OUGD406 Studio Brief 4 - Research

OUGD406 Studio Brief 4 - Research

As we had decided to do a calendar, we found it appropriate to research modern calendars and see how this could be applied to our work. There seemed to be a consistent them in our research that that contemporary calendars have a well thought out balance of white space. In addition the use of shapes was really interesting and this is something that me and jess wanted to incorporate. We found one example with orange, white and grey which me and jess both found to be a really nice colour scheme. One thing that we wanted to aim for was a unisex calendar, so we wanted natural colours. We then found another example that used shapes for the actual boxes within the calendar. We both found this really interesting and very contemporary so we though this hexagon theme along with the use of the colour orange could be interesting, and like a Hive. Therefore we thought this could be a possible theme for our calendar.

We actually got a lot of further inspiration from posters around the uni. This example sparked our interest and made us consider screen printing for our calendar. We both mutually agreed that screen printing it would give it that extra edge and have a really nice aesthetic. Examples in our studio of letterpress styled words confirmed this as this is the aesthetic we both wanted to go for. I think the use of bright, bold colours together really makes the poster stand out, but predominately the type for me is what really makes it. The bold style draws your attention straight away, especially the choice of colour on a subtle tone. This aesthetic to us would work well as the calendar could be an example to students that you don't need to digitalise everything. I love hands on things although the idea of screen printing or letterpress is a bit ambition, I think it would definitely be worth it as it has much more of a creative aesthetic which would appeal more to students here.