I realized I haven’t really spoken all that much about my dissertation, so, considering the fact that I am around the halfway point and have just handed in my formative draft of it, and then considering the evolved purpose of this blog was to, well, blog about projects and progress at university, I imagine it’s high time to do so. So, here we go.

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As I said earlier, I’ve been working on some new designs for the RSA project we’re working on. The previous designs were rather rushed and looked clunky. Here are the beginnings of the new designs. They still need some work, but I think (and hopefully others will agree) they’re a major improvement over the previous ones.

The first project of the new (academic) year: Postage Stamps.

The project itself is actually a negotiated brief, where we can choose from several different briefs provided by the RSA, and so I chose ‘Postage Stamps’. The idea of the brief is to create six new stamps that create awareness about the environment, and things that are and/or can be done to help the planet and conserve our energy resources. The initial presentation for it was yesterday, and so I’d say we’re a little under half way to the finishing point.

I like the idea I’m going with, but I’m not happy with the stamps design. I think I rushed them. But since the presentation I’ve come up with a new concept to work with, and I’m now currently working on these new designs. I’ve spent the majority of today playing in illustrator working on creating my own vectors for the designs. I’m getting there, but as always, it’s never as easy as it looks.

Last week saw us working on a mini project involving the creation of an absract vending machine. It was a very brief week long project to give us a break from what we have been doing, and to get us to experiment with creating something a little bit different. I’ve got to say, I think it worked.

We decided to create a vending machine that would contain hologram creatures that blessed the user with a luck of there choice. Be it strength, health, fortune etc. The machine would then let out a stream of smoke that would coat the user, this essentially being their luck. The machine would work on a donation system, so instead of the user paying and recieving their choice, they would choose what they wanted, and then pay afterwards. n a sense, wring upon the honour system. If however, the user decided to run without paying, then they would be recognised by the other machines which are connected via a network. And would ultimately get ‘cursed’. I’ve attached some of the slides from the presentation itself below.

The project was definately good fun, and we had a really good team that worked really well together.

In addition to this I’m going to be making some changes to the site over the next few days that will hopefully alow me to have more of a blog presence on this site as well as it being my portfolio.