Month: January 2019

Hi everyone,

Week 2 at Bottle Blonde Studio and I’m absolutely loving it.

This week now the website has been launched it was back to print designs and so I began drawing very graphic icons of various pieces of technology from the 70s/80s/90s. In my second year we were challenged to represent a brand without stating the name with 5 photos, here I learnt how a brand’s image is very important and can allow you to identify how well different silhouettes, colours and items would fit in with a brand. I used this skill this week by doing more research and looking round the studio to understand the vibe of the brand better,  I concluded that retro tech prints and postcards would fit in well with the brand’s vision. Everyone has their own drawing style, mine tends to be very detailed whether it’s sketchy or precise which as I’m doing drawings of vintage products helps me to style the pieces of tech to fit the brand more. Developing my own illustration style will be very useful for my final year as it helps clearly define my work from everyone else’s, as I’m now onto my second print design placement my personal style is ever developing. My first and second years have helped me to understand how to develop an idea to its full potential rather than leaving it at its initial starting point and I use this with each pattern as well as my drawing style.

Record Graphic

I’ve decided the best way for me to go about developing prints is by drawing segments/icons which can then be layered, repeated and positioned in prints. As Bottle Blonde has a very bold neon colour scheme I needed to make sure the colours I used where bright too and when necessary match the Bottle Blonde pink. I learnt that to perfectly match a colour when you go on the colour picker if you type in the # code at the bottom then it matches the colour. This is incredibly useful to me for my final year as I have 2 shades of purple I personally use in everything I can as my own identifiers, knowing this fact saves so much time making sure I have the exact same purple for whatever purposes I need.

Colour Number

As apart of my jobs I’ve been asked to design some postcards that can be sold on the BB website along with prints. This week I have been researching styles of postcards and potential quotes I could put on a BB postcard, as my personal style is very graphic I have been doing graphic drawn cards that can be given as gifts or kept and pinned up for yourself. As BB loves bright colors attempting to put quotes over a vibrant background can be difficult, but outlining a white font can solve this issue and make it much clearer to read. So I learnt how to outline a text in photoshop and this enhanced and completed the design. This is generally helpful for when text is needed over several colours as it can be very difficult to read, outlining in another colour defines the texts and allows the reader to read much clearer. So far over my industry year I’ve learnt a lot of Photoshop skills for which each new one I make a tutorial for my own personal use as the human mind can only hold so much. These files as well as the skills they hold will be useful in my final year to make sure all of the work I produce is at the highest quality for my abilities.

Finally in my personal life this week I have been doing some other designing, a very long time ago a stranger contacted me on Facebook and asked if I would be interested in doing some TV inspired graphic t-shirts. After way too long because of personal issues I finally got round to doing some designing, I haven’t done much because of other priorities such as uni and my internships however it’s just a nice little pocket money earner whilst I do my placement year. Personally I have designed ‘’Peaky Blinders’’, ‘’How I met your mother’’, ‘’Friends’’ and ‘’Stranger things’’ inspired tops. Designing for graphic tops is very different to the prints and postcards I am designing at BB however furthers my design skills and knowledge.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Hi all,

So it’s now 2019 and with the new year I have begun a new internship in a whole different environment, new vibe, new job and new people. 14th of January I started my second placement of my industry year with Bottle Blonde Studio in Coventry, who make festival wear and generally have a 70s/80s/90s bright and vibrant vibe going on. Bottle Blonde is incredibly different from my previous placement with Amanda Kelly who were designing prints aimed at high street stores and mass market.

For a first week at a job it was rather hectic and fast pace, however this is because we were aiming and successfully launching the new website for the Friday of my first week working here. On my first day I was given my official job title/duties for whilst I’m working at Bottle Blonde, my job is designing prints and little graphics such as postcards, fonts if needed and patterns for other items. I was expecting to be sewing some of the iconic tinsel cascade jackets when starting this job however I’m excited I get to design some more bold prints and just do general graphics for the company as it’s something I’m passionate about. The first job I was given was just researching the vibes of the brand so I could understand and be inspired to create my own prints in an 70s/80s/90s. In comparison to how I researched for prints in London it’s rather difficult to create your own images to draw from when it’s for a fashion period rather than nature/ more doodle styled prints. Fortunately my mother and boyfriend’s mother have tons of photos of them wearing 80s fashion which helped give me inspiration for colours, shapes and rough layouts without copying the exact patterns. I’ve used but also expanded my research skills I’ve learnt at university which will be useful for my final year understanding alternative research methods and how to create your own primary images when working with themes that aren’t easily available for primary research i.e. 80s fashion rather than flowers.

As we were preparing for the website launch this week I assisted Rachel who was mainly in charge of setting up the new site. For the new site Rachel wanted all the product images on the shop page to be the same standard size which involved resizing all the photos from the old website in terms of pixels to the same size. Resizing takes a very long time as we had to copy and paste every photo from the website into a correct size Photoshop document, in order to make sure they were all the exact dimensions that we required. Although it took days to resize and upload to the new site it was definitely worth it, I learnt that digitally having all images on a page the same size gives a more professional and put together visual look. This will be useful when creating portfolio pages as well as organising my own blog and such in my final year as well as my general future.

And finally in my personal life I went out to research more 70s/80s/90s inspiration ready for more pattern designs and play with my new camera I was given for Christmas. I know at some point in the coming weeks Chloe (the CEO/owner) wants me to design some graphic gift cards and postcards for the brand and so I also went and gathered some inspiration for this some pieces just for the layout, others ideas of little card packs so hopefully they’ll be available soon. Also as I’m working in Coventry now I had to find another place to live since I no longer have student accommodation and unfortunately commuting from Leicester is just takes a bit too long to be worth it, but luckily for me my boyfriend lives just outside of Coventry. Each day I commute from his village to Coventry via bus which is a big change from my 45 minute 2 tubes to Amanda Kelly in London, I also appreciate that living with him I no longer feel lonely and when I have issues I now have someone to talk to and help sort through them which wasn’t so easy to do in London.