Whils I appreciate that this isn't neccassarily the same style but the layout of objects to create a character summary is appropriate; I'm creating an identity for the guild through the tools they're using.
In terms of what I'm doing for the guild of taxidermists, the tools I've been line tracing lend themselves quite well to this blocky, faux screenprint style. Most of them are really interesting but my isse comes with the amount of colours in each, making it a little too full on for a brand identity.
Ok, so these are quite obscure influences, but I think what I'm trying to get at are the unusual nature of magic and that I need to put across this kind of ambiguity.
The thin line weight and simplicity of these symbols is quite interesting visually, this kind of cleaness in a logoform is something I'd perhaps want to emulate. The imagery of the hand with somethign else within it suggests a magic symbol to me, the connection between body and symbols suggests something very occult and edgy which I quite like.
Again, like the food vectors, the simplicity of this and the way letterforms become a little more obscure within the logo are perhaps something I want to emulate. I also think it's important to have something clean and quite modernist. The all seeing eye made me want to put this up. I think it's trying to get this traditional feel of magic/occult imagery and combine it with an ultra modern feel, much like some of the earlier logoforms I was looking at.
These are the kinds of things I've been looking at for the flat earth society, they have a kind of traditional look that I want to echoe, it would be a useful semiotic to influence how people view the traditional/potentially backwards thinking of the society.
I've decided to contact these societies in order to try and get some copies of the rules, in order to make a rulebook to send out:
I've tried to be as frank as possible, I'll let you know about the results. If they respondpositively, I'll be able to get other things out of it, or at least that's the hope anyway.
After my initial discussions about this project, I decided I really wanted to a membership pack fro a magic society, not THE magic society 'The Magic Circle' but a smaller one with a more unusual name. This Website has an alphabetised list of all UK based magic societies. The two that look the most promising are the Pentacle Club and the Order of The Magi. As you can see, the design for both is extremely lacking and there's perhaps an option to propose websites with this brief as well. I think I'm more inclined to go with the Order of the Magi, because their name is a lot more ambiguous and open to reinterpretation. The pentacle club is very literal, and the order of the magi seems more steeped in history as a name. Despite the Pentacle Club's 90 year history.
After an extensive search looking through societies, guilds and clubs I came across, the one that provoked the most intrigue was the UK Guild of Taxidermists
Now I've got my subject matter, I need to contact them to get things like their headquarters/contact address, their mission statements and their rules and regulations. Now I'm going to go away and start looking at ways to represent these societies.
I'm doing te ISTD fakery brief, Here is some quick research of things that I'm aware of that I though were interesting in terms of faking, hoaxing and frauds:
The Yes Men are a group of people aiming to improve the world. In this elaborate stuns they made their own version of the New York Times, with headlines thy think the world would want to see. I really like how clever this is, by using the signs and signifiers of a formal news paper, they briefly tricked people and by doing so they established a point.
The Cottingley Fairies is a hoax local to Bradford that my Grandparents had hanging in their bathroom when I was much younger. It was perpetrated by children and fooled many. I quite like the idea of working with something local like this.
http://roadtickle.com/7-famous-hoaxes/
"Bath tub hoa This story has been spread around for years, often being quoted by doctors as proof of culture overcoming common sense. The basic story, first published in 1917 claims that when the bathtub was first introduced in the U.S. people refused to use it because they believed that baths would hurt their health. Apparently what helped the bathtub was the fact that in 1850 president Millard Fillmore ordered a bathtub be installed in the White House.
However, in 1926 the original author of the article admitted that everything he wrote about the bathtub was false. He apparently made up the story as a funny, light piece to run in the Evening Mail. He didn’t understand why people believed everything they read without conducting further research and wondered how many other bits of common knowledge were completely made up."
The point about believing everything they read is pertinent to the power of an author or a typographer, thy can make something seem believable as long as the document it's self is presented in a sophisticated and professional manner.
I do believe the best approach to this brief is to create something that does involve creating a deception of some kind, and using the way the type is laid and set out to make it convincing. If the idea is strong and clever enough then it definitely becomes a piece that could win the ISTD award.
http://thedailymash.co.uk/ This is a sight that kind of takes the news and satires in it. the stories are fake based on fact. This kind of thing could be an interesting and comical way to take it. I'm not sure how interested I am in going down this road though.
I'm going to go away and do a bit of brainstorming and then pursue a few lines of enquiry.
Two different phrases are needed to be interpreted here for two separate designs: 'The Worst of me is The Best of you.' And I've thought about a few things for this including geometric tessellations and dual tessellations:
Especially the dual tessellations, the fact that they are two unique patterns derived from one another kind of reflects the duality of the phrase pretty well. The second black designs are derived from connecting the central points of the first tesselations. This can create an interesting effect and the way it's derived kind of echoes the sentiments of the phrase quite well, whilst avoiding cliche.
Something else that struck me as a reference point to go away and work from was trick illustrations:
If I could make an illustration more content approprriate that works like these trick drawings, where looking at them in different ways creates different interpretatons of the drawing, then it would also play on the duality of the phrase. I'm not really illustration driven any longer, and this seems like it would draw my focus away from what I want to get out of this module. Plus, I need to get this brief done and out of the way with so I intend to spend a day on each of these briefs, maximum.
"Hand in hand with wonder and disgust" is the other phrase, I think I need to just get drawing and scribbling ideas down with this one because nothing comes to mind. Anyway, here are some designers and t-shirts that I'm looking at in terms of inspiration:
I think what they have in common, really is well chosen/unique typefaces combined at times with geometric or simple pattern/image design and often but not always vibrant colour. I think that vibrant colour is probably something that I should start looking at more and more as Daisy sees that as an important part of her brand. Anyway, I think I've got enough research to star going away and thhinking about how to use it.
