Context of practice task 3

As part of this task I need to consider my favourite designers, creatives or agencies. I'll write a list as long as I can of artists that I think I genuinely enjoy and am inspired by, and I'll try and research new ones as applicable as I've never really looked into agencies and the like.

From the list I'll pick one male, female and one group/company/agency that I particularly admire or am inspired by and pick 3 examples of work for each and tell a little about each artist, age, background etc.

Here is what I came up with, some off the top of my head and some where I knew the persons work but not their name, and some which I just discovered. (I find remembering names really hard!):

Anish Kapoor
Shepard Fairey
Jonathan Ive
Olly Moss*
Saul Bass
Bridget Riley*
Peter Saville
Sagmeister
Raymond Loewy
Alexander Rodchenko
Le Corbusier
Mies Van Der Rohe
Yuji Shinkawa
Andy Gilmore
Glenn Fabry
Burak Kaynak - makes stuff like this

GBH - For stuff like Puma Unity Initiative

Justin Van Genderen: Love his work like this

Big Active, for their work on stuff like the Mark Ronson cover

Happy F&B

FieldCandy

Radio*

Picasso

Van Gogh

Monet

Alex Kurbatov

*What I'm going to go with.

Male designer

Olly Moss.

A 24 year old UK graphic designer/illustrator who does work which basically I wish I had the crazy skills to make, most of his work makes me go wow, that's bloody clever - that's my favourite type of work in my opinion. The colours are always really strong and the execution is always quite simplistic in execution but the idea and concept behind it is always pretty smart and it is something I aspire to achieve with my work. I'm really into movies and especially movie posters and peoples takes on them, same with music covers etc and Moss has done loads and loads of it and I don't think I've seen one I dislike. Here are 3 pieces of his (from many) that I like. Very reminiscent of Saul Bass, also an artist I love. I love Red and both Bass and Moss seem to love it too.

It's hard to show him in a nutshell with just 3 pieces but these'll do for now..!

Female artist

Bridget Riley. UK born artist/designer/painter born in 1931. Bridget Riley is an 'Op Art' icon, a type of art dealing with optical illusions and paying special attention to line, framing, format and colour. I just find it fascinating to be honest, I really like this sort of approach to design where you can create shapes, by basically not drawing them. She paints them too which is insane, I don't know how she does it without getting a migraine. I've recently just seen her work in person at Tate Modern and it made an otherwise pretty dull visit, worth it.

Design agency

Radio

Radio work out of Cape Town, South Africa, paying close attention to illustration, graphic design, iconography and advertising. I just really like their style on most of their stuff, the colours, again play an important part of their work. In my own work, I've hardly introduced colour as of yet which is abit disappointing, I've been focusing more on the actual design than colour seemingly but in the past I think colour has been one of my strengths and definite interested. Some of their stuff's really nice, check these out. They've got a really vivid, strong style of illustration. One using simple shapes in most cases, keeping it simple again.

Chat soonishh,

Abbas

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DIAMOND/JEWELLERY DEALER'S COLOUR SCHEMES & OVERALL AESTHETIC

I think it would be useful to look at existing colour schemes and colour palettes of diamond and jewellery dealers already out there, as it would only make our work more informed. At the same time, we want to make our product abit different and an alternative more stylish, simplistic approach so the colour schemes won't necessarily be adopted, we might go against them on purpose to create a difference.

I'll also use adobe kuler to help visualise possible colour palettes from these websites.

H. Samuel

365 diamond

Diamond Dealer Direct

Ernest Jones

Beaverbrooks

Goldsmiths

Philip Stoner

F.Hinds

Links

All the jewellers seem to have similar logos and layouts, with a navigational bar along the top with a simple text based logo with nothing really unique or eye catching about them. They're all very understated. 

The general kind of colour palettes that you can see on these websites - I've knocked them up using Adobe Kuler, which actually lets you upload an image and extracts the colours from it which is really cool and also allows you to create your own colour palette.

The ones that I think look classier are the ones with a monotone colour palette with black backgrounds, black is the background we're probably going to be adopting too. No website has a simple monotone greyscaled layout, although we're going to inform and not sell products so we can survive without photographs.

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IMAGERY FOR CIRCULAR LOGO

For my circular motif logo I've been working on, which you can see here

This is some reference imagery which I think partly helped and inspired the design of the logo. I really like the look of a sort of badge, I think it works well with monotone one ink colours and also in colour, I'll also try the variations in colour and see how it would work. I'll research into suitable colours for that.  I tried to sway away from diamond imagery as there's a lot of brands that use diamonds as their logo and it would be difficult to differentiate from them.

Here is some imagery which helped. A mixture sort of vintage, clear and legible inspirations. I also got the idea of the outer ring of little diamonds when I saw a postage stamp on a letter, weirdly enough. The edges of them gave me the idea with the kind of perforated edges.

Collection of modern vintage logos by Riley Cran...

Loads of really cool one colour retro logos from a Jordan Lloyd collection here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jordanlloyd/sets/72157625725750162/

here are some from the collection

Really like the texture of these, maybe it's photoshopped but could easily be emulated by printing on nice textured stock. It almost looks coloured in by hand with a black marker, I like it when digitally printed stuff looks almost screen printed because of the stock.

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