HE Fashion Show

Harriet Isaacs (a damn good graphic designer) and I were asked to make a font cover for the up and coming HE fashion show featuring Plymouth College of Art fashion student's work in Plymouth Pavilions. The brief was to use two image as inspiration:

We were also given the theme of 'Edwardian Plymouth' so we had to create something was quite old looking but also quite now and fashionable which was a bit of a tricky brief but we just slowly pieced it together starting with the top image as the main piece of inspiration then just working parts of the bottom image as well as things like a compass and light to show Plymouth/the sea. 

We were also asked to make a mood board on the same theme which again was tricky but interesting because we firstly needed to work out what needed to go on a mood board in the fashion world, but I was very please with the outcome and when we handed in both pieces it was praised which was good and I put my name as Bench Allen on it so it was a good way to spend the name out there. 

Easy Fold Book & Box

To make the ghost explorer more accessible to people and also so I could sell it at fairs and use it as a piece of self promo, I made easy fold versions of the hard bound book. I broke the book into three chapters, I've only made an easy fold version of the first chapter (which I have entitled prologue) so far for the deadline but the Plymouth College of Art Summer Show 2012 I want to make multiple versions of all three chapters.

For this project I wanted to find a new way of packaging my easy fold book so I asked Laura if she could show me how to make the boxes she makes for her Resin toys. I decided i'd use cream card for the top of the box and blue for the bottom because it looked like sand/rock and the sea which obviously works for the story of the ghost explorer. I then digitally printed the title on the top and put them together which ended up being very tricky and fiddly without nails but they were done.

I then completed the package with a business card. For the summer show and New designers I was going to make little goodies like laser cut badges and prints in there as well so that it's more of a promotional package.

Tumblr

To get more people seeing my work I joined Tumblr, the good thing about tumblr is that I can put up my art work and other people can re blog it and therefore spend my work around and also I have linked all my images to my blog so more people can look at my entire work. Another thing is that I can re blog other people's stuff so I've been reblogging other people's work on the course (as you can see I've recently reblogged Kelly Walton's work) so that we can all help one another spend our work around.

Blog

I made benchallen.blogspot.com in the second year and therefore the whole thing seemed a bit dated with my old business card image as the banner and the colour scheme was black and white to tie in with the flash catalyst website I made in second year too. Firstly I changed the colour scheme to a nautical blue so that it worked with the work I was putting on the blog. Then to tie in with the new identity/ logo I made a new banner.

Though I didn't really like this banner for I had to use two teeth to fill the space and also because the background is white it didn't fit in with the layout very well.

 

The banner I tried next was to just have the tooth by itself with the same coloured background as the blog so it looks like it's just there by itself, the minimalist look. Though you couldn't see the tooth very well so I put a rough white border around it though it still wasn't working as a blog banner. 

  

The final banner I came up with was the tooth with the writing underneath (which I changed from black to white so it's more legible) on the same colour background as the blog, which I think works perfectly.