In February, I  produced a series of images for filling serveal ideas I had about not only the concept but also a way of approaching personal work.

The ‘Connection Series’ explores what elements are required for people to make meaningful connections with each other, particularly when thinking about relationships and friendships. Between my notebook, used for ideas and thoughts, and Evernote, used for collecting quotes and images from the net, I have alot of quotes, mini ideas collected together, I wanted to bring a few of these together to produce a single project.

I wanted to use a project to address some issues I have with producing work. I have a problem of thinking big and letting become a barrier to starting or finishing projects. I had a few different things I wanted to try out ascetically but never seemed to get a project where these would fit. I wanted to produce a selection of images that were linked visually and conceptually as everything I have designed has always been stand alone. I wondered if producing a set of images rather than just one would allow me to explore the concept behind the work more fully.

For this project I placed limits on what I would allow myself to use to complete it. Firstly, the subject matter would be about relationships. I broke down a huge list of different blocks of text into seven words, these became the seven designs. I found quotes, advice or blocks of text I liked that somehow referred to these words for me personally. I started each design with a skeleton grid, a layout that included a black circle, a white font (Alexandra BD blod italic) and a set of several brushes and textures. I then sketched some of the ideas I had for each image and made notes on what each image could look like. At this stage I also looked at repeating elements from one image in the next image as a way of introducing a visual narrative and progression though the series in a similar way to Joshua Davis’ ‘Once Upon A Forest‘ project.

I produced one design at a time, only starting the next image when I was satisfied the current image was complete. Each image took the best part of a day to finish. About a week in, I starting publishing a single design on my Flickr page while finishing off the last few designs.

Honesty: [adjective] Free of deceit; truthful and sincere. Done with good intentions even if unsuccessful or misguided. Fairly earned, especially through hard work.

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Patience: [mass noun] the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious.

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Forgiveness: [mass noun] the action or process of forgiving or being forgiven. Forgive: [verb] no longer feel angry about or wish to punish (an offence, flaw, or mistake)

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This project is about exploring personal ideas as well as technical ones. I have now begun to review other ideas and thoughts I’ve had to see if they can be pulled together to produce another series of images. Creating a collection of designs held together by a central concept rather than individual isolated designs, gives the work more strength in various ways, allowing the different aspects of the concept to be separated and explored while using colour, shape and layout to pull the sections together.

Please view the ‘Connection Series’ Flickr Set to see the full set of images.

Also see my ‘Connection Series’ Behance project, this includes close up details of the images.

Since March 2010 I have produced a monthly ‘journal entry‘ but rather than use words on paper, I have used graphics to describe how I feel and what I have done. After all, I am a graphic designer.

For Januarys entry, I chose to move away from the digital and try something a little more physical. Heres the end result:

I keep meaning to screen cast the production of my work as I think designers can be far too secretive about how they put things together, but i always forget. I thought it might be worth explaining how I put this together for anyone whos interested:

I started in Photoshop looking into fonts that might be suitble for what I had in mind. I stained paper with used tea bags, primary school style, to keep it looking rustic.

Next I printed the text onto the stained paper, then burnt each block of text into individual segments.

I had an idea to use stones as part of a photo or design a while ago but now I live in the middle of London, nice stones are hard to come by. While we were travelling back from Cardiff a couple of weeks ago, I noticed some nice grey stones in a service station, so I swiped a few.

I used some nice old rope to tie the stones into parcels. (this rope has been holding up a broken set of blinds in our bedroom for months, now we have finally put up new blinds, I had to use the rope for something before it ended up in the bin)

I took the arranged the stones and paper on a wooden bedside table and took the photo with a Canon 7D, a 24-105mm L lens and a 430ex flash. I edited the photo in Aperture, then exported it to Photoshop for some further editing.

The end result is a nice example of how I am begining to use my personal work to explore what is possible in the real world by plundering items and bringing them into a digital space. The rest of the entries in the Temporary Pleasures series are currently stored on Flickr and on this blog.