Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Review

Inside The Mind of Ben Evans - Fuelled by Music and Superheroes

“Showtime A-Holes!”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has definitely been an ever-growing collection of films and this year saw the launch of it’s “Phase 3” initiative of movies. The one I have been looking forward to the most is James Gunn’s Guardian’s of the Galaxy Vol 2.

I was a massive fan of the first Guardian’s and when I knew a sequel was on the way, to say I was stoked would be an understatement! I personally think that the sequel was much better than it’s predecessor as the stories within the film felt more developed, giving us more of an insight into each of the Guardian’s. The film itself turned out to be an action filled, roller coaster of laughs and emotional moments which captured the heart and soul of the director’s vision.

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Hi… it’s been 9 months

After the burnout of University, graduating, working over the christmas period and job searching, I have made a miraculous recovery!

After contemplating my existence, crying in the corner and thinking it was all hopeless due to my now crippling debt, I have returned to my roots of this site. You may notice a few changes around here, including the way I now write more freely due to no lecturer supervision, Ha!

After looking for my new years resolution that usually lasts all of 2 minutes, I opted to create a list of actions to complete this year. Not only do I want to get a job within the design sector, I want to improve my skills as a designer in the current areas I enjoy the most as well as learning new software.

That all said and done this will enact as my web portfolio and help me build toward a future site that flows with my creativity.
Thanks for reading!

FMP- Reflection

I have based my FMP around the journeys project as part of the imminent city studio. I had noticed the lack in content for road safety awareness for 11-17 year olds within the THINK campaign set out by the government. The aim is to inform readers about road signs which are of particular help when out and about. Be it as pedestrian, cyclist or eventual road theory for driving.

I felt a little overwhelmed at first due to me not finding a way into the subject. I settled with developing my character designs from my workshops for the jobs and journeys projects. I felt that this would be important way to bridge the gap between the information from the highway code  to discussing the hobby of riding bikes. After talks with peers, I felt a little more confident that my idea held weight.

I liked having the freedom of media. I used some of my previous knowledge from the last years to create media for the subject area. For example, I used the marvel app to produce a dummy for my app. I also thought that some of the style elements like typography and colour worked out well, informed from my initial research. I disliked the amount of time it took me to get to some of the points that I was creating. A lot of experiments went wrong with the app, map and book. However, I don’t believe this to be a bad experience. This is because it taught me a lot about myself as a designer and showed me the eventual roots to create something more interactive.

I feel like I have worked towards my goal. Although I do not think I have fully achieved it, I have created various media for a target audience to interact with.

I think that I could have interacted with a focus group of 11 year olds to improve my designs more. Unfortunately, I could not schedule a meeting during the process due to time constraints and the various stages of the work I had created at the time.

I think that I would create quicker mock-ups if I were to enact this again. My designs could have used quick mockups to proceed with a focus group which would pull the outcomes more towards the target audience which could have set it apart form regular designs that I have based my research on. I feel that I rushed to produce something that used all of my elements i.e typography and colours to make outcomes.

Self Branding- Business cards

With the simplification of some of my designs I have simplified my business cards in order to give them a better structure. These are the original designs:

 

I liked that the design was able to be colourful through the ‘portals’ in the card, but felt that it was too impactful on the design and was taking away from the important information. I had however, used my typography and colour palette with the logo in full.

Next was when I subtracted the images and added them to the back of the card. However I felt that the patterned background was interfering with my grid and the illustrations on the back didn’t make sense.

Finally I rearranged the assets using my grid to align to the right and the left. I felt that this was simple but stood out the most without complicating the imagery. Finally for the back I decided to stick to abstract by taking an extract from the secret 7 vinyl cover.

All in all I believe this to be successful and reflective of my ‘brand’.

Self Branding- Re-visiting the folio

After a talk with Cecilie, I started to re-evaluate my folio design. At its current standing it felt too old, because I was using very dark and contrasting colours, much like propaganda. Therefore I had to rethink some of the aspects. By moving the suit icon to a singular page I realised that I could add text to a singular page whilst having a complete focus on images on the other side. I have simplified the layout and am currently liking this version a lot more. I worked with my actual logo as well, therefore giving more accuracy to the design.I will start to bring the base ‘background’ into indesign to properly layout my Grid, a possibility of a 4×2 grid for each A5 page, with the final size able to fit in my portfolio box that I am currently working on.

Reflective Diary

I really enjoyed creating the Reflective Diary. It gave me a chance to review my work and see how much I had actually done in the year. In all, my year has been spent refining my style and using the creative weeks of illustrator to help refine and improve my graphics. I have also used in design to create real world media, for example, in the hothouse the zine creation was one of the most exciting things for me. It has made me strive to be as professional as possible. Here’s the process zine. It still needs a few tweeks but the template is complete and to scale

sign elements

Penguin Design Awards- Finalisation

After reviewing the work I had created, I decided to gather the elements into a simple two part cover. One for the drugs used for the milk, the other consisting of the milk itself. The typography I used was a personal favourite of mine and works for a lot of pieces because its a variant of helvetica. The typography felt boring and too solid for the title though so I created a shadow affect by duplicating and darkening the title. I offset the blurb to the right as I wanted the image to really dominate the space it was in to really enforce how disturbing the plot of the book is.

I also used both grey and blue colours to contrast but not overwhelm the design.

The second variation of this consisted of the stylised eye. The concept for this design is for it to be a cover with a paper overlay that moves up and down, causing the pupils to almost look like they are moving and so contribute to the theme of madness.

The colour palette was chosen to reminisce blood, but also mix with the orange. Again I used the same typographical element with the layout pushing the design to a more mid entered design.

Penguin Design Awards- Development

They say that there is a madness in repetition.

I started off with a simple pattern of a symbol depicting an eye. I wanted to see how it would tessellate and how it affected the ability to recognise and tell the cover from another book. In this scenario, I worked with the eye and makeup that the protagonist wears to depict the madness and ultra-violence the book builds upon.
I thought that this would stand out to what I had depicted, and wanted to develop it with a hand-rendered process. As lino cutting makes tessellation and symbolism easier, I decided to use this process. However, this did not turn out well as I had hoped due to the nature of printing and I would rather simplicity and structure to the cover.

I went back to the original and sketched a new eye that would show a darker tone, but reversed would depict worry, in which Alex goes from an angry depiction to a scared and vulnerable person after his ‘therapy’

I also had an idea of having a flat coloured illustration based cover for the milk that had been laced. I came up with some simple shapes in illustrator and meshed them together.

I thought the lines were unnecessary and would look better if I coloured it in illustrator rather than in Photoshop to give a more clean look. I also wanted to re-edit the colours to give a more rounded colour palette in general, so I came up with a few elements in illustrator rather than relying on photoshop which would pixelate the image rather than keep the vector style that I was getting used to.

For my third design, I wanted the element of the hand to be shown within the design to give a skeletal and hands on approach that would also represent the madness and anger contained within the protagonist.

Penguin Design awards- Research

This brief consisted of creating a cover for one or more Penguin published books. It had a template for download and had to be kept at the size required. Because I had seen the film and had a general idea of the plot, I chose to work on a clockwork orange for the cover.

Before looking at anything else, I looked to pointers to give me a little bit of inspiration.

This was the board I created. At the time I was interested in bright visual colours combined with darker imagery/ symbols to represent the cover. I also looked at a distorted/ destroyed typography to give the impression of madness.
I also rewatched the film as part of my research, in which I found the scene in the bar the most interesting. In this dystopian representation, Alex and his gang of droogs, drink at a bar in which drugged milk intoxicates them and fuels them for their ultra- violent spree. The reason I saw this stand out the most is due to the way reality is completely different in this part of the film. Apart from the ultra violence, everything is normal for a 70’s era society.

Therefore I started to think about madness in my exploration and experimentation.