Ice cream packaging

A design for the IDEA awards brief 2008, to create a reusable and sustainable ice cream packaging. In this solution you see that the differing flavours and their boxes create a set of collectable boxes. All the aspects of this design are tailored to be environmentally friendly.

Imagemaking Welcome to My World

Welcome to My World

For this project I choose a friend, Patrick Mansfield as my subject. Patrick is 23 years old, he was born in Holland as his mother is Dutch but he grew up in Bray, the hometown of his father. He currently works with his uncle in a furniture removal company. The element of his life that became the focus of this project was the fact that he lives with his paternal grandmother. Patrick, or Paddy, is what is known as a cyber or industrial goth. He listens to a type of music called EBM (Electric Body Music), or ‘noise’. He would wear a lot of black with UV colours, and boots called New Rocks a heavy stylised industrial boot. Paddy got his first tattoo at 17, and now has 11 tattoos and 13 piercings, including stretched tunnels of 18mm in his ear lobes. In strong contrast to this his grandmother is very ‘traditional’. She is quite religious with many religious statues and icons around her house. In general, they do not get along with very strong personality clashes. The dialogue between them, and also in describing each other is usually somewhat derogatory and ill-tempered. They appear at most times to have very little in common and communicate as little as possible. In the course of documenting the house in which these to very different but intertwined lives coexist the stark contrasts in their belongings, priorities, outlook and attitudes become apparent in both very obvious and subtle ways. The somewhat forced manner in which these too opposing personalties share this space is some what symbolic of a new versus an old Ireland. Mrs. Mansfield and her devout religiousness, and a variety of the ‘Valley of the Squinting Windows’ mentality. Then Paddy with his lack of interest in what his grandmother would term as ‘normality’, his unorthodox style of dress and blatant lack of interest in the future. He very much lives in the here and now, where as his grandmother appears to worry about nothing else. The very differing climates in which they grew up in, and the values that arose form that is apparent in nearly every facet of their lives. On a small scale the juxtaposition of their belongings and each others comments on those are both amusing and insightful into both of them. On a larger scale their differences could be seen to encapsulate and be regarded as a microcosm of our society and its uncomfortable partnerships today. I designed the book as a mock ‘objet trouvé’ or a piece of found art. Found art describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a mundane, utilitarian function. For the purposes of this project I used the most readily available media for a family to use to create a book or scrapbook, a photo album with adhesive pages. It lent a homemade feel to the book as if these two came together to record their unique living situation.

To see the full book please go to here.

Design for Print

The project aims were to create a typographic ‘celebration’ of language in its local and in the vernacular of a particular region. The ISTD brief sets out to express typographically the slang or vernacular of a local region and the derivation of the phrases. In this project the I set out to explore the local language of the region in which I grew up in, Carlow in South-East Ireland, that my father remembers from the 1950’s. As a member of a local historical society, the Old Carlow Society, my father and my uncle wrote an article recording the words that were at one point in daily use that may have disappeared completely now. This article was published in the 2006 issue of the societies annual magazine, Carloviana. Mostly of Irish roots the words mostly referred to agricultural and descriptive words that would have eased easily from spoken Irish into English. It would be a small niche market that would be interested in a publication like this. They would be exclusively people with an interest in language, development in language in Ireland, or those who grew up in Carlow during the particular time frame.

The finished book is a combination of the inner pages of copper plate embossments and screen printed type, juxtaposed with the outer pages of computer printed pages with the article and related text. The whole concept revolved around the interplay between the opposing techniques to highlight how the language illustrated is that the past, and is being documented now. The hand printed elements and the hand binding of the book serve to create a mood of exclusivity and handcraftmanship that ties in with the niche market that would be interested in such a book. The somewhat informal and conversational tone of the body of the article works with the more modern printing of the outer sections, and the more formal and dictionary-toned inner pages reflects the more formal tone that older publications of the time, the 1950’s, would have had. Taking inspiration from the Penguin series mentioned earlier, the publication was realized in monochrome, relying on the artistic shapes of the uncial typeface and the texture of the paper used to add to the tactile feel to the book. The layout reflects the page size selected, with the grid in a square. These elements were designed to be neutral so that the type was and remained the main focus. The layout remained quite simple with three columns to aid in a flexibility in the setting of the blocks of text with the enlarged uncial letters. The type selected outside of the uncial was Garamond. This is a classic serif typeface which reads easily at small point sizes and once again lends the layout the feel of a older more formal book publication of the 20th century. The typeface uncial is not as legible when set in blocks of text. It was for this reason I decided to use examples of a uncial face, namely American uncial from the Linotype web site adapted slightly, as a form of illustration. This lead to the added emphasis on type forms as a focus in the publication. The article itself discusses the development of language which is implicitly linked with developments in printing and information technology. Thus the emphasis on the type forms and their juxtapositions between the too is both wholly justified but appropriate.

Imagemaking Book Titles

This project sought to unite these seemingly disparate book titles in a collection entitled ‘Agreeably Curious’. This collection will be marketed as a limited edition collection for those with eclectic tastes in book subject, or those collecting a certain style of book cover design e.g. Penguin paperbacks. These books are all designed to a Penguin paperback style, using Gill Sans and the trade mark orange and Penguin logo in the final realisation.

Through much research into the individual subjects and various approaches to imagemaking for book covers, the photographic style emerged. All of the covers play on words, idioms, metaphors or turns of phrase tailored to each book.

In the final set, and viewed in this order set out above, the viewer starts at the tiny detail of the London tube ticket escaping off the cover, and as they continue through the collection the view pans out slowly until one has stepped back quite far and is viewing the very large wicker torso. This feeling of zooming out is accentuate by the detail in the backdrop, or lack there of, on which the items are set. This also reflects the encompassing nature of the titles. The titles with items shot at a very close angle are about quite defined subject matters, tube schemes, shells. Where as the final few books are on wider subjects, collection of stories on gardens, or a book on finding your own sanctuary.

Digital Media

The aim of this project was to explore the themes and other aspects of two films in a typographic linear animation. This piece is aimed at design students, designers and film enthusiasts. The two films in question are Damnation Alley (1977) from classic cinema and Tank Girl (1995) from modern cinema. Both of these films are set in post apocalyptic landscapes in which both a natural disaster or war has radically altered both the natural and man made worlds and civilisations The animation is a typographic depiction of the uniting and differing themes and tones of these two films.
The project is to communicate the over riding themes, such as genre, characterisation, emotions, atmosphere, location, tone etc. in a typographic manner. In these films the over riding and uniting themes are that of the post apocalyptic world and militaristic back drop and props. Both of the films were regarded as flops at the time of their release but later achieved forms of cult status amongst science fiction and comic fans. They are both supposedly based on comics or short stories to which they bear no resemblance. The piece would aim to portray the themes of a futuristic world in which civilisation and the natural world are completely transformed by disastrous events. Taking this theme, the iconography of the pieces and the type face chosen are to be an ironic statement towards these pieces of dialogue. The imagery chosen for this piece is that of road, warning and instructional signs. In the event of a worldwide disaster such as a nuclear war in which governments fall, law and its enforcement are among the first things to crumble. To this end, all which represent this become equally irrelevant. One such genre of items to become defunct is that of these signs. They represent a world and its values that were wiped off the planet by a meteor or another warring nation.
So here is the movie for Damnation Alley


and for Tank Girl