So today on my lunch break I sat with more print outs of my current postcards. Like last time I put them together to see if they work and wrote on post it notes changes I want to make to adjust this weekend… I sat with my work colleague and surprised myself for the first time ever that I was actually quite open in talking about my ideas, thoughts and feelings about my work so far. Usually I am shut off and keep everything close to my chest – the fear of rejection or not pleasing!

I was telling her that I need to make changes to my postcards in that I need to add more “Graphic Design” into them. Curently I feel that my work has my own style attached to it but I am worried that at the moment it looks too illustrated rather than Graphic Design.

By the end of my lunch break I decided that ideally I need 4 postcards instead of 3. My original idea was that the 3rd and final postcard would be LA themed, I have now decided to add an extra postcard and split the wing image across both. One will represent my design influence and the other will still be LA themed.

This is what I mocked up…

I started to look on pinterest for inspiration. I decided I need something pink that will fit in with the current theme of the first 2 postcards but I need something that looks more design and represents Graphic Design or influential designers.

I really liked these images:

My designs and style of work are quite modern in appearance, I want to one of the designs back to the origins of Graphic Design/ what area of design I am interested in but I still need to keep the same modern, bright appearance that it has currently. To reflect a style such as Bauhaus for example just wouldn’t work. I then started to think about what I am interested in…

I love magazines…

Now I don’t just mean the naff celebrity gossip ones that come out every Tuesday (even though I am a little addicted to these also :s) I really like a good quality, well designed, quirky, attractive looking magazine. One of my all time favourites has always been Nylon. Nylon is alternative, its arty, quirky and the way it is designed and laid out is always very different. I later learned that Nylon took some of influence from David Carson and Raygun. I then thought what about doing something similar in my design. To have influences from magazines with the type and layouts but have the quirky, collage influence from Carson.

I really like the highlighter/marker pen idea and I have messed around with that approach in some thumbnail sketches. It then got me into thinking how I would incorporate magazines into my design… like Carsons work where he rips up pages and uses them in his work, how could I use this influence in my work? I then thought I have the LMU magazine that got sent me (I wrote about this in my research section on my blog) the magazine was designed by Pentagram so it would also have that designer influence. If I could take pages out of this magazine and incorporate them into my design. The articles from the magazine all also relate to Los Angeles and around “what is an Angeleno” which ties in with my design.

Make a collage from pages of this magazine and then add the marker pen idea and maybe some other mixed media.

I am going to sketch out some more thumbnails and experiment with some mixed media;

Letterpress/screen printing

ink splatter

marker pen/highlighter

brush strokes / brushed type

post it notes

lipstick

collage