Tag: Semester 1

Good and bad logo design

During this weeks workshop we explored many examples of what makes a logo design good and what makes a logo design bad, this helped me to understand how i can make my logo look the best for the convergence task coming up.

Good Logo Design

I feel that the FedEx logo is a good example of logo design as it represent the brand of the company by using blank space in between the E and the x to create an arrow. Many high profile companies do this to add complexity to their simple logo design which adds depth to the logo with minimal noise. The logo uses their branding colours using simple a two tone of purple and orange tying in with their entire branding strategy.

Another company which has done those two things is Amazon, their logo i think is also very suiting, the hidden message is an arrow ‘from A to Z’ which forms part of their slogan tag line, and yet again they use a simple two tone of black and orange to tie in with their branding and add simplicity which make it diverse across a multitude of mediums.

Bad Logo Design



The Reebok logo is and example of a very bad logo design as i feel that the font is messy, the colours clash and the logo image is hard to understand. The overall effect of this is a logo that looks messy and out dated. In addition the way that the font uses curves along side very sharp edges makes me confused as to what branding style the company are trying to give off, if you stare at the letters for too long they start to become almost undefinable and almost look like foreign letters. Finally, from a first glance a potential customer might not know this has anything to do with being a sports brand at all, yes if it is surrounded by other brand on a sports direct advert for instance then yet they will understand. But if it is on its own nothing from the logo really screams to me ‘sports brand’.

Written on 3/11/15

I thought from the off that i had an amazing idea that was going to set me up for life and make me a millionaire whilst also getting me a good grade here at uni.

The idea came about as follows:

I was thinking of ways that technology can help with the more tedious tasks of trying to be greener in life. This got me on to thinking about people being greener and trying to grow their own produce, especially in a city environment where there isn’t much in terms of greenery. That then led me on to thinking about how plants need to be watered on a regular basis but there isn’t really a 21st century tool that can help us keep track of what plants need watering, leading people to forget to water or over water their plants, killing them and then people giving up on growing all together.

My idea was the use the simple mechanism of an already existing moisture sensor to beam out a signal to an app on the customers phone, i understood the topic more from reading this article http://rayshobby.net/reverse-engineer-a-cheap-wireless-soil-moisture-sensor/. This would then show the app viewer a percentage or a scale of how much moisture is in the soil around that plant. As many plants differ in the amount they need I was also thinking on the app of having a list of plant types which you can select which plant you are growing and it will set the moisture requirements of that plant, and it can notify you when the plant needs some attention.

I thought of many more extensions and uses for the app, all to do with helping the grower to care for their plants more efficiently.

HERE IS THE BIG BLOW…

ITS ALREADY BEEN DONE BEFORE! SAD FACE.

The app is called EDYN (great name) and does a hell of a lot more than what i was intending to do with my moisture sensor app. I think that they have done it so well with an amazing sleek design, extra attachments and adding a solar power energy source that i simply cannot compete. Take a look for yourself! https://edyn.com/

Oh well, on to the next idea!

In this weeks session i had a lot more thought about what i would actually like to create in my 1 minute short focussed around myself. Recently i feel like i have discovered myself as a bit of a money maker and slightly entrepreneurial in the fact that i want to innovate and create things in order to benefit the world and benefit myself. I feel like this can be a great topic of conversation and a good starting point in terms of thinking about the flow of my 1 minute short.

In the session itself we learnt about how to create really easy and simple vector graphics and learnt that you can infinitely scale vector graphics as the pixels update to fill the vector so it will never pixelate. i never knew this before and it has opened up a lot of doors to me before as i had seen it done but never know how to do it myself. 

I also really liked the use of the Adobe Capture app that syncs up to my Adobe cloud. I have started to use this straight away with the shapes tool to create vectors of things i would like to add into my i minute short. I really like the way that a £2 coin looks and i created a vector of that which i am hopefully going to use in a creative innovative way in my short.

I have also thought about the other sections of Digital media which i would like to incorporate such as projection mapping in terms of things that interest me. My friend has a projector and i am hopefully going to use that to create some thing in my own house that will be worthy of making the 1 minute cut.

Sadly my cat of 15 years had to be put down today, so i am also thinking of a small homage in there somewhere to Marmalade, Long live his legacy!

Firstly in the motion graphics week 5 workshop we were given a quick exercise to use simple selecting, cutting, compositing, layering, cloning etc to create a layered PSD file that can then be imported into After Effects. We can then change a multitude of things within After Effects and add effects too each separate layer to make them move using keyframing. In this example we used a cat and had to make its head follow a toy that was moving above it.

In the second talk we were given something slightly harder, which was to create shapes within After Effects and then add some effects to those shapes in many different way in order to grate a motion graphics logo. The told we used to do this were things such as the transform panel, using the stroke effect and the fill effect along side keyframing to create animation. I also used the dash pre set effect on the hexagon in the centre and key framed it to created the moving dash effect which links up to create the whole shape. I think the best thing about creating things within After Effects instead of importing from Photoshop is that you can manipulate the layers so easily and everything you add is completely non destructive.

We also got set a task to think about characteristics and ourselves we have and to remember them for the next session, I am going to write them here so that I know where they are and now everyone else will!

If I were to pick a Mr. Men character as myself I guess it would be Mr. Daydream, it’s a cliché I know, but id like to think that I am going somewhere in my life and that by having high expectations and dreaming of the top it will help me to get there. In my spare time I like to play FIFA with my housemates which I seem to do way too much, watch football with my house mates (which I also do a lot of), go to nightclubs, and do a think called matched betting which makes me spare money. I also have a job at The Swan (SU pub) in which I work for around 12 hours a week. I live on the south side of Lincoln directly on the High Street, which is around a 15-minute walk to the university.

I’d say my favourite emotion would be excitement as I think the sheer excitement of something can override every other bad emotion and fill a person with joy and happiness. I like to surround myself with people who are like-minded and generally joyful as it brings out the best in me. This year I am also trying to involve myself with the community and the media sector a lot by signing myself up for volunteering with things such as Frequency festival and the Lincolnshire ambassador. This is helping me to grow as a person and make contacts with people I wouldn’t usually have access to.

In the second week of Jon’s VFX workshops we learnt about how to use 3D tracking in a shot and exported some of our own attempts at using 3D tracking within After Effects (you can find these at the bottom of this post). In order to get a three dimensional track of the video we needed to use the track camera option in the tracking window. What this does is tracks all of the potential tracking points within the shot and then uses triangulation to create a map of points which then creates a sudo 3D track of a 2D video. These tracking points can then be applied to a null object but highlighting over certain tracking points, right clicking and clicking on one of the options depending on what job you are doing. For instance in the first video I used ‘Create Text and Camera’ As i was adding text into the video, where as on the second video i used ‘Set Ground Plane and Origin’ so that the software knew that the area that had been triangulated was the ground. With any of the options an in software camera will be made so that the graphics added can all be applied correctly.

I think with the first 3D tracking shot i did i used a good light angle to match the light diffusion in the room, i also think that the softness of the shadow was about right to match the real life elements in the shot. I do however think that the tracking could have been executed slightly better as in the video when the camera pans and moves into the third dimension the text doesn’t quite stick to the box. This may be due to me messing around with some co-ordinates and possibly changing the Z axis therefore the text wouldn’t sync with the target i had previously made.

On the editing of the second video i don’t think that the effect sold that well mainly due to my placing of the hole and the angle it was set at which just didn’t set very well but i didn’t understand why. However I do think the effect of the inner sides of the hole moving separately due to parallaxing worked very well and i really like the idea that its the little touches that really sell the effect.

Finally i learnt that VFX is different to SFX, SFX is in real life where as VFX is done in the editing suites post production, I didn’t know this before but i’m sure it will be useful to know so that i don’t sound like an idiot when talking to industry professionals!