Extended Practice

I found the Peter and Paul brief enjoyable but very challenging. I was excited to get to work on this brief as I had loads of ideas to contribute and was working with Sarah Heal, who I hadn’t managed to work with before. Deciding to collaborate with Sarah was a really good idea, as we both share common interests and passions for lettering, as well as being able to come up with fun and crazy ideas together.

What I found challenging about this brief was being able to meet up with Sarah regularly to work on it. We were both very busy with COP work and other commitments at the time and the type of design that we were producing required dedication and a lot of sitting there for hours fiddling around on Illustrator. Illustrator was another challenge for me. I’m not that confident when using the software for vectorising hand rendered sketches, so when it came to bringing our typography into the software I definitely felt out of depth. Sarah is such a wizz kid when it comes to Illustrator so was happily working away on loads of complex parts of the design, whilst I sat there struggling to create realistic leaves, vines and grapes!

This brief was extremely time consuming, but I learnt a lot from Sarah about Adobe software and feel so much more confident with Illustrator because of this brief. I think that if I hadn’t felt so out of my comfort zone when it came to vectorising the artwork, then I would have been able to contribute to the final design a lot more. However, a lot of the time I would try to tackle a part of the design and Sarah would just redo it for me as I hadn’t done it properly.

I think that me and Sarah work well together, but if we collaborate again in the future, I would like to try and do something that is less software based and more to do with both of our drawing skills, as I think we could create a really exciting piece without Adobe!

Although our concept wasn't picked for the competition, we weren't discouraged and decided to mockup how it could have looked if we had been picked. I think that the design would still need finishing if it was chosen for the wall space, but other than that I think that the space would have been so interesting to look at and I think that incorporating the water fountain was such a good idea!

We both thought that our idea should incorporate the water fountain, as we didn't like the way the fountain currently looked and thought that we could make it more exciting and blend into the surroundings better!

We decided to turn the water fountain into an Italian Renaissance water fountain:



Going from there we discussed how we could turn that whole area into a Renaissance corner. We thought about typical Italian things, and then thought about grapes and grapevines that could creep up the wall. Then I thought - why not turn the grapevines into typography? As we both really enjoy drawing type, so this would be a really good way of using our strengths together to collaborate fully!




We started off with a few dodgy sketches to get more of a feel of how vines could work with typography.


This slowly developed into the words "Welcome To Graphic Design", which we both took turns in sketching out on top of one another's sketches.


These sketches were traced over continuously in order to get better shapes within the letterforms and to work out how everything would interlink as naturally as possible, in order to look like a grapevine is wrapping around itself to create the letters.


Sarah sketches out a few different bits and bobs so we could discuss how the vine would work as a tree and how the leaves and fountain would work.

Meanwhile I was tracing over more and more typography to get it as close to perfect as we could before we took it into Illustrator.



We then thought about how the typography would intertwine with the vines and branches of the tree as a whole. We also decided to work out how the fountain would fit into this design.



For the other wall space, we decided to go with the idea of making it seem like you were looking at an animal conservatory and the designers were animals inside. We thought that this idea could link in with the renaissance water fountain downstairs by creating our very own Roman Zoo upstairs, so all the design styles would be very typical of Renaissance design, that way the designs would interlink and be similar to one another.

Having a look at Jessica Hische's typography was definitely really worth while and gave us both loads of different ideas as to how we should tackle our typography for the brief. It helped to see how we coud incorporate leaves and ornaments to our lettering, as neither of us have produced lettering that is quite so heavily illustrated before. Looking at lettering like the ribbons type she created also helped with understanding looping letters to create shadows etc.