Today I had the opportunity to talk to a lead creative agency based in London. Specialising in of visual branding and typographic details Sea Design has worked with a range of successful companies giving their work a voice of identity.

Leading the Lecture was senior designer Danny McNeil who explored the his many projects working with companies such as GFSMITH paper and Fabriano at Sea Design.

During his talk Danny explained how his agency created a range of designs inspired by nature. Here he explained how the diffusion of ink in water inspired a range of photographic designs in a range of colours and formats for GFSMITH.

As well as this Danny mentioned that a range of work by Sea Design had been created by modern means. When making a recent GFSMITH campaign technical coders contributed to the work creating a formula which transformed an illustration into 1000 different variations which were later used as book covers.

One of the agencies acclaimed works was for the Monotype exhibition which has recently gone on tour opening in America this week. Sea Design was tasked to organise over 5000 typefaces created from the worlds largest type foundry gaining great acclaim for their visualisation and style for the event. (see: http://penciltopixel.org) 

Overall the lecture was a great opportunity to learn about the creative industry from the eyes of a highly credited design firm. After hearing the many working styles of the firm I look forward to working towards a similar success following my graduation.

The New Graphic Design brief has been one of my favourite projects since i started my degree at university. Initially i was lost and confused and that was generally due to the wording of the brief and my course leader however after some perseverance with a tonne of research and development i grew an addiction to the small details involved in magazine layout. Upon completion of the brief I have grown a great appreciation for magazine designers and editors as the countless hours i spent hand kerning must be nothing in comparison to their job. 

Admittedly through this brief i got to grips with a lot of the features built into indesign and it has now become one of my popular design based applications. 

Overall i have enjoyed this brief, it has had its downsides such as the lack of communication and the excessive time permitted for the project but I have embraced a range of magazine editorial elements. From typeface selection, kerning and paragraph layout to personal photography and magazine branding i’ve experienced it all in this project.

After completing my magazine design I comprised a simple document containing my research and development work for the brief. This can be seen below.

Finally after around  6 weeks of design confusion, research and development I had gone a little bit layout perfectionist but I had also created a magazine to be proud of. With only 22 pages of content I was a little upset that all my time had only resulted in a short exploration, however i could appreciate the small details of kerning and typesetting even more.

Unlike the recommendations of my peers I left my Masthead design till last. I felt that my cover needed to embody the content of the magazine as a whole and so i waited till i had an understanding of the content within. As i reached this point i found myself becoming a layout perfectionist making it more harder to finalise a masthead style. Finally i had settled with a design that reflected the magazine brand alongside a flow of text and image bringing my project to a close.

This next step proved to be the hardest due to content refinement. After reading up and filtering historical information, i found myself simplifying my text even more allowing it to flow with the content of the magazine rather than dominate the page. 

Alongside this development I was experimenting with visual narrative and layout design to create a product that could harmonise my photographic content. With an array of research varying from the minimal to bold, bright and colourful, I stumbled across a magazine design by Yi Xiang Lim, for the magazine ‘Dwell’. With a similar theme of visual narrative and photographic style this work provided a great influence for my image arrangement.

(www.behance.net/gallery/Dwell-Coastal-Cities-Revisited/7212089)

With this style in mind I began developing my own gridded style inspired from features of this magazine. After countless hours of refinement I had settled with a page layout built on a system of three columns and narrow edges providing the perfect room for large image placement. However due to the briefs restrictive guidelines I could only design in an A4 style which often made image scaling and placement difficult as it reduced flow.