What is a book?

A book is a SET or COLLECTION of WRITTEN, PRINTED, ILLUSTRATED, or BLANK SHEETS, made of PAPER, PARCHMENT, or other material, usually fastened together to HINGE at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a LEAF, and each side of a leaf is called a PAGE. A book produced in electronic format is known as an E-BOOK.

Books may also refer to a literature work, or a main division of such work. In a library and information science, a book is called a MONOGRAPH, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as MAGAZINES, JOURNALS or NEWSPAPERS. The body of all written works including books is LITERATURE.

In NOVELS, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called BOOKS (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, etc)

A lover of books is usually referred to as a BIBLIOPHILE, a BIBLIOPHILIST, or a PHILOBIBLIST, or, more informally, a BOOKWORM.

A store where books are bought and sold is a bookstore or bookshop. Books can also be borrowed from libraries or obtained for reading through the practice of Book Crossing.

Not very well. :(

*cough, splutter, dribble* 

I WANNA GO HOOOOME!

Photoshop session!

Here's what I produced in the photoshop session, Thursday.
Usually I'd get quite bored and end up facebooking it. This session though, nooooo way!! It was AWESOME!!! I'm so chuffed with this!! So ok, it's not the best thing in the world, but I've always wanted to make something like that! And now I have! :D
I thank my mum.. dad... everyone who's suppoted me.. and of course.. the guy who taught me how to do it!

Lindsey, Boysie, Charlotte and Craig ARE THE BEST!

Following on from the 100 photos.. we had to write a list of ideas and concepts which we could focus on to move on from the photos. After a bit of confusion, mine ended up being order and chaos... (although I concentrated more on the chaos side!)
We then had a couple of days to research more.. having a minimum of 10 primary and 10 secondary pieces of research.
After clearing the desks and neatening up our work, we moved from desk to desk to write comments and ideas on other people's work. From them, we chose 4 main ones and stuck them on the wall.. as you can see!! -v
Finally, we narrowed it down to one each, and a small number of people grouped up the sentences according to the subject. I was put with.. Boysie Sands, Charlotte Hitchens and Craig Fawell... quite obviously, the best people!
Once in our groups, we were set yet another research task to carry out; 'What If?' Based on our common interests, research and knowledge, we had to establish a 'problem' that affected some sector of the general public in Leeds.
Going back to the sentences each one of us had...

-What happens if you break restrictions? (Boysie)
-Vandalism is destruction (Craig)
-Hedonism looka like too much effort (Charlotte)
-Chaos and order go hand in hand (Me)
We chose to focus on diets. We thought diets can get rather chaotic at times. So, we went to the shop and bought two bags of dairy milk buttons! Each bag containing 513 calories. We went round asking random people their age, to give us a rough guess as to how many calories they consume daily, and to have a guess as to how many calories the two bags on buttons had.
The information we got after asking 30 people, was that some didn't know what a calorie was, and hardly anyone guessed the right amount of calories in the buttons!
After long hours of pondering, we finally came up with a 'problem'.
'People don't know their daily calorie intake.'
We decided we needed to create a questionnaire for further proof of our problem. Again, we randomly handed them out, and waited for all to be returned!
Looking at the results brought us bad news. The final question was: 'How many calories do you consume a day?' :( Even though some people may have guessed or copied from someone else.. most people put 2000. This, annoyingly, was more or less right. So, our problem was no longer a problem anymore!!
Another question was, 'Do you go to the gym?' Out of the 30 we asked, about 2 people put 'yes'. So, we gathered, although people knew how many calories they consume, they don't do anything about it to loose them. We decided this would be our problem. The questionnaires nicely proved it, even before we knew the actual problem! Handy!!!
We managed to get quite a lot of research; primary, secondary, qualitative and quantitative. Although we didn't have any A1 design sheets/mood boards, we had full-up A4 folders!! Compensates nicely instead of the massive sheets!
For an entire day, we sat in the canteen, doodling and discussing ideas. We drew loooooads, and came up with some awesome ideas!! This was what we produced on illustrator as a final resolution....

(It wouldn't upload an illustrator file so I had to save it as a JPEG in photoshop. For some reason it's turned out blue- it's not meant to be!!!! But you get the general gist of it?)
Basically, it's aimed at students who don't work off the extra calories they consume. So, our idea was, to make clothes which represent various sports, i.e. shorts (for jogging) etc.. and they only fit the thin person. The larger man can't fit into the clothes until he looses the weight. So, he has to stand around in his pants. :)
I think the whole idea was for the clothes and the men to be perferated. Also, to have little tags around them, so the clothes can be fixed on.These are the clothes and props we made to fit the thinner man. Again, the colours seen here aren't correct.

Overall, I enjoyed this research task. I found it quite challenging though. I really thought it'd be simple and relatively easy. I've always been fond of the research part of a brief. I guess I was only skimming the edges though!! Doing this, has made me realise just how in depth you must be when researching something you know little about.
Although our group did a fair amount of research, I believe we could have gone that extra mile. We only did two ''questionnaires', so quite possibly, if we had done more, maybe we would have come to another problem?
Also, I think managing our time would have benifitted us. Although we managed to come up with a good final resolution, we were a little rushed for time in the end. We could have produced more props and clothes.

Photography

Me and a certain someone started playing around with photography..

We had a camera, a tripod, a phone, and ourselves. Now, I'm sure the possibilties are endless as to what you could do with all that equipment. But, we decided to put the camera on a timer, and set it to a 30 second exposure. Using the phone's light, each of us took it in turns to doodle in the air, forming these quite ravishing images!!

And here's a few of Boysie's images.

The work of others

There's so many amazing photographers!!! Personally, I'm more interested in close up imagery, as well as nature shots. Which is why I'm very fond of Andy Goldsworthy. He's a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist. His art involves the use of natural and found objects, to create both temporary and permanent sculptures which draw out the character of their environment.

He uses and experiements with a wide range of materials, often including brightly-coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pinecones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He has been quoted as saying, "I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole."
Here are a few examples of Goldsworthy's work...

I find his work so unique and interesting, and a great inspiration.

100...

We've been asked to take a minimum of 100 photographs of: Objects, people, words, places and textures. We also had to choose whether to compose the photographs either landscape or portrait. Here's a few examples I took!!!

Objects

People

Words

Texture..

I've got loooads more, but these have to be some of my favourites!!
I tried to get one of each category, but I didn't really get any good ones of 'places'. Just boring buildings really! I'll leave that one up to your imagination!
I LOVED taking this pictures though!! I LOVE photography!! Especially when I've been told to go out and explore... textures and stuff! That category had to be my favourite!

Once we had brought in our 100 photographs, we were put into groups of 4, and were given instructions to categorise out images into: words, places, people, textures and objects.

Good ol' Tim there!
We had a little scoot around the room to see everyone elses attempts at the fun task. Then, were put into pairs... and was given a different pairs work to play with. We had Leighs and... someone elses............ the name escapes me. Basically, we had to find two interesting ways of categorising there photos. It was tricky, but we got there!!!


This would be Leighs photographs. We decided it would be interesting to split them up into two groups, showing where she took the picturs. i.e. inside, or outside.

And this.. would be the name which slipped my mind! However, they were good images. They consisted of a lot of colour, so we decided to categorise them in similar colours! It worked out pretty neat!

The 4 month brief

Well here's a few of the snaps I've taken during this week for this rather long brief. The definition I've chosen to focus on is... 'a formation of people, objects or things on besides/behind eachother'. I've tried not to think too literally, just to make it as interesting as possible.

Botox and mail shot..

I'm soooo glad this mail shot project is done and out the way!! Well, saying that, I've still got a voucher to put together and attach to a card! Hmpf.

But anyways, it's all done, and now I shall go through my though process. :)

The mail shot project was based on the newspaper article we researched for the previous project. Just to remind y'all, mine was 'Botox is great!'.

I researched some more, to see what exactly a mail shot is. We also had to produce a mailing list. All these complex words were totally new to me, so the research I found was vital!!

Once I knew exactly what a mail shot was, I came up with various ideas as to what I could do.

I went on a bit of a tangent, and kind of wandered away from the whole birthday thing (which I had done in the previous project). I wantedto see what other ideas I could come up with. I always knew I wanted to carry on with the birthday idea though. It's just interesting to see what else was available to be done.

I wanted the whole package to be about birthdays. So, I thought, what kind of things are there when it comes to a birthday?? Well, there's balloons, cards, wrapping paper, ribbons etc.. I grew a very fond liking to the card idea. So, I made it into a gift card. I designed a voucher and a card.

I didn't have many ideas for the mailing list. I didn't know exactly how to go about it. But as it had to be 'visually engaging', I thought, why not make it 3D? Well.. kind of 3D! Lol!!!!! I made birthday tags, and stuck a piece of string through the corner.

Even though my theme was 'birthdays', I also though, well, botox is very doctory, so, I thought it would be appropriate to make it look clinicy at the same time. I decided the card and vouchers would be a skin colour. This would represent where you'd have botox. Also, I used a scrunched up piece of paper to place behind the fleshy colour. This would make it even more obvious that it supposed to be skin. I then thought white would be good for the text. As well as these two colours, I decided to use a red. This, I made the envelope out of.

I think if I were to re-do anything, I'd change the colour. Probably the red. They look OK together, but I think it would benefit from a different one.

Here's my final resolution.

All 10 envelopes, with cards, vouchers and tags for the mailing list.

Mm.. tooty fruity

Ladies and gentlemen, I know present to you....... 

THE FRUIT LADY!

LittleBigPlanet

This so deserved a place on the blog!!

One of the most amazing games I've ever played!

Basically, you create your sac boy, choosing the skin colour, whether you want him to have hair, glasses, clothes etc.

Then you start the game, and complete levels, collecting prizes inside bubbles along the way! You can win stickers, objects, or more appearances. It's soooo good!

As well as it being totally AMAZING to play, I noticed the logo (above) for it is pretty damn good too.

Lots of love...

This was a rather tough, but interesting brief! For this, I had to produce a set of high impact posters which deliver a personal identified message derived from the research I gathered during reading week. They had to be presented at A3 scale with a 2:1 format. I was like, whaaaaaaaaaat... when we were first told. But with the help from little ol' Pheonix, I understood! Go mee!!

Most of the research I gathered was to do with how botox helps headaches. I picked this because I thought it was interesting, and would be different from the whole ageing thing. In the end though, it got the better of me. I went straight back to wrinkles. I really wanted to stay focused on the headaches, but my messages just weren't working at all. No one could understand what I was trying to say.
I did kind of stay with my initial idea, with the ''party string'' etc, only, I used it to represent getting older each birthday that comes around. I thought this was a more interesting approach.
I actually made finished pieces by hand, which I had to stick up in front of everyone. I was SO embarrassed. As soon as I saw everyone else's posters, I just wanted to curl up. Mine weren't made to a good standard at all. For a start, I used white paper.. even though the brief clearly states, 'You CANNOT use black or white in your final resolutions'. DUUUH. I also used pencil, which, of course, is a tone of black. GR!
So, here are my first set of final resolutions.

I can't stress how much I'm embarrassed by them. But I guess by putting them up here, it'll make me learn not be try and be such a clever arse!
I decided to re-do them... on computer. I actually think they came out rather well. It took a while. The spirals were the trickiest! Damn pen tool!

Visual Language 2

Good ol' Ian with his camera. Trusty little man. :)

Another amazing session! It all kinda feels a little babyish, but it's so cool! Illustrating words and such, using minimal media. It's so tough not to use literally imagery. That's one major problem I have I'm ashamed to say. But hey. It's all good practise.

This session, we wrote down 5 verbs and 5 adjectives. I can't even remember what I wrote, so I shan't go down that path. So yeah, we wrote them down, then stuck them all in the randomizer. We 'randomly' picked one of each, and basically had to do exactly what we done last week... use the coloured paper to create those words. It was a bit more tricky today though, considering we had two words to work with at the same time.

'Happy roll'

'Clapping run'

We then all had the word 'dog', and had to pick an adjective. To clarify, I can't draw dogs to save my life. To start off with, I drew a wiggly tail...? See. I can't draw. :( And just as I thought they would, people guessed this to be a 'fat dog'. GRR.
'boring dog'

I then chose the word 'snake'. So again, we picked another adjective and put the two words together. 'Snake shout'