Learning Activity 9: Sketching layouts (3hrs)

For the past 2 days I've been scrounging up material for the previous lesson's requirements, but unfortunately I have yet to find any good examples of magazines that don't use a layout that is commonplace, orderly and non-conformist.
So I made do with the sketching layouts one, I'll have a more extensive search for suitable magazines tomorrow.

Click all images to view their higher res counterparts - Sorry for the quality, my scanner's not been itself lately.

Learning Activity 5: Make 3 logos (3 -5 hrs)

"This activity encourages you to explore the nature of negative space. You have to make 3 logos. They can be for you, a friend or relative's business, an event promotion, a band, a music label, a fashion label a t-shirt design...anything! Make up a fictitious business if you like.
Making a logo is a sophisticated process involving a lot of planning/ research/ thought. In the context of this activity however, the emphasis is to explore the strengths of negative space rather than delve into the psychology/ semiotics of logo creation" 

A redesign of a logo for a recent shop that I have opened in a virtual world called "Second Life" would be a prime candidate for such an exercise - I had to keep in multiple ideas open to testing as well as being able to come up with as many variations as possible to create a logo that found a balance between said negative space, and the space that outlines the rest of the logo, additionally I had to create a foundation of what the logo would be, the brand name, and the charactiture of the brand name that I would be selling virtual items under.
My first thought was "free", everyone loves free stuff, and my work was going to have 3 key points - Quality, Affordability, Functionality. The low price coupled with high quality craftsmanship of items that would have many options built in would attract customers, and so "3-stuff" was coined up as a pun on "free stuff" and the "3 key points" deal.
But that wasn't where I really wanted to head off into - The brand name needed to be recognized as a "furry" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom), but it still needed to have that "free stuff" vibe, so for a moment I had "Furry Free", a shorted version "Furry and Free".
Still I wasn't happy with that, so I took the "free" part coined it into a sentence and then changed into a pun to reflect the "furry" nature of my store.
In the end, the name "Free Fur You" stuck.

 

(Click the above image for the higher-res version)

The colour blue was chosen as it resembled a clear blue sky, freedom of movement is often portrayed as "flight", so it became the optimal colour choice for the logo.

 

(Click the above image for the higher-res version)

When it came to designing the FreeFurYou logo, the first step was to create something that was easily distinguishable, so the first “version” of the FreeFurYou logo, was a simple “boxed in” and controlled logo, but I knew that it became too “uniform” and “conformist” - similar to a lot of logos that are found in and around official government agencies and departments.

So I decided that it would be a fresh step in the right direction to have the proper use of negative space, which ended up in using too much damn negative space, which washed out the form, and became near unreadable.

The third and final design was taking what I had from the previous version, and taking the “failed” paw print from the letter “O”, and making it the feature background to give the negative space some definition from the blank/whitespace. This freed up the rest of the logo for a simpler design, whilst also giving a nice equal balance of whitespace, negative space, and logo detail.

The blue-on-white-on-blue paw negative space balance here is portrayed rather well, while the blue colour gives an almost serene, calming tone to the whole logo. Additional details such as fox ears on the letter "F" of "Free" and the tail on the end of "you" adds to the "furry" theme of the brandname.

Overal, I am extremely happy with the final quality of the logo, which you can also see in the following link that goes to the online store that gives items to players in the virtual world when they buy items from it:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/90845

In finality, I'll leave you with a depiction of negative space provided by a trio of friendly pacmen that are glad to assist me for the cause of art:

Also, apparently I haven't submitted the other half of this whitespace assignment where I was told to show three examples of whitespace used in different media:

 The top/bottom whitespace formatting here gives structure to a simple an appealing layout.

Corporate identities use simple quotes with lush pictures, whitespace (in red, here) gives padding.

Google, search engine, uses plenty of whitespace on it's home page, needing no other info other than links to information and other features of the search engine, simple and easy to use.

Lesson 4: Intro. to Design Fundamentals (50 Apples)

Interpret the idea of "apple" 50 ways. Each example should be original in concept and execution.

Click on the image for the high quality version.