The rented room was one of, and the first of,  the mini projects for the think project, where we had to create a presentation for our thought presses for the brief. The brief for this one was to create a book jacket for a book called the rented room, with a description of the general plot of the book, the printing company as-well as the authors name. I went for an attempt to make it look extremely unsettling, using browns to try and make the floor look particularly dirty and unsettling, as well as exaggerated shadows to try and make it ominous. I'm not the biggest fan of my book jacket, however. I like my cover sketch, where the door is much further away, making it seem much more ominous. It feels too close, losing quite a bit of the mysterious and nervous air around it. I also think the back looks quite awkward, possibly because of the composition. I began my reaserch by looking at books with the general vibe I wanted, one of which was a cover for ‘I have no mouth and must scream’, aswell as looking at the photography skills of Shimon Attie, a photograpy based visual artist who is known for deeply research projects around new york City. I also looked at Michelle thompson, a designer based in the UK who has made a lot of book covers for many prolific clients, such as BCC and Penguin books. She is a known illustrator for editorial work. 

To summarise on this. I definitely think I could have improved with the execution. I feel like, though I did manage to capture the dingy and dirty feeling I was going for with the atmosphere, I think I could have used a lot more of sharp and drained colours for the design. I understand the approach I had Aswell, but I do think I should have made it a lot more abstract, as well as maybe even changing the writing style for the title. Most of my grievances, however, end at the front of the cover. Though I do think the spine is boring, the back cover, to me, fuels the mysterious and dingy atmosphere I had in mind for this book covers design. The alone radio on the table with no clear end to the room, in my opinion creates the feeling of being lost and trapped, and especially with the colouring in the room it can even invoke the feeling of being hopeless, in my opinion. If I were to change the cover, I would make the background of the setting, instead of a gradient of two greys, solid black, with the door and the light from it being the only visible thing. It also make the door much smaller in regards, not too small since I would still have to fit the title of the book onto it, as that’s what i plan on doing still, since I think it would fit well with the atmosphere. I would also probably change a bit of the back cover. I would stick to a monochrome colour pallet, personally, possibly with hints of yellow to add to the dirty atmosphere posed to us by the brief. I would also remove the visible tiling on the floor infront of the door. This might sound like a step backwards, but I think keeping it a dirty yellow, still very bright, could get a similar vibe across, while also using less. Another idea, if I were to revamp this project, would be to utalise collaging methods, taking picures of real objects and essentially cut and pasting them in. With this method, you could have various images in the light path of the door instead of just a dirty dingy floor, though I would probaby adjust the values to keep

This was the second  project in the Think module. For this project, as specified by the brief, we had to create an album cover to apply to a certain set of sounds given to us by the course leader. These sounds were Lans and Hilp for side A and Jos and Mitter on side B. for my research, intending to go into this with a set idea. I looked at Saul bass. Saul bass is an artist who has inspired me in the past, to the point I added him to my 10 Graphic designers project. He was a graphic designer during the 1960s, who mostly worked on commercial pieces Aswell as title sequences for movies such as 'anatomy of a murder' or 'the man with the golden arm'. He mostly utilised different silhouettes throughout his work, instead of using more detailed pieces. This is what my goal was for my piece. My experiments were also both traditional. The first one is a Graphic score I created with a group of other people on my table. We listened to the sound Jos, which we concluded, with the sounds in the background as well as the high-pitched bits, reminded us of a dolphin, and so we created a dolphin based piece. We did, however, add in the bits of paper In the middle while keeping the dolphin outline essentially completely black, to show the pops of other noises throughout the sound. the second one is a very rough mock up for what I wanted to create for the actual cover. Not much changed throughout that and the final piece, just solidifying the ideas I had for it more and more. I do believe, though, I ended up flipping the front and back cover by the end, since, as you can see, the barcode is on the side that ended up on the front, while the titles of the songs are on what is now the back of the cover.  

To summarise my feelings and thoughts on the cover, I'm actually really proud of it. i stuck with my general idea of wanting to keep a silhouette theme for it, so it looks a lot more abstract than my other pieces. The use of keeping the colour pallet very limited with cyan, magenta, green and red, in my opinion, worked very well. One of my nit-picks for this particular piece would be the saturation of the colours I used. Because of the fact I had to use CMYK, I knew I would be limited colour wise, however this was made significantly harder with the fact that I actually began this piece on RGB, due to the fact the canvas, for whatever reason, never converted to CMYK when I was creating it. By the time I realised the issue, I had created the entire graphic, so I was stuck in the spot of having to just place the piece into a canvas that used CMYK, to fix the problem, as I didn’t think I'd have enough time to fix the colours on the original canvas. I think if I had enough time, or had even caught the issue early enough, this problem would have been sorted, and is definitely very solvable. I also probably would have used a different program. For the creation of most of this image, I made it in procreate on my ipad, as I do have an easier time using my ipad to create graphic pieces. However, I think the use of it impacted the outcome negatively, more notably, the outline around the dolphin on the front of the cover is wonky and uneven in someplaces. Though I could have made the assets in procreate, a  better idea for the outline would have been to send them to photoshop, as theres an easy way to create nicer outlines on that program and would have left me with a cleaner look. My only other issue, as brought up as well by others I've shown this piece to, would have to be the text. Some parts of the text isn't as visible, and I do think the font I used was way too thin for the usage it had. Especially since the text is so small, it almost goes completely unnoticed, with it being barely saved with the outline of the white box its contained in. If I were to remake that part particularly, I would have definitely used a different font. Something a lot thicker as well as something that fit better with the way the piece looks. It's definitely my favourite from the ones I created for this project, Least of the reason being the inspiration from Saul bass.