Matthew Leonard

Trend Prediction: Ready For Your Close Up?

Having recently completed an essay on the ongoing debate of "Is Print Dead?", I stumbled across an interesting find that I had been aware of but didnt give a second thought to until now. Something a lot of designers are doing, a common interest and maybe even a trend. Being in the "Digital Age" where everything can be viewed on a screen some designers seem to be going back to the old techniques, experimenting with foiling and embossing to name a couple. Websites like Collate and Its Nice That seem to be full of beautiful detail shots of projects that include these techniques, giving a real sense of detail in pieces and even including small elements that would sometimes go unnoticed, like the arrow on Build's album cover for Squarepusher, seen above.

I believe as digital continues to grow rapidly and people start wondering what will happen to print as they have since this rivalry began, they will start experimenting and trying to use old techniques in new and exciting ways. Making these pieces of work visible online with the use of professional photography and tight cropped images. Personally I would love to try out some of the old techniques, maybe I will start experimenting with them in the future.

Instagram...

Ive been very active on Instagram for a while now, posting photos of what Im doing, the stuff I wear, the things I eat and recently the work that Im doing. I started posting my hand rendered typography a while back and this got me a few more followers and a couple of likes, some of the pieces even getting reposted on inspiration accounts.

I changed the layout of my account and decided not to use the standard square photo frame you get with Instagram, I think this gives my account a little bit more appeal to look at as it doesnt look like everyone elses. My Instagram is definitely the platform that I post on the most and I think its a good way to get my personality forward, a mixture of work and personal photos being posted almost every week.

Follow me: http://instagram.com/matty_leonard4

Twitter...

During a number of the industry talks the importance of social media was made clear, an easy way to get your work out to a wider audience and network with a number of creative professionals. Twitter kept being mentioned as a way to get my name out there, having used it in the past for a personal account I knew my way around it, but had to completely change the tone of voice of the account.

This would be my professional, creative account where I would retweet interesting work, share what I was working on and mention important factors of my journey this year. I decided that I would keep this updated throughout projects giving people an insight into what I do. Wanting to make my account look more visual I decided I would tweet with images the majority of time, having recently found a love for vector icons I thought this would be a great way to illustrate what I was tweeting about, where necessary. This also works alongside my Instagram account that I am very active on.

Follow me: http://twitter.com/mattyleonard95

How My Design Process Has Changed Over a Year...

I knew that during studying Graphic Design I would grow as a designer and things would change about my design process; however, I didnt think that it would change as much as it has. Even before the course Ive been interested in what I could do in Photoshop and used to do a lot of photo manipulation and digital paintings, most of my work being digital based and being in front of a screen a lot. In the first year of the course I was a self confessed paper-phobe, putting my work in digital documents and spending as little time as I could sketching because I wanted a polished and finished product as soon as I could and I thought this was the best way to do things. Oh how wrong I was.

During the second year of the course theres been a quite dramatic switch, I actually enjoy sketchbooks and the "longer" design process. I say "longer" because the more work I put in a sketchbook and take my time on, the easier it becomes later on. I also found that Asda do Moleskine-esque sketchbooks for a few pound that are easy to carry around, these were my chosen sketchbooks for the year, no more expensive art supply store books that I felt every page was sacred on, scribbles, notes and thoughts jotted down rough, a quick and easy was to get whats in my head down on paper. I definitely think that this has helped both my idea generation and final pieces, making mistakes on paper saved me from spending an age doing it digital to find out it just didnt work. This new process has definitely changed me as a designer, for the better too. Definitely something I will carry on doing in the future.

Check out some of my previous posts on what goes into my sketchbooks! It'll give you a small insight into my process.

Jessica Walsh...

A big inspiration to me and a kind of nerdy graphic design crush (if thats a thing) is Jessica Walsh, a designer, illustrator and art director based in the Big Apple as part of the partnership Sagmeister and Walsh. I've looked at her work for around a year now and have become a big fan, especially her hand rendered typography, taking it further than just on paper and applying it onto people and taking her designs to the next level.

Sagmeister & Walsh's work is crazy, the concepts are things I would never think of doing, but its inspiring to see what people at the top of their game can come up with and actually get away with doing, some designers think that the creative freedom that you get with projects in University and my case College stops as soon as a live client is involved, Sagmeister & Walsh prove this isnt the fact and output crazy concepts that meet the brief. I remember watching a video on a live video they made to go onto a screen in Times Square, it was the making of a piece that I had seen before looking through Behance and on thier website and just automatically thought that it was computer generated, I was wrong. This piece spelled out the work MAX, in purple spikes, or thats what I thought. These were actually pencils that had been placed into large cutout letters and then sprayed.

I found the below video when going through a classmates blog to see if I had missed any posts for my PPD unit (inspiration right?!) and found it really interesting, it gives an insight into Walsh and her work as well as a little bit of a back story. In the video she mentions that she got a flat with an ex partner that they could barely afford just to follow a dream and approached Sagmeister for his opinion on her portfolio, he then asked when she could start working. Just goes to show following a dream sometimes works out VERY well.

I will continue to look at Walsh's work and her Instagram is a constant source of inspiration in both hand rendered type and colour, and as I've mentioned in a previous blog post she's actually saw some of my work on there and liked it (crazy). Maybe someday I'll do a Walsh-esque move to another city and land a big job, who knows! Only time will tell...

Sara Marshall Imagines a Corporate World of Hand-Lettered Logos...

"Iconography is one of the most important facets of branding. Countless designers rack their brains filtering through the infinite library of fonts and typefaces available, all in pursuit of making a distinct, meaningful impression on its audience. With this in mind, graphic designer Sara Marshall abandons all of that, instead re-imagining famous brand logos in her latest series: Brand by Hand. Considering the ostensibly timeless logos of Coca-Cola, Burger King, FedEx and more, Marshall created custom scripts based on each brand’s existing color palette, boiling each down to its essence. Ignoring the embedded geometry of each logo – for example, the arrow between ‘D’ and ‘E’ in ‘FedEx’ – Marshall’s experiment does well to test the associations we make with each identity." via HYPEBEAST

Saw this project doing its rounds on Instagram last week, mainly the FedEx logo, was happy to find the designer behind the concept while on Behance, love how theyve took it further and mocked it up onto vans and cans etc. Someone definitely needs to bring hand lettering to a big company!

Check out her work at: http://itssaramarshall.com/