What kind of designer am I?

Good question, however I'm really struggling to find out myself. I suppose it's similar to asking Who am I? Equally as hard to answer. I thought the best place to start would be looking at my history as an Artist/Designer and exploring my interests and what I'm passionate about. 

Thinking back I dabbled into a lot of photography at one point, this became separate from my studies and more a hobby.

Photography was always a starting point for projects for me, capturing the visual image led me to massive amounts of inspiration. Although I don't believe I carry the technical skill photographers have I could always notice something that I deemed as visually exciting and always wanted to capture this. This is something I think will always be a good skill to carry as a designer. 

Print work

Illustration

All of this work was produced on my foundation course, a great opportunity I cherished. It gave me the opportunity to experiment with so many different skills. In the context of type of design I think I am going to keep all skills under my belt. Use them all when needed. 

Packaging. Initial research

Package designing is something that I have a genuine interest for, however with me only just making the transition into the design world I am excited to start looking at packaging designs that are really eye catching. I desperately want mine to be a work of art in itself but also with a purpose/ some form of efficiency. 

http://trendland.com/pencil-packaging-design

These two impressive pencil packaging designs really caught my eye. Designed by an artists called Kevin Angeloni he has taken the basic grey pencil, that is taken for granted as being a tool to create ideas and created a beautiful pieces of packaging.

I aesthetically enjoy these packaging pieces however I personally can see waste material, I would like to keep mine as economical as possible. Here are some examples I have found.

A package in the form of origami
By the designer Patrick Sung

Wolfgang Weingart

After looking at how powerful black, bold type can be I came across Wolfgang Weingart, a Swiss Graphic Designer who creates  beautiful pieces of design using typography. 

His work is so powerful, the contrast of the black type on a white background screams the type out of the page. I wanted to look at his way of using size within these pieces. How each letter has its own identity and some are blown up and some are really quite minute in comparison. This has inspired me to see how I can use size and font within my logo and practise some typography pieces. 

Looking at LOGO's

Logo workshop

Logo's are everything for a brand. They are a small way of communicating everything they are about by using visual imagery and/or typography. A good Logo is a powerful and visually exciting symbol that is unique to the brand. As part of this journey our last workshop was looking at Logo's and using the letters of our initials to explore our own possible Logo's. Here are a few I produced whilst in the workshop.

These were created using a basic technique of cutting the letter's 'A' and 'M' out of different printed fonts and looking at unusual layering, taking parts of the letters off and still being about understand what letter it is and playing with size and composition.

Richard Sweeney
The Art of Cardboard. 

After the cardboard sculpting workshop I wanted to look at an artists called Richard Sweeney in further detail. He was mentioned in the workshop and I thought his work was beautiful. Below are a few examples of his work. 

Richard Sweeney

Watercolour Paper

2010

Richard Sweeney 

Paper and Adhesive

2006

 

Richard Sweeney

2007

http://www.richardsweeney.co.uk

His work is stunning, the delicate shapes he creates with such a hard wearing material is a really nice concept. As a designer I  am extremely inspired by his work, for my personal net I am going to start looking at creating quite organic shapes as I really enjoy this contrast.

Exploring cardboard. 

I thought the best place to start would be to look over some techniques I had gathered already. These are cardboard sculptures that I created last year using the simple technique of restricting myself to primary shapes; circles, squares and triangles and arranging them by cutting slits into the card.