Mr Vardy's Blog

Recently I’ve been looking at buying a light box, a useful bit of kit when developing your work on paper. But at around £100 for an A2 size it’s something I’ve considered making and hopefully thats what I’ll be doing today!

I’ve priced up at around £30 including the light source (which will consist of energy efficient LED’s) which comes in at a saving of £70 if I bought one instead. 

If successful I’ll post a tutorial! 

It was over in a flash of blood sweat and tears and now it’s the summer! Really enjoyed my second year and it’s great to see my skills developing so well. 

I’m happy to be currently freelancing on a couple of projects at the moment, it makes a refreshing change to University work. 

I’ve also updated my online portfolio at www.ryanvardy.co.uk so please take a look!

Well I completed my second week work experience and I can safely say I enjoyed it as much as the first! For my second week I sat next to a different designer, it was interesting to see the queries and decisions that had to be made. One in particular was a choice of two sign designs that would hang from the ceiling in a retail unit. They were quite similar, but to get the decision right they created physical/life-size mock-ups of them both. I suppose it’s quite important to get right if they are going to appear nation wide in hundreds of branches!

I helped out with quite a few different tasks, one of them resulted in me learning the wizardry that is Photoshop Actions. In order to preview how a branch will look like with new signage it is possible to photoshop the artwork onto a photograph of a shop floor. This allows a good preview without the printing costs. However, it’s incredibly time consuming to use perspective/distort on hundreds of images when the client may change their mind about artwork and then demand ANOTHER preview. So this is where Photoshop Actions came in. The designer I was sitting next to showed me how to use Photoshop Actions so you can create a mockup with the click of a button. It was a pretty cool thing to see, I never knew you could use actions for such complex jobs! 

Other jobs included touching up product images, preparing images for use, creating product stacks and changing master documents. 

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time doing work experience, it was fantastic to see a large team produce work over a two week period. It has made me more confident of what I want to achieve and what type of design interests me. 

Well ive completed my first week of work experience in a design company, an amazing experience so far. Ive helped helped out with bits and bobs, had an insight into how the company works and what clients they have and seen the printers!

I’m not going to go into details of what work ive been doing, a lot of things are designed well in advance of use and competition is a big issue. Designs for next summer will be starting next week which shows the amount of work that can go into certain campaigns. Ive mostly been making amendments to artwork and preparing images for use.

I would definitely say ive had a taste of the more technical side of using InDesign, no complaining here though! Ive probably learned more in the past week about InDesign than I have in one month at University. I think this points out that University is good for design process but lacks in the technical department. 

Today I made a visit to the printers who also deal with product photography. Ive always wanted to see how they get products looking so perfect and now I have! The process of making them look so good is also quite complex, again I have to be careful of how much I say, I don’t want to upset anyone. 

To summarise this week I would say ive had a great time, it’s gone so quickly which makes me want to savour it a bit more next week. 

I started work experience at a design company on Monday and so far I am loving it. Ive been getting involved in various tasks, from amending artwork to photographing products for mock designs. Over the next two weeks i’ll be posting about my experiences, I have already learnt so much. 

Well ive finally got around to posting about my visit to Berlin. In a nutshell me and my girlfriend had an awesome time, our feet didn’t however, but thats another story.

I have been to Berlin once before so it wasn’t an entirely new experience, however I did visit a few places that I had not previously experienced. 

The main highlight of the visit for me was the Bauhaus archive. I would highly recommend it to anyone, my girlfriend (who isn’t a designer) really loved it. The exhibits, complete with a free audio guide allowed us to see how students at the Bauhaus were taught. I really liked the sketch work and sculptures but surprisingly found the architecture models of particular interest. The red cube design really caught my imagination, such a simple but beautiful design. 

Another highlight was the bodies exhibition which wasn’t planned. Ive always wanted to see the “plastinates”, thats preserved bodies to normal folk. More than anything else it made me question why the hell anyone would be ok for that to happen to them after death. It was all there, dangling away, I was even given the opportunity to play around with someones lung, a smoker by the look of it. Yes it did give me an amazing understanding of the human body but what is the purpose of arranging a bunch of dead bodies into different scenes? The guys playing cards was a particularly weird one. My girlfriend came out of it as confused as me!

And then theres all the history of Berlin which I find fascinating but can’t be arsed to go into detail about. Firstly because I will reveal my misunderstanding of history and second this is a blog post and not an essay. 

Today I have finished two props that will be used in my new act! I’m extremely happy with the results and I plan to post pictures soon!

Next task: logo and branding!

It’s been a nightmare at time but finally I have got my website up. There’s a few changes still to go, nothing huge though. 

I’m looking forward to using my blog more in the future, It’s something I have never heavily been involved with. 

Here’s to the future…