ditto press studio visit
Today I visited ditto press which I found to be quite a motivating trip. Unfortunately Ben wasn't in which was a shame as I hoped to talk to him a bit more after meeting him when he came in for the talk/briefing. However I got a chance to speak to some other members of the team just generally about Ditto and about the possibility of printing off some zines for my contemporary culture brief. I was briefly explained about the risograph printing and the options open to me when printing my zines off.
We also spoke a bit more about the type of work Ditto do and the clients they are involved with. When Ben first came to the college I liked the look of the work he had shown us so I was quite excited to see the other things they had worked on. After having a chat about the printing options and being shown the type of printing that would work with one colour/four colours etc. I was then given the opportunity to look at dittos collection of publications. Before this visit I hadn't been massively interested in riso printing but after looking at some of the work they'd produced this is definitely a printing method I want to try in the future. The more work I saw by ditto the more interested I became in their practice and the studio. They mostly focused on publication design which has been an increased interest of mine throughout the course, but the thing that interested me the most about the ditto publications were the visuals used. A fair bit of photography accompanied by text, and also the printing methods were intriguing to me.
I spoke briefly to Sophie about how she ended up working at Ditto and what she has studied. She has actually got a degree in illustration from Camberwell, where I did my foundation. She said she was interested in riso printing when she was at camberwell and thats what attracted her to Ditto.
Looking at the work and asking questions about specific projects has given me new ideas and inspiration for certain projects that I have been stuck on. Below are some designs by ditto that have allowed me to think about briefs that I am doing in different ways, which is refreshing as I had become frustrated with how slowly it was taking me to think of some ideas to move forward.
The studio space was quite intimate and whilst I visited there were four of them working, the room was mostly full of printed matter and books, with printers and laptops. Visually everything was quite interesting for me as the work they do is the kind of thing I would like to be involved in after college.
These are some of the publications I particularly liked and some inspired new ideas for current briefs I am working on. This is the style of printing they offer, which I hadn't really thought about for the contemporary culture zines. I think this could be a possibility, it would definitely change the overall aesthetic of the zines so I'll have to think about which would suit the content more.
Looking at this particular page makes me want to print them in this style as I think it would compliment the style of photos i've received so far. I also like the layout of this zine, as I am looking at potential layout ideas which is something I will be working on when returning from the easter break.
I think something that I realised whilst looking at some of the designs ditto had made was how the final result could be effected by the printing. Sometimes when working on designs I feel they look to simple and almost boring when designing them on inDesign, however it can make all the difference when printed in a certain way and also hard copies can look completely different as I feel on screen sometimes if the design has a lot of white space it can look too clinical and as though not much design has gone into it.
I particularly like the photography in this publication, and the printing, which I thought might not work as well with photographs, just added to the overall aesthetic of it. Another thing that I noticed at Ditto was the variation of format sizes. I've noticed I tend to stick to a similar format size when creating publications but I would like to explore bigger format sizes in the future, A4 or bigger could be a potential format size for the ditto brief set by Ben.
Again, I would never think to design just focusing on type like this but I think it looks good, its all about the type choice and layout. I should think about this more for the unsung heroes brief as I was having trouble thinking about the imagery I could use for that. I didn't want to use photographs for it as I had already looked at that type of visual for the promotional material side of the brief.
I liked this publication, it was printed on a smooth stock that allowed the photographs to be printed really clear and crisp and focused on someone taking photographs of people taking photographs. I thought the photography was strong and interesting so visually it was intriguing.
I really liked this particular publication, the contrast of type with hand writing is something that I would like to do with my ditto publication. As I am looking at recording conversations and gathering an archive of conversations and communication I would quite like to display it with the contrast of type and hand writing. Since starting third year I have become increasingly interested in incorporating my handwriting into my designs. At first I came across some problems and when live tracing my hand writing and zooming in it looked to vectorised and I wasn't happy with the final results. However as the year has gone on i've become a bit more experienced on how to get the effect I want, and sometimes just scanning it in and cutting out the stock background works better. This is something I will explore in three briefs that I am currently working on: unsung heroes, ditto's brief and the museum of childhood publication.
More examples of hand writing in publications, this one I particularly like as it just looks quite natural, I actually really liked the layout of this publication. It was quite large in format and was a zine with film photography of Adele the singer, the photos were quite natural and depicted her in private surroundings, her being the main focus. There were also scanned objects from gigs of hers such as tickets, wrist bands etc. Her handwriting accompanied the scanned objects which I thought was a nice touch and made it seem slightly more personal. This is something I considered when collecting the childhood memories but I gathered some though email and so the design would be inconsistent.
I photographed this one particularly for an example of self branding. Whilst designing my logo and thinking about the branding I was considering stock and colours which could make a huge difference. This is the kind of coloured card I want to use when designing my self branding. The logo with be black ink and the colour will come from the stock rather than the design itself. I think the black on the brown card works really well and this is similar to what I want.
This is quite a simple design but I need to be thinking about ways that I can display my written passages of unsung heroes and avoid using images. A new idea is to scan in different stocks, a variety of colours and textures and either hand write or type the passages on top, simple but I feel the content of the book should be almost strong enough to not rely heavily on a huge visual impact.
If sketches were appropriate or fit with the passage I would like to include some scanned sketches as I think this would work well with the type. It wouldn't be a huge feature within the publication but could be a nice feature, or possibly the name of the unsung hero/heroine hand written and scanned in.
No comments:
Post a Comment