Design Is About Doing

For my initial design ideas I stuck to using something to do with crosshairs and clocks. Since I wasn't sure if we could include the groups logo, since we can't include the name, I altered it to just a simple crosshair without the figure in it so while it would still be recognisable I wouldn't be breaking any of the competition rules.

I thought about making really simple symbols of this with quite intricate patterns and designs and that's where I started with my first couple of ideas. I created patterns using the crosshair as a base.

While these two designs fitted my initial ideas I thought they were a bit too delicate and, for the second one, ornate to fit the song, and seemed slightly girly. When the shape of the crosshair was changed like this it completely changed what it actually was which was not something I was trying to do.

I starting experimenting with some of my initial clock designs and became quite interested in the dynamic of the cogs in the interior, which would also make using a clock for my cover slightly less obvious.

For the first one, I outlined an image of the internal dynamic of the cogs in a clock. I kept it simple but included enough detail to make it recognisable. the colours I used were similar to that of the Ty Lettau designs I had researched.

While I was just experimenting with some ideas I tried a more conceptual interpretation of the interior of a clock, basically just showing how the cogs vary and match up.

The second clock design was a brief outline of the main cogs in an image of a clock and to stop that from appearing too dull, I printed it out and bled different coloured ink in the background before scanning it back in and outlining everything again.

I wanted to try bleeding ink over another more simple image as the one above did appear quite overwhelming. I used a picture of Flava Flav's face and outlined it, While I was outlining the shape and features of his face it started to look quite robotic so I decided to capitalise on that and actually make it the face  of a robot. I printed it off and used the same technique but found that in the end, this image was actually even more overwhelming than the previous one.

Despite my thoughts that this design was unsuccessful I was still quite interested in using the robot image and so used it for a couple of much more simplified designs and found that it worked much better for these.

EVALUATION

The final 5 I chose weren't all in a series like I had planned but a couple of them did link together vaguely. While I was happy with some of them, others did not turn out as I had planned for them to.

At some points I do think I tried to overcomplicate things that didn't require much more detail than what they were in their own right, and in the end the more simple variations of my covers were actually more effective.

After our crit in which other group members told us their favourite of out designs, it was the last robot design that received the most votes, which did make obvious to me that the more minimal designs worked better as vinyl covers whereas the others may have worked in another context but not this one.

I was most pleased with the first of my clock based designs and do wish that I had spent more time coming up with ways in which to vary that base because it could have gone from strength to strength. My main plan was to do a lot of supposed final designs so I would have a lot to chose from, but instead it didn't allow me to see the full potential of some of the initial ideas. It was a short amount of time in which to design five covers but in spite of this I don't think I managed my time well and some of my designs would have benefitted hugely from more experimentation.

In the end I went with the votes of the members in my group and uploaded my final robot design as I didn't expect others to have done something similar whereas the clocks could have been used a lot. Given the opportunity to do this brief again there is a lot I would change about how I approached it, mostly my time management, but I would also have benefitted from spending more time researching specific designers, the styles in which I wanted for my vinyl covers and how I could incorporate something similar into my own designs.