cheeky cheeky

Just been scanning through design agencies I like for my journal and noticed the homepage of TBWA London, explaining about themselves and there company. But what really caught my eye is the very mischievous picture they have put up of the Saatchi & Saatchi building and in front of the scaffolding is a plug for TBWA. How very naughty of them :) I dont know how long this has been there but it put a smile on my face, so I thought I would share.

Rainy City Stories project

Brief: Editorial

My idea to create images for the website RAINY CITY STORIES

(http://www.rainycitystories.com)

This website is for Manchester based writers who submit short stories of Manchester memoires and their own narratives.

“What’s Rainy City Stories?

This site gathers up a wide experience of living in, remembering and imagining the great city of Manchester. It uses a map of the city to organize stories linked to particular places. If you click on a place marked by the little cloud icon, you will be able to read a piece of writing associated with that spot. Anyone can submit writing to the site.”

Pick FIVE stories off this webpage and illustrate them appropriately.

 

Photography – Not Yet

By Paul Capewell

 

This short story is situated in the Deaf Institute on Oxford Road, and it is a simple narrative about two people waiting and longing for something to happen but it seems as if time stood still. For this I took a trip to Trof (which is the Deaf Institute) and took some photographs with a fish eye camera and a digital. I have played around in Photoshop with them and based my designs on a phrase used in the story “silent comrade”. And with this I thought of the military and how correlated the armed forces are with each other, how in-sync they have to be to fight at their best. I liked this idea and though to present this in the design. I drew my own comrade and played around with layout, my final design is my favourite and it looks worn and as if the ‘comrades’ were projected on to the building.

 

Collage – Narcissus. The Double Daffodil

By Anne Beswick

This short story is about nostalgia and the lower class in the 1960’s, and it is situated in Moss side, Manchester. For this story I felt that collage design would be suitable as the story is about childhood memories and dark times, with these thoughts I think the design would have little or no feeling if it were to be illustrated in Photoshop or Illustrator. So with this I started to design typical ideas with daffodils and crumbling windowsills, but this was so uninspired and gave no sensation or emotion. So I thought about the time period and what was going on in the surroundings of the narrative and decided on creating a scene using dark colours to instigate the hard times and using a bright yellow in the little girls dress to illustrate the idea of the daffodil being the young girl. And how the tale revolves around her positive attitude and young, optimistic outlook on life in her working class lifestyle.

 

The Busiest Bus Route in Europe

By Emily Josephine McPhillips

 

This story is located on Oxford road near the BBC building. It is a classic love story but with a twist, between two people on a 142 Magic Bus travelling to University. They connect subtly on the busy bus journey, not knowing anything about each other but there is a strong bond being formed, they could relate to each other without even forming a sentence. From this narrative I formed a design instantly in my head, I knew I should create this vision with collage as it presents a delicate touch and sentiment into the design. I wanted to capture the unknown/mysteriousness of the two characters but also centring them to be the focus. In a sea of anonymous people, they are to stand out and relate to one another.

 

The Victoria Baths

By Aiden Clarkson

 

This narrative is located at the Victoria baths, Hathersage Road. It is a combination of two stories, one is the history of the Baths and the other is a narrative of a mans content memory of a man hitting another man with a mountain bike. I was having trouble deciding which route to take with this story, as there are two different directions to go in. I chose the history of the Victoria baths as I think the Baths are so interesting and beautiful when you compare them to the average community swimming pools of present. I felt like I wanted to tell the history of the baths as well as create a visually pleasing design so I produced a timeline of the history and combined this with a side and floor plan of the baths itself. This design is information graphics and I think the colours work and blend well with the website as well as the actual design. Again I have not ventured into this design style much before and I like the simplicity of the design I think it suits the story in an unobvious way but tells the narrative clearly and not to overpower the actual story.

 

Rusholme Ruffians

By Matthew David Scott

This story is full of emotion, it is set in Rusholme and is centered on student living and gang culture. It is an insight into a thieves/muggers way of life and how they chose their victims. This story is a lesson to all students and to young people being pressured into a lifestyle they don’t want to be in. it is about two teenage boys in a crew stand waiting in an unlit door way on the busy street of Rusholme waiting for their unsuspected prey. They have been tracking a certain student for a while and had decided that tonight is the night to jump; they follow him home and violently let themselves in after him. The older one of the two is the obvious leader and calls all the shots, he is the instigator and what he says goes, the young of the boys clearly has to follow strict orders. The younger boy feels sympathetic to the victim and is confused about is sexual orientation, he doesn’t want to be in the crew but feels he has no way out now.

This is such a strong story line I found it difficult to create a fitting image, I wanted to show how the muggers follow and track their victims and for this I decided to create a mapping design. I have used images of rusholme at night and edited them into three sets of footprints; each footprint is allocated to each character in the story. The design is to create a narrative in itself, ‘stalking the prey’ it is a very different way of designing than I normally do and I think it is refreshing.

 

With these designs I have developed some postcards, to be used for the tourists side of Manchester. As this whole brief is centred on Manchester writers, Manchester stories and designed by a Manchester designer I thought this would be fitting.