Rui Costa

This piece of Rui Costa (The Maestro) was a request from a twitter follower. I was more than happy to oblige and knocked something out for him and sent it on.

"Rui Manuel César Costa (Born March 29th 1972) is a former professional footballer who had a career spanning more than 17 years playing for clubs such as Benfica, Fiorentina & AC Milan. He was also capped 94 times for Portugal."

Iniesta - Confederations Cup

Andres Iniesta. Spain & Barcelona playmaker.

Neymar Jr - Confederations Cup

To show my appreciation of the Confederations Cup, here is a little piece of Brazilian striker Neymar Jr.

Poster & Logo Design - Personal Brief

Here we have another personal brief that I set up. While doing a bit of research and looking for something fun to set out and design, I looked through other blogs and design forums to see what other people were setting out to do and take inspiration from how they approached their brief.

So I scribbled down some notes and decided that this one will focus on making a poster and a logo for a fictional festival. The name of this festival is "Dublin Bite". I like to keep my briefs close to home as I identify with the country and city I am from. Later on down the line I will try branch out but for now I set out to do this brief.

Here is an outline of what I wrote down when setting out to do this brief.

"Dublin Bite is an annual open air food festival that takes place in the Merrion Square. It's aimed at the modern 'foody' and hosts stands from a wide variety of artisan food producers. Dublin Bite is a great opportunity to taste gourmet food but to chat with the producers and socialise with friends. Celebrated culinary names such as Jamie Oliver, Neven Maguire, Rachel Allen and Ross Lewis will be doing cooking demonstrations and there will be a special Masterchef event open to the public"

Firstly I started to design the logo. I decided just to go straight to designing in Illustrator and just see what came out. I just wanted to keep it simple but nice, like I always do. I wanted to incorporate something that associated with food  but not a food, something like a plate or cutlery, the things we use to eat with.

This was the result for the logo. I had it in different colours but decided to settle on a green colour as I felt it looked the best out of the colours I considered. I feel this logo ticked the boxes for my minimalist approach.

Moving onto the actual poster design, I decided to design it in A4 proportions with the thought of it being used in a magazine or blown up to be advertised elsewhere. I sourced the images I wanted to use then set out putting the poster together. I felt it all come together quite naturally in it's layout and design. I wanted to capture a piece of Dublin, especially the area the festival is to be held in so I used an image of an area around Merrion Square in the background. The rest of the images are self explanatory really, food & chefs.

I showed it to a friend who is also a graphic designer and he gave some really good feedback. Mainly about the colour I chose. He directed me to an article online that related to colour and how the brain reacts to it. It turns out that in a study, it showed that blue was thought to suppress hunger. I wouldn't have thought that was the case myself but I decided to take that on board and just simply switch up the colour.

In the end I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I really didn't want to create a poster that read uniform, left to right. Designing the poster how I did has made it stand out that bit more than your standard poster advertisement, in my opinion of course. I'm happy with my end results. I learn a little more and I move on.

Thank you for reading.

Logo Design - Personal Brief

For this personal brief I decided on creating a logo/identity for a company or restaurant. After a bit of thinking I decided to go with creating a logo/identity for a gym so I set a few guidelines to help myself create the logo/identity.

The guidelines are as follows:

. Create a logo for a Dublin city centre gym.

. The gym's clientèle are busy, health conscious young professionals.

. The age group being targeted is 20-35.

. Put a particular emphasis on people who wouldn't consider themselves as typical gym goers who might be intimidated by the idea of it.

. The gym should be seen as friendly, accessible and helpful.

I set out to designing the logo making a few sketches and notes while following the few guidelines I made. I used Illustrator for creating the logo. I thought of using Photoshop but I felt it would be simpler to just use Illustrator. I wanted to create something that was visually appealing and strong that could be used on any type of advertising material.

I came up with the gym name "U-Fit". I felt it was strong and could be expanded onto and it would also allow me some creativity when designing a logo. The "U" stands for "Universal" but I opted to leave that out from the logo when designing it.

Here are the designs I came up with.

With this logo I wanted to incorporate something visual into the name. I went with a character who was stretching and the idea behind it was that the stretching character was making the shape of a U. I decided to add the line "Fitness & Relaxation Studio"  to the logo as a way of softening the overall logo. That way, anyone who is intimidated by a gym will see that it's not all about working out and sweating. 

I chose a strong font for the name of the gym and a more slim, easily readable font for the line of text under the logo. As far as the colour scheme goes, I wanted to try out just two colours on each logo. The reason for this was I didn't want to clutter up the logo's with a lot of colours or shading.

The second logo follows suit from the first in many respects. The colour scheme is the same and the layout is similar. I again went with a visual aid in the logo. I created the U free hand with a minimalist style so that it looked just like a U but if you look closer the U is a a character working out/stretching to the shape of a U. This logo was my favourite of the 3 I designed. I felt it was elegant and strong.

This is the third and final logo I designed. I enjoyed creating this logo as I felt it could be used with or without the line's of text I had used to accompany the circular design. The colour schemes in all 3 stayed the same but I used different fonts in each logo that I felt complimented the logo designs.

Out of the 3 logo's, I liked different things in each but ultimately I preferred the 2nd logo I designed so I decided to choose that as my final design. I then decided to make a few changes to the colour scheme of the 2nd logo and also keep to keep the weights in the U to further add to the illustration.

Overall, I'm happy with the outcome of this personal brief. Thank you for reading.

Football Graphic - Bastian Schweinsteiger

I was supposed to upload this on Friday (yesterday) but I never got a chance but better late than never.

The final piece in a 5 day update has come and I will put these types of designs to bed now that I have scratched the itch to do them.

Today's footballer I used is Bayern Munich's and Germany's Bastian Schweinsteiger. A player who started off as a winger and has now been moulded into one of the worlds best centre midfielder's.

In keeping with all of these designs I wanted to keep it clean and simple and I feel I achieved that. I placed the render in, fiddled around with some settings and then to finish it off I got an image of the Allianz Arena, Bayern Munich's home stadium. I blended it in behind Schweinsteiger and played around with some settings until I was happy. Lastly, I chose a font I felt went well with the design.

Here it is.

Football Graphic - Mathieu Debuchy

Day 4 and another football piece. I will be doing different pieces of artwork from next week onwards as I have scratched the itch to do these pieces of artwork One more remains and will be published tomorrow.

Today's footballer is Lille and France international Mathieu Debuchy. A centre midfielder come right back. He's a player I have liked since I first watched him play 3 years ago.

For this piece I placed in the render, changed the layer options and then added a gradient to the base. I chose colours close to the France kit. I selected a font I liked and angled it above and below Debuchy. I then added some gradients to the font and I was happy with the end result.

Here it is.