, like SpongeBob SquarePants and Pikachu. Charaben makers painstakingly fashion the food using stencils, specialized picks, cutters, and other tools, with the aim of achieving kawaii, a type of cuteness associated with things like babies, snowmen, and baby pandas. For his book “Face Food: The Visual Creativity of Japanese Bento Boxes,” Christopher D. Salyers photographed the elaborate bento made by Japanese mothers (and one father), who told him that they would often wake up at 5 A.M. to tweeze seaweed and tapioca into piglets and manga princesses. “The devotion they had to the craft was one inspired by an absolute avidity toward pleasing their children,” Salyers writes.

Online bento culture is focussed on the exquisite and the practical. Shirley Wong, a Singaporean blogger who goes by the moniker Little Miss Bento, runs workshops to teach people how to make the perfect charaben. Elsewhere, bloggers like Sheri Chen, of Happy Little Bento, and Li Ming Lee, at Bento Monsters, document the bento they build for their families. (Caroline Miros, the C.E.O. of PlanetBox, a maker of bento-like containers, told me that about ninety per cent of people sharing lunches on her company’s social-media pages are women.) The downside of this conspicuous creativity is the expectations it can place on parents. A recent article by Kimberly Leonard in U.S. News and World Report suggested that pressure born of bento-dedicated social media, in particular, is excessive. “For parents who make these lunches and for those who don’t, the topic of what they are feeding their kids is deeply personal, rife with insecurity, anxiety, judgment and criticism,” she writes. Bettina Elias Siegel, a food-policy commentator who blogs about children and food at The Lunch Tray, wrote to me in an e-mail, “Are [bloggers] justifiably proud of their work and entitled to show off a little, the way we all trumpet our accomplishments on social media these days? Or are they coming across as morally superior?”

As Kenji Ekuan, the Japanese designer best known for creating the Kikkoman soy-sauce bottle, writes in his 1998 book, “The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox,” these social concerns are woven into the history of the bento box. The bento has humble beginnings, tracing back to twelfth-century Japanese farmers who used them to carry simple balls of rice into the fields. A more elaborate bento culture flourished during the Edo period (1603–1867), when it became the province of the élite. Sightseers would carry koshibento, or “waist bento,” which consisted of easily portable rice balls wrapped in bamboo leaves and tucked into a woven bamboo box. Makunouchi bento, or “between-the-acts bento,” consisting of cylinders of rice and side dishes, were served during intermissions of Noh and Kabuki performances.

Later, bento became prevalent in more areas of Japanese society—in offices, as white-collar workers began to carry their lunches in compartmentalized aluminum containers, and at train stations, which came to feature a wide selection of to-go bento. By mid-century, factories were churning out cheap bento boxes, to the dismay of some élites. “The quality of these mass-produced lunchboxes is appallingly low, making them an entirely different breed from their gorgeous ancestors,” Ekuan writes. “In many cases, the rice is no longer even shaped or wrapped but simply crammed into the assigned portion.”

In schools, the boxes became a marker of inequality. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese schoolchildren primarily brought their lunches to school. Wealthy kids began to bring elaborate bento in metal containers that underprivileged students could not afford. The attendant status distinctions effectively disappeared in 1954, when Japan enacted the School Lunch Act, which mandated that lunch become integrated into the country’s educational curriculum. Nutritionists began to regulate what went into student lunches, and schoolchildren were assigned to arrange tables, serve the school-provided meal, and clean up. Today, although bento in Japan has become popular with schoolchildren again, it tends to be restricted to field trips and picnics.

In America, the status and health issues involved in the segmented presentation of food have historically been further complicated by the influence of mass marketing. These began, notably, in 1953, when Swanson sold its first TV dinners, prompting some men to complain that they preferred meals made (by their wives) from scratch. Later, in 1988, the Oscar Mayer Company came up with the segmented, prepackaged brand Lunchables, as a way to sell more bologna. Although the company’s executives, perhaps seeking to tap into the sushi craze at the time, perpetuated a myth that bento boxes had inspired Lunchables’ bright compartmental design, the journalist Michael Moss writes in his book “Salt Sugar Fat” that they were actually based on the TV dinner. Lunchables targeted kids in their advertising, and were soon a hit. But nutritionists pointed out that, like TV dinners, Lunchables were packed with salt and extra preservatives. A 1997 study showed that ham-and-cheese Lunchables contained three-fourths of the recommended daily sodium allowance. Pancakes Lunchables, a variety that has been discontinued, had seventy-six grams of sugar. Health concerns eventually prompted Oscar Mayer to change some of the contents of Lunchables (swapping, for example, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with fruit cups) and to emphasize terms like “protein” and “no artificial preservatives” in marketing them. In 2013, the Lunchables brand accounted for more than a billion dollars in sales.

While the countervailing boutique bento trend can be precious, it has also married concern for presentation with concern for the quality of the food that children eat. “I think most of us agree that what we make with whatever ability we have is much better than what our kids would otherwise get in the cafeteria, and that might eventually lead to change in our food industry,” Chen, of Happy Little Bento, wrote to me in an e-mail.

For many parents and nutritionists, a sea change not unlike Japan’s School Lunch Act, which democratized eating and made nutrition part of the educational curriculum, would be the better approach. Sanna Delmonico, a nutrition specialist at the Culinary Institute of America, told me that she would prefer to see greater emphasis placed on participation in school meals. “They tend to be more nutritious,” she said, adding, “There’s a lot to be said for conviviality and eating the same foods as other people. They learn a lot from that. It’s peer pressure, in a good way.” She sees school meals, too, as a corrective to special-snowflake syndrome among children, which she said bento can promote. “There’s so much defining of one’s individuality though food that people lose out on what food is really great for: bringing people together,” she said.

Fortunately, some bento bloggers are already fighting the impulse to spend hours making perfect replicas of Hello Kitty. Shannon Carino, who writes the blog BentoLunch.net, started making bento in 2007 to coax her daughter to eat. “With a huge sandwich, she would never eat that, but when I had everything cute, we had absolutely no problem getting her to finish all her food,” Carino told me. Far from turning bento into a marker of her child’s identity, though, she often doesn’t bother with decoration beyond toothpicks with little panda ears. “I don’t have the kitchen, nor the time, nor the patience,” she said. “For me, it’s more about what regular families are going to eat.” A recent post, “Simple, Not-So-Exciting Bentos,” featured tuna sandwiches and raspberries plunked unceremoniously in a plastic container. “Some days,” she wrote, “I’m just not that inspired, and the kiddos still require food. Sheesh.”