Dear Sue identity swing tags

Good presentation of products and some nave imagery used on the swings tags, simple but effective.

Womenswear hang tags

For the hang tags I wanted to stay away from just slapping the logo onto a tag so I've opted to explore a more creative idea. For the womenswear tags I going to possibly use the shapes similar to theses new wave earrings and model my tags on these.

Everything 1980's

After last thursdays crit I've re-evaluated the blue rinse project and my approach. I surrounded myself with everything 1980's and below is a small collection of images and themes that I've been looking into. Everything from music to idols to architecture. Everything about the re-brand has to be thought out including instore furniture, wallpaper and even the music that is played.

Luke Hayman - Magazine design article

research into apparel sites

Apparel Website analysis

Urban outfitters: They have such a well designed and consistent website and style throughout, bespoke typography and a clean cut composition. It's easy to navigate and remains quite simple and I think that is where it's success lies. Plus I really like the full screen images on the home/flash page, grabs attention quickly and sets the mood for the rest of the website.

American Vintage: Again quite simple but with a totally different style to UO's website, really clean professional images on the home page that automatically change. Similar browsing to UO as well in terms of layout of products. Not too sure about the typography though, quite lifeless.

Beyond retro: Immediately you have a sense of theme to the company from the start. They have a clear and tailored aesthetic and it echoes the brand and the products they sell. When you start to deconstruct it however it's quite simple which is good as it lets the clothes have a voice and the surrounding illustration when browsing the collection is brilliant it continues the theme but not intrusively.

My Vintage: A really plain and lifeless layout to the site, predictable navigation too predictable maybe. I do appreciate the photography though, it holds everything together and saves the website from being a complete fail.

Adore Vintage: stripped back minimal website which allows the content to shine, again good photography and even though the clothing is displayed on mannequins they're done quite well. And the homepage/flash page is fantastic, a really impressive vintage feel.

Vintage kit: I only put this one in because I enjoyed the illustrations, it's mainly a children's vintage apparel store but the theme is pretty cool and relevant to the nostalgia of the shop.

Peekaboo: Great 1st image, straight away theres a stylistic feel to the site and a professionalism which makes you take the store seriously. standard rows of images for browsing the collection but it's successful as the images are only positioned 3 across and are larger than most other sites. 

Style and the City: The only redeeming quality of this website are the photographs that greet you on first look, the back drop is plain and soulless and the typography is awful plus the photographs of the clothes though better than blue rinse photographs are still poor.

The Packhouse: Though not an apparel store I put the Packhouse in because it was stylistically interesting, minimal and I like the nostalgic and ages feel to the photography used.

James Langdon

James Langdon's bespoke typeface for Support Structures is such a well designed and relevant visualization of the content in the book, which happens to be art installations where the artist has deconstructed a cube. It's made me think about the theme transformation which I've started to explore and how and object can transform into typography through manipulation.

Visual Editions - Tree of codes

 

I've started looking into how a publication can be visual and not use images. Joe Gilmore showed me this amazing publisher Visual Editions who believe "that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell" and this book is the perfect example of that. Each page had been die cut to reveal the right sequence of words to tell a story. It gives me something to think about in relation to the format of the publication and how it interacts with the content. 

Linefeed Reading List

Linefeed Reading List—October 2011 from Michael Bojkowski on Vimeo.


This was a great find and and an even better watch,
seeing magazines in depth that I probably wouldn't
of ever picked up gave me a new perspective on
magazine design and format.

A really smart publication featuring some good examples of how I could possibly layout the type, I especially like the display type on the left with the adjacent page having more of a magazine style layout.

This is a good example of a strong typographic zine cover, I like how the type sits on the right hand side and how the designer has arranged the words to create a narrower column. With my zine I'm going to try and design it solely using type with no image, which I hope I can pull off but I plan to apply colours and artefacts to support the typography.

zine covers

These zines are a perfect example of a type based publication, not many zines that I was looking at at had such strong typography, mostly hand rendered. There are images in this zine but the type definitely shines through and is strong enough to carry itself.                                                                                   The only problem is I'm starting to think I need to restrict myself a little and make the typography and layout more like a magazine, as in columns and not stray off and start designing an experimental type publication or is that what I should be doing?.