Degree work, printed graphic design

The following are some examples of my printed graphic design work whilst studying for my degree. The work is very conceptual, and whilst it doesn't compare to a lot of my more recent, professional design work, it helps identify my personal development and progression.

This posters were designed as an anti-war theme. The main images focused on modern consumer items which when changed could reflect a disaster based upon war. In the examples above, a Playstation controller and mobile phone were the items I chose to represent modern consumerism. Both items then contained additional messages, the Playstation controller highlights real war as not being a game, whilst the mobile phone talks about the signal stopping, something which would seriously affect modern culture.

To give it some historical relevance, I chose extracts from the bible, more specifically revelations, which I felt represented war and the problems associated with war. I also threw in the W3 logo to symbolise World War 3, whilst also having subtle links with the world wide web.

Another anti-war poster which took on a more direct approach, and portrayed how fragile the earth was and how it was the few who control the many. Eggs seemed like a great representation of mankind as they give life, but are very fragile. The first line draws on 3 themes which between them are big causes for war, I suppose greed could be added to that list now, greed for land and power. When we vote our politicians into office, we hope they will bring us better lives, they are supposed to represent the people, but more often than not, they become part of the monster.

This project was based around phobias, and having previously lived in Australia, I decided I would focus my phobia on Spiders, Arachnophobia. I wanted to be subtle about the way I discussed the phobia and instead of showing big pictures of spiders, I wanted to instead focus on the way spiders/phobias can make people feel. The end result was a document which was about 13 pages long, each page highlighted a phrase, with the final phrase and ultimate pain related to phobias being death.

We were given a brief related to signals, and I decided to focus on sign language. Rather than design my piece based around the disability of hearing loss, I instead wanted to focus on a non-hearing persons ability to communicate using sign language. By focusing on their strengths this piece would have given people with hearing loss a feeling of pride. The booklet would also aim to break the communication barriers between hearing and non-hearing people by educating hearing people to learn between 8-14 commands. Commands which everyone would understand and in the case of an emergency could certainly help bridge a gap.

Using basic geometric shapes, I had to construct a very simple story. The use of colours would certainly help tell the story and I focused on producing a short story based on leaving the UK for a short break. I chose to use grey and boring colours to represent the UK, whilst using bright colours to represent nicely coloured breaks abroad.

The Republic of Ansgorlia is of course totally fake - and that was the theme of this project, something fake. So I chose to create a fake country, I decided to take all countries across the world beginning with the letter A and create a name based on that. I also drew lines across a map of the world to workout where my fake country would be situated. The location of my country was actually Afghanistan, and so I created the Republic of Ansgolia around that region.

Personality was a simple postcard promoting a photography exibition.