Blog.

As I have fairly limited blog experience I have found it a learning curve however, this is my live blog. I have used to designs from the supplement to show how it could work. However, I believe that it may work more effectively as promotion if it was a blog for a certain shop or designer to show off their 'bargains' etc. It could be really good to do it for a charity shop as stock comes in.

Blog logo trials.

Here is the logo I chose to use for my blog, from earlier trials I decided this would work well on screen. Due to the rectangular screen the rectangular logo fits more neatly.

Some trials of type and colour:

I believe that the design decisions should reflect fashion at the moment. Pastels look good on the white plain blog template. The opacity works well with them too as it creates a texture to the logo.

Deciding on the type was also important, as the type of my blog will reflect it to create a constant throughout.

I believe that the most aesthetically pleasing typeface for this is Times due to its classic look and particularly the height of the numbers in relation to the word 'fashion'. It creates a distinct difference. For a logo as a header on a blog I think its important for the logo to be plain but stylish and I think this is achieved by using Times.

Further investigations into designing £100 fashion supplement.

Work by Mark Howe for a band. After scanning in the magazine cut out of clothing I wanted to use them in my supplement to illustrate the clothes. I really like the way the clothes and image of the girls are all flat.

It's also great how plain the background is. Uncomplicated.

Here is a selection of some images of the clothes I cut out and scanned in.

Due to my intent to focus on the design and the product looking as fashionable as I could afford, some of the clothes used were not under £100, however, I tried to stick to cheaper pieces.

Here is my mock up that I produced, it was good to get an idea and feeling for how it would all look when I could use cheap stock and could show others in a crit.

Feedback from the crit.

General advice:

Identify and focus on the intended audience. Make it relevant.

Go back and reassess the brief.

Specific to my project:

Broaden the audience

Put the work into a blog, as supplements would cost and go out of date quickly as fashion changes.

Some examples of online fashion sites. not specifically blogs, although interesting to see layouts etc. More on design context

Therefore I am going to re-assess my final outcome intentions. I have created another blog so that this project can go live. Fashion 100

Photoshop and Colour Theory

I began by selecting the best of the photographs from my colour theory session. My chosen colour was orange and below are the photographs I picked. Choosing 5 I could compare and contrast the different results.

Some initial ideas for £100 outfits.

I wanted to begin designing as then I could begin to see how the outcome could progress onto.

Some screen shots of ideas for front covers:

outfit pages:

Research.

Referring cataphorically to my research proposal I stated that would create an 'interesting documentation of a collection of 'favourite outfits', however, after another crit it was mentioned that there was not enough reasoning for this. So I decided to try and concentrate on 'product and promotion'. My product being clothes and the promotion would be what I was designing. Altering my p

roposal for more commercial intent.

photos of fashion supplements to come.

I also stated the ways in which I would research for this brief.

PRIMARY methods o

f research

How?

I will create questionnair

es that I can gather q

ualitative and quantitative rese

arch

from.

Reading articles in magazines, online blogs, newspapers and other media.

Who?

I intend to gather inf

ormatio

n from a wide variety of people to create a fairer investigation, by going into Leeds and asking p

eople quick questions that they can answer quickly, althou

gh

friends at college will probably b

e more

willing to fill out more exte

nsive written questionnaires. This will obviously limit my findin

gs however through using different medias I hope to make a fair judgement as far as I can.

SECONDARY m

ethod

s of research

How?

Fashion magazines

Fashion blogs

Other researc

h carried out by others if poss

ible.

Online, videos/youtube etc

Art by others, Mark Howe's photography

Who?

I will use the internet to res

earch initially but hope to also investigate interviews/transcripts, tv programs, books and magazines to hopefully broaden my investigatio

n

and make it more interestin

g. I will look at design work that is related to fashion, how the audience di

ctates how things ar

e designed and possibly define

some rules or results.

Some of my secondary research can be found on my design co

ntext blog

However I carried

out some primary research. I asked 100 people what thei

r favourite pieces of clot

hing were. Here are my results:

Images to come.

Questionnaire results.

Info Graphics.

We had a workshop with

Amber which concentrated on using facts and figures and interpreting them into visual information that was not instan

tly connected to the informa

tion it communicated.

A couple of examples to contextualise my work on this but more examples on my

design context blog.

I wanted to investigate interpreting my research into some info graphics. I created a straight forward (pretty ugly) pie chart and hope to make it more aestheti

cally pleasing.

Product promotion. inc Wearing and Layout.

Identifying favourite items of clothing has allowed me to begin to think about how I will concentrate on promotion and relate back to the brief 'collection100'.

Initially visualising a book of some type, possibly a flip book (changing peoples outfits, with 100 options)

example:

I also started to look at the work of Gillian Wearing, a British conceptual artist. Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say was a series of photographs.

I quickly took some photos of my brother just to see how it would look etc. I liked the impact that the writing caused.

altering them to see how they looked in black and white etc. just to develop what worked well and what didn't.

It bought out an honesty, I thought it could related to features in magazines when people are photographed on the street.

Street Peeper is an example of this. When researching fashion and finding more and more out it becomes daunting. Choosing what you put on can portray everything about you to others. It becomes much more than what you wear.

The British fashion industry is reportedly now worth nearly £21billion a year. Guardian article.

I decided that photographing people would be interesting for the viewer, however, it wouldn't work in relation to my intentions.

After a visual language session with Lorenzo about layouts and the importance of grids, I thought it would be useful to begin dissecting and analysing how fashion magazines organise their layouts. I wanted to concentrate on the layouts that were relevant to my own project, so where there would be a combination of type and image.

I thought about illustrating the book, however, referring back to my initial rational I must remember that my aim is to promote the clothes, if I wasn't even showing the clothes then the effectiveness would be ridiculously low.