M IS FOR MOUNTAIN

Ok, so, I had this dream... and I dreamt that I did a whole project entitled 'M is for mountains'. It also included 'A is for Avalanche' and 'B is for buttons'. That's where the dream ended... but seriously, this was a very insistent dream, it lasted a whole night, and I kept half waking up and feeling the uncontrollable urge to makes notes in my notebook to make sure I wouldn't forget it in the morning. The notes mostly consisted of 'M is for mountain!' in various different degrees of messy handwriting... But anyway, I decided to indulge my subconscious.
'C is for cup' is the weakest, mainly because it wasn't thought up by my sleeping brain. I'm going to have to hope the rest of the alphabet comes to me in another dream.

This makes me sound like some kind of crazy hippy. I don't generally live my life according to what my dreams tell me to do, but this seemed like a fairly harmless one to act out in real life :D

Oh yeah, and everything had to be RED





If you happen to think of words that also look a bit like their initial letters... do let me know.

You should probably go to this.

And not just because I designed the poster. Because it looks AMAZING.
Another one for the 405

For Michael...

Who is tired of jumping through hoops.


I'd have done this better if I had more time before work.

Perfume developments.

Crit on Friday, lots of things were said, and although they were not all good things, I did leave feeling quite enthusiastic.
They hated the one with the hair. Which I expected. While they liked the cover with all the grey figures they agreed it was too scientific, but they really liked my earlier work with the photos.
So this is combining the two...


My main issue with the photos was that there weren't any with enough people in. So using my cunning/debatable photoshop skills, I made a picture with LOTS OF PEOPLE! To hide it's dubious photoshoppery, I turned it on it's side, greyscaled it, and reflected it. Voila! That's a pretty nice cover there, but what about some text, and... how to make those people smell?

Well, it all looked a bit 'clunky' if I just put the text and circles directly onto the image, so to get around this I've come up with a nifty tracing paper overlay, which I think looks really nice. It's stuck just down the spine, and printed with the scent circles and type. Here it is:


When the two are overlaid together, it would hopefully look something like this:


So I made it, and, well, it does.


The competition doesn't end till April, and I want to enter (and WIN!) so I optimistically hope to do something better than this by then.

And now for something completely different.

Today I met Noma Bar who is my new Graphic Design hero.

I showed him my Perfume book jacket, and he thought it looked like a science book. I told him what the plot of the book was, and he said he thought it sounded like a sinister, but sensual book. Which it is. And that my design should reflect this more. Which it should. Then and there he proceeded to sketch out one of his amazing 'negative space' illustrations, involving a nose and a scent bottle and a person, which also conveniently formed a skull. Because the man is a genius.

But unfortunately that was HIS idea.

And, deep down I knew already, but he confirmed to me, I need to come up with something better.

This is not it, but it has killed a couple of hours of the afternoon, and given me a newfound appreciation for hair.

He said something in our lecture this morning about the book jacket being an amazing format, because you have the front, the back and the spine forming one continuous whole, whilst also having to work as separate elements by themselves. (As evidenced in his book, 'negative space') It made me think about my previous design, and how, really, that was three separate elements, but not a whole. Unfortunately, this is a whole, but doesn't really work as three separate elements. i.e. It looks nice when you view it like this, and the back looks nice, but the cover looks a bit rubbish. Boo.

Come ON Emma, this is due in TOMMOROW! Time to pull something amazing out of the bag... any time now would be good, brain.

Perfumed with the stench of inevitable deadline

Hmmm...
Turns out we have a critique on the 'Perfume' project this Friday. I was under the impression that I didn't really have to get it finished, just have 'ideas'... turns out I was wrong.
I've spent a while working on this. Initially I hated it and thought it struck totally the wrong tone for the book, but then remembered that the whole point is to break with cliche.
So here we go.
Now I really like it.
It still needs work, yes, but I'm more pleased with it than I expected to be.

Front:


Back:

This is what I want to do. Only better.

Ok, Perfume. Have you read it?

If not, here's my short synopsis. Guy is born with the most extraordinary sense of smell, but curiously has no body odour of his own. He generally finds the smell of humans repulsive and overpowering, with the exception of the occasional person - always young virgins, who contrarily have the most sublime smell imaginable to him. He gets an internship with a perfumer, learns how to make perfumes, then kills the girls to make a perfume out of their scent. The ending of the book is weird and *spoiler* involves a mass orgy and cannibalism.

Now, all the existing covers for the book are pretty cliched - dark, moody, lots of flesh tones, redc colours, and beautiful ginger girls (all the girls he kills have auburn hair)

I really really want to escape from this, and produce something that is hopefully striking and intriguing, but not blindingly obvious in terms of inspiration.

Amongst other ideas, I'm interested in the concept that every individual person has this strong smell which emanates from them in waves, and I want to represent this visually.

At the moment I'm really inspired by things like this, this, this, this and this

Possibly the wrong area to get inspiration from, because they're mainly books full of cold hard facts, wheras this is a novel... but oh well, I'm going with it anyway.

BUT, these are just ideas. I really need to go back to this location with a group of people who are dressed slightly less conspiciously 21st century (i.e. black, long skirts on the girls, no trainers etc), arrange them in a nicer fashion, and get some better shots to work with. I also need to work on what kind of circles I'm going to use, what kind of typeface... basically everything.

I do like the blue and grey though.

Here are some ideas so far.