Day 1. First Brief

Graphical Portrait.

Day 1 of Graphic Design we were given a one day brief. The brief was to create a graphical portrait of someone in the class you didn't know. 

We began by finding out as much information as we could about the person. For instance my graphical portrait was of Jake. I found out in his work he likes working in black and white and not colour, he likes writing song lyrics, he likes magic and never leaves the house without playing cards, he likes playing pool, he's learning how to drive, he likes rock, metal and some blues music and his favourite number is 37. To find out more about one another we delved further into some of the answers we got. An example of this would be that I found out Jake likes writing song lyrics that are ambiguous and don't make sense at first but do by the end of the lyrics. I quite like this idea. Visually I saw this as jumbled shapes that slowly start straightening up and I thought that could be interesting to incorporate.

Furthermore we made a mood-board to try and show visually ideas that reflect the information we had been given. Above is my mood-board of Jake. I kept it to a limited colour palette, as firstly it reflects his own interests of being interesting in black and white imagery. But also I wanted to reflect the theme of cards and magic throughout the piece and I felt adding the red reflected this nicely. I incorporated some questions marks to resemble an enigma. As I feel that's what magic is all about, creating an enigma, a mystery. The black rectangle shapes are trying to reflect the jumbled idea of how he creates his song lyrics. I kept the background collagey because I quite how that looked aesthetically, the ripped pieces of magazine and red paper.

As you can see on the final graphical portrait I did use a lot of the ideas that I played around with on the mood-board. I felt the mood-board was a really great help to create the final graphical portrait. I added a few extra things such as the pool balls with his favourite number in them and also the diamond, heart and spade to again show that "magician" aspect, steering away from being to literal with the actual imagery of an actual magician or of cards themselves. 

I do quite like the final drawn up graphical portrait. I do feel like more could be added to it. Maybe some type or just more collage as I feel it is missing something slightly. And I do feel like more information can be incorporated, it's just working out how to visually represent some of it without being to literal.