Back at uni

Doing my PGDip LA at Kingston part time, so am reviving this blog

Crystal Palace

Arup's work on it can be seen here...

www.thelondoncrystalpalace.com

Building Hoarding

Saw this near work and it got me thinking about how even the building site before whatever you've designed gets built can be a designed thing in its own right.

Had a quick google around and here are a few other things that came up...

Golden Hour

Taking photos at the right time of day can make even the crappiest scene look actually quite nice.

"Golden Hour" is the time to aim for, and you get TWO a day! One in the morning and one early evening. Obviously it changes throughout the year, so luckily there are loads of apps and stuff to help you keep track of it.

Adobe Bridge

Currently teaching myself adobe bridge as it seems to be a far better way of dealing with images than the windows or apple defaults.

It has a bunch of great features, such as easy keywords, labeling and batch renaming. My favourite is probably that you can select several images at once and then open them as separate layers in a single photoshop file.

It's designed to be a hub for the creative suite but will deal with all file types.

Work Experience

The last couple of weeks I've been running work experience alongside my own work. It was actually really fun and I think at a very basic level we covered a lot of ground.

I gave them the background information for a relatively small project we are currently working on, and set them the task of coming up with their own design.

I couldn't put her on a train to Hemel Hempstead, so instead we went for a walk around Fitzroy square gardens and I did my best to explain what to look out for during a site survey. As she was from Germany and hadn't been to London before I told her to pick a place she wanted to visit as a tourist and then go and do her own survey. Luckily she picked Regent's park which is just down the road.

When she got back we made a list of her favourite hobbies and considered how each one could become an element of a public outdoor space, and began sketching them out.

We looked at 1 and 2 point perspective, axons, sections and more expensive styles.

I talked her through the basics of Sketchup, and a few minutes later she was drawing quite complicated things with textures and layers.

Then we edited a few images in Photoshop and arranged them in InDesign. After a day of placing text and graphics she had fairly comprehensive design package that she would be able to present at school and develop on her own time.

Images to follow...

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