Damage Limitation

In October our group was tasked with organising a Halloween party for the college. Many aspects of the organisation process went off without a hitch, such as obtaining a venue, bouncers etc. but ultimately the party never came to fruition. There were a number of reasons as to why it failed the chief of which was that despite setting up a Facebook group in which everyone involved had a forum to speak out on what they felt was important, there was still little to no communication, particularly between the graphic design students and the illustration students.

The lack of communication caused a number of issues. Many people were getting on with their assigned jobs, unaware that the job was no longer needed or had been assigned to someone else, such is the case with Harry Garrens who was tasked with creating a logo/typeface for the event only to discover that the work he created was no longer needed as illustration students had created a typeface themselves and already applied it to the brand. As failure was imminent it became imperative to invoke a damage limitation exercise to make the failure as small, subtle and insignificant as possible.

With that in mind
 the next task became to protect the reputation of the group by downplaying the incident, removing all posters and references to the party around the CCAD and quietly announcing its cancellation and offering refunds to those who had already bought tickets.

Master of Trade

For this week we were assigned to create a presentation about a master of our trade who we would like to emulate, particularly in terms of their career trajectory. I chose Shepard Fairey as I admire the way in which he is able to span the mediums of design, illustration and street art while still being financially stable which is due in part to his agency 'Studio Number One' which regularly serves very important and wealthy clients such as Coca-cola, Disney, Google, Nike and many many others. This level of security is admirable.

Fairey has also had his work displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Smithsonian and National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Arts in San Diego and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

However the presentation deemed best in our group was on Raymond Pettybon. This presentation was very well researched and written out and out of all of the ones we heard, i learnt the most in this one, not only about the man but also why he is looked up to by others.

Pettibon is an American Artist based in New York who has done a lot of work for punk rock bands, particularly posters and album art for SST Records in California. He works with Indian Ink and most of his early work is strictly black and white with only the very occasional use of colour through paints, pencils and collage. It is the black and white images such as the one shown here which he is well known for.

In 1976, Raymond's brother Greg Gill formed Black Flag which would go on to be a hugely influential punk band. In the early days when the band couldn't find a bassist, Raymond filled in and also designed much of the bands artwork including their iconic logo. It was after this that Pettibons art began appearing everywhere such as on Skateboards, Tshirts, fliers, album covers etc.

Images Taken From:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Shepard-fairey-2011-westhollywood.jpg
http://176.32.230.27/d5media.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ObeyIconhighrescopy.jpg
http://artobserved.com/artimages/2013/12/Raymond-Pettibon-via-Guardian.jpg
http://cdn1.smosh.com/sites/default/files/legacy.images/smosh-pit/082010/ptttibon-18.jpg

Brief/Commision

For this post we were put into groups and tasked with creating our own brief. This is what we came up with:


"The Client is looking for posters and business cards for a new brothel. Thorough the creation of these you are expected to design an overall brand for the business including logo's typefaces etc.

The poster should be in CMYK and A3 while the business cards should be 85x55mm. All of the work should be subtle and at no point should the word "Brothel" be used. It should be advertised as a massage parlour named 'Red Light Massages' with the slogan being "Don't Stop, Don't Stop!" This commission is due in 6 weeks on December the 4th." 

The slogan is obviously supposed to tie into the name, Red Light, creating a legitimate reason to use a sexual sounding exclamation in what is designed to look like a more legitimate business. The poster was chosen to be A3 as that can be subtle enough not to warrant any unwelcome attention while also being able to stand out to the clientele. We had a short amount of time to create this and so couldn't go into a great amount of detail but we were able to decide that 6 weeks should be ample time to complete a relatively simple and easy brief.