New designer

After an invitation to contribute on the Jontom blog I was instantly excited about becoming a part of it. I hope to use my posts as a way to expand the content by showing my interests (mainly graphic design based) and help provide an even more fluent and inspiring blog for readers to indulge in.

My name is Tom Dabner and I'm currently in my second year studying Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. I also have my own blog at www.fivesandzeros.blogspot.com which showcases my own work, but I will be using this space to create an insight to my interests and influences in design.

My main interest is corporate and brand identity which leads me to my first post:

A brand new book titled 'Logo Design Love' by Irish freelance designer David Airey. I have recently purchased this book in the hope of it enlightening me in my design skills and teaching me ways to utilise them properly. I must say so far it is fantastic! The case studies used are brilliant and the way in which he approaches the reader makes for an easy and insightful read.

"Iconic designs that stand apart from the crowd have just one feature to help them stand out. That's it. Just one. Not two, three, or four. One."

This quote taken from the book shows how direct and gripping his writing is. Above he was explaining the fundamentals of logo design, using the new 'French property Exhibition' logo (shown below) redesigned in 2008 by Roy Smith Design.

The book can be bought on Amazon.co.uk and also over at David's blog of the same title LogoDesignLove.

I hope you enjoyed my first post and look forward to many to come.

Neville Brody in Landan

Just got back from a D&AD talk, bit of drama with tickets but really enjoyed it. Brody was great!

Today's Headlines

Some things I've been playing around with.

Olly Moss - Classic Film and Game Design

Here are some alternative versions of posters and packaging for a selection of well known games and films by one of my favorite graphic designers / illustrators, Olly Moss. His work has a really great quality to it.

New blog thing ya'll

This is a little introduction to our new blog.

The main idea behind the blog is a way of sharing things that interest and influence us, and also somewhere to show things we have been up to. Instead of doing a personal one I thought it would be cool to do a joint blog which hopefully should make it alot more interesting!

Anyway. Currently I am finishing off some projects for uni which is going quite well. One of the projects is to do three student magazine concepts.

Here is one of the covers i have been working on with my group:

Yesterday one of my tutors 'Martin' stopped me in the corridoor to talk about my last project. He said that during the crit we had he diddn't understood what i had actually done, and now he has had a better look he really liked it. I was really pleased to hear this as he didn't seem very interested during the actual crit.

This is the logo we had to use:

We then had design a change of address card.

This was my solution:

I was trying to keep the idea subtle which obviously worked as my tutor didn't spot it at first glance. Unfortunatly i wasn't able to find the same font used in the logo, so had to bodge it a bit!

Jonny