DITTO PRESS//NEW STUDIO OPENING//OUGD602

ditto press : studio opening
I attended the new opening of Ditto Press' studio on friday evening which was really enjoyable and gave more of an insight into the kind of industry events that go on.  As I had been to there old studio it was good to see the new place where they would be working and the type of set up that would be the professional environment.  In comparison to the old studio it was a lot bigger and there would definitely be more freedom to set up the studio in a more personal way showing Dittos style.  

The opening was busy and so was a good opportunity to talk to a few people about studios and how they had come to be at ditto's night.

There was a range of dittos work on display and for sale which was a good opportunity to look at some of the publication design, as thats the kind of design I am particularly interested in.  There was a range of interesting books and editorial work to look at, from different formats, to printing and finishing.  I had looked through a variety of publications when I went for a studio visit earlier in the month, however there were quite a few I hadn't come across before which gave me some new ideas for ways to approach some of my final briefs.

Since first seeing Dittos work when Ben came in to talk to us I had been interested in the kind of design they do.  They design and print a lot of zines which is something I've tried to direct in that general direction from the beginning of third year.  They also work with photography quite a lot, which again is  something I use a lot in my own work.

These set of tapes were something I was quite interested in and really liked the whole black and white illustration style and how they worked as a set.  One of the earlier briefs I had done was to design record sleeves for the band Meantime, which I really enjoyed doing and found the design outcome of them to be quite successful.  Seeing these tapes allowed me to think of other ways that I could do similar projects and would quite like to try and design my own series of cassettes.

In terms of publication design and printing there were a lot of different books that inspired me, but not just visually as the content of a lot of Dittos publications interested me.  They had put together some really simple concept based publications that focused on photography.  Whilst looking through some of the more photo based designs I was thinking about how I could layout and best display the photographs for my own contemporary culture zines brief.

I found this publication quite interesting as it focused mostly on interesting photographs and scans.  In the general layout they had a lot of over layered images which I think worked really well, this is something I've been interested in and wanted to try when designing my own publication, however have always struggled with composition, it could be a consideration for the contemporary culture zines.

Again, hand written text and featuring hand writing in publications is something I've tried to incorporate this year as I think it looks especially nice with photography.  For my ditto press brief I wanted to have the majority of the content in hand writing, which is something I have started working on.

I thought the general design of this publication was really nice, and nicely executed.  I also quite liked the simple concept of what the actual content was which was just a selection of firework photographs laid out, clean, with a lot of white space and some soft focused images of fireworks.

I thought this was a good opportunity to engage with some of dittos work and to attend a studio opening and see what it was like.  As dittos work and publication design has been something I have become increasingly interested in it was nice to see a range of their work and different styles and formats of publications.  It allowed me to think of some new ideas and ways to approach publications that I am currently working on or will start to work on soon.