Paris vs New York - Vahram Muratyan

I was struggling to come up with something to blog about, so I had a quick scroll through my twitter favourites and came across a tweet I 'favourited' from @designtaxi showing a really great animation by Tony Miotto showing the many differences between the city of lights and the big apple. Check it out here

Of course this video is based on the book and blog by graphic designer Vahram Muratyan. Muratyan blogged about his travels to New York, which you can see at http://parisvsnyc.blogspot.co.uk/. His comparisons are shown in very striking graphic illustrations, which have a very simple, clean and minimalistic look to them. The colours used are bright and definitely eye catching, I absolutely love the style of the illustrations as a whole. The actual comparsions are very witty and fun, covering a wide range of topics which represent each city. A few of my favourites are...

Probably the most iconic female fictional characters to represent the two cities. I love how Muratyan has picked out arguably the most distinguishable features of the two characters, the hair and focused that as the main element of these illustrations.

Both airports are of course named after Charles de Gaulle and John F Kennedy, I absolutely love the cleverness of these, using the exhaust gas as a way to illustrate their profiles.

Finally! These iconic buildings of both cities also have become memorable due to fictional characters; Quasimodo ringing the bells in Notre-Dame and King Kong scaling the Empire State building. I love how the two illustrations have been composed in the same sort of way, with each having been aligned more to the left.

For more comparisons check out Muratyan's website http://www.vahrammuratyan.com/

(transferred from my wordpress account)

Newcastle Music Hub Logo Designs

This blog post shows my final designs for the Newcastle Music Hub brief. The four final designs have pretty much the same concept behind them but with different adjustments etc.

My idea for these logos came from using the image of a treble clef, but I wanted to rework the shape into a more modern style which would be appropriate for the company and appealing to the market of children to teenagers.

1. The first design shows the image of a treble clef shape with lines of different weights filling in the spaces. I did this in Illustrator and it actually took a long time to arrange all of the lines, there was probably a simpler and easier way of doing it but I at the moment I don't have a lot of experience on these programmes! I added the text too which I think has a clean look to it. If the text was any thicker than the weight of the lines than it wouldn't have looked very effective.

2. For this design I wanted to try something a bit different, so I used the treble clef shape to inspire a square shaped design. I think it looks quite good but I don't think people would associate it very much with music. I also filled one of the squares in blue for a relaxed look.

3. For the third idea I went back to the idea of the semi circles and kept it quite similar to the first design, however I did change the weight of some of the lines. I also filled one of the shapes in the blue colour from the second design just to help make it pop a bit.

4. The fourth design looks pretty similar to the first, the only huge difference being that I rotated the image which I think helps to highlight the treble clef shape more. I also had to rearrange the text so that it went perfectly on line with the horizontal lines on the motif.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with how my logos have turned out for this project as I wanted to go for quite a quiet and relaxed look. 

As these projects are done we now have to consider the next part of this module, which is again a live brief, of creating a logo and stationary for Newcastle College School of Creative Industries!

Branding Alphabet

One of the first tasks we got given in this Branding & Corporate Image module was to create an alphabet composed of different brand logos, however we were given a sheet with an example showing which ones not to use which were of course all of the obvious ones...so it was a bit challenging!

I decided not to edit the colours of the logos or anything as colour can play a big part in identifying logos and brands so thought it would be better to leave them, I also think it's quite interesting to see the different colours all of these brands use, how different they are etc.