Designing for secret 7- OUGD406

To start the design process I took screen shots from the video and made swatches of all the main colours I found to refer back to when designing. 

I looked further at the photography in Toiletpaper magazine, the main characteristics are the bright colours and creating a feeling of uncomfort. All the images make you cringe or feel uncomfortable in some way, for example the image above makes you feel fear for the bird but the bright happy colours contrast this feeling. Its a bizarre and thought provoking aesthetic I want to try and achieve with my brain idea.

So I bought a pigs brain (and eyeballs eww) from the butchers. I looked at photography from the magazine, it often showed parts of limbs but never anymore then that. So I wanted to do the same and only show my hands. This one is a really good photography as you can see it dripping through the hands and thats pretty stomach turning which I like. But its a shame the photo wasn't taken centrally so the composure is off which makes the design less effective. 

I used the clone tool in Photoshop to extend the image and add an artificial shadow to improve the composition.

This next one is similar to the last but shot from above. The table I was shooting on was grey and I wanted a yellow background to mimic the bold yellow colour throught the music video so I bought some a2 sheets of paper but had to Photoshop the breaks between sheets to create a smooth background color.

Lastly I photographed the brain on a plate to represent peoples brains being consumed by technology and social networking. I really love this one as the perfect white plate looks really clinical and so did the set of the music video it was almost too perfect. These designs gave me the chance to re-visit my studio photography and lighting skills and also editing in Photoshop afterwards.

I asked the group like a kind of online crit which design was their favourite and will also use the physical crit feedback to decide which one to possibly enter. The feedback from the interim crit for these 3 designs was that the first one was the overall favourite and I should enter that one. 

My next idea was informed by how iconic St.Vincents hair is in the video. I found this screen shot in particular really inspiring. I also really loved this bold teal colour used.

To represent this I created a vector image of a strand of her hair on a teal background. The style I chose for the illustration was informed by my research into the design agency Cranio design who draw hair in a really beautiful style. I think this design is successful as it hints at being this particular song without using any type or distinct imagery. It is minimal and I think it will appeal to art minded people.

The feedback I got for this design was that it was unclear what it was suppose to be, a lot of people thought it was a feather rather than hair so I will not be submitting this design to the competition.

My next idea was to experiment with type using the word 'yeah' which is a significant part of the song that stands out to me. This was actually one of my favourite outcomes as the bright yellow really stands out and grabs your attention. To me black and yellow represents danger which is quite fitting as the underlying meaning of the song is quite dark.

I printed out the word 'YEAH' in Futura as most of the typeface uses the same stroke weight so it would work well when manipulated. I then scanned the word but wiggled the paper around as it was scanning.

The idea was that the song is about warped perceptions and corruption of our minds by the digital world. I think showing a corrupted and warped type design gets this message across well and the outcomes were really interesting.

The best designs were the ones that had some completely illegible parts and others that you could tell what the word was.

Once scanned I played around in Photoshop with brightness, contrast and adding colours (yellow and blue to compliment the videos colour scheme).

This is another favourite of mine as its really minimal and simple. Its also very legible so you can clearly see the connection to the song. At the same time the legibility could be a bad thing as it doesn't get the warped message across as much.

This personally is my favourite design out of them all because I changed the midtones to blue and the highlights to yellow which looks really interesting and goes with the song really well. I think the type is just legible and really effective. In the final crit I will ask out of this design and the yellow one which I should submit to the competition.