Derrick Segsby

I'm bloody knackered Derrick.

This biking to and from uni now that Dan's not here is knackering me out big style. It so silly. My bum actually hurts from the bike seat. To make it worse I had the smart idea of going to somerfield down the road to get our shopping. On foot. Bleh. At least we have food now but I'm just wiped out.

First off today we had the briefing for the new 'postcards' project. Numero four. It's seems good in that there's a lot of freedom in what we want to do and it's designed to be a collection of what we've learnt before so if anything, this will be the big competition project. The slideshow was funny in quite a depressing way because I thought there were only a handful of postcards designed by past years that were actually any good. The american ones were shockingly bad with no sense of style or creation. I don't know if it's a different culture thing because of the small farm town that they were from or whether the difference in specialism in their university courses but a lot of the work looked like it had been done on publisher. The comments on the british work were quite anal aswell about meaning of fonts and specifics like 'why page number 402?' on the oxford dictionary themed one, yet their work seemed to have no consideration for such meanings and concepts of design at all. Bizarre. Sally and Neil made an interesting point in saying that you do have to remember your target audience and maybe the designs for the british ones were aimed too high and went straight over their heads. Such a thing as being too good?

I had some inital thoughts about using good ol Eduardo Recife as a style basis as he does incorporate text and image with all of his work so it'd be a good starting point. With my love for vintage means I'd get to use a lot of the things I already have as research giving me a broader pool of reference to dip in. Saying that I though a lot of the solidily heavy graphics style work suited the postcards better than some of the more fine art illustration stuffs. Maybe it was because the illustration things were quite basic in the sense that they were illustration with text as a support rather than an integral part - something which mine probably wont or rather shouldn't be. All in all though, I'm feeling pleased about it as it'll be a good chance to experiment with what we've looked at so far and see how far we can push it. I can tell already there's going to be some rather interesting work.


[Link To Marcus's Site]

After the briefing I stole away to Scarlett's illustration classes guest lecture and I'm so so glad I went. Marcus Oakley seems like a guy who is really happy with his work and style and what he's doing right now because it embodies him but is also, foremostly, a part of his day that he enjoys. I don't even think he considers it work. It was pretty art brut stuff but hearing him talk about his work gave it an extra depth and sense of character because you could then see the imprints of his personality in it. The thing that struck me most was how big some of this guy's work actually was. He'd worked for Levis and Citroen yet still did his little magazine work for friends. It sounded like a lot of work is heavily based upon contacts which is nice but a little daunting. It really must be about who you know, but I'm beggining to see that just working at uni already.
I'm definately going to more guest lectures because its such a good source of inspiration. It really does give work more life than what a website or section in a book might not quite get across. Happy times. Oh and space dragons. Genius.

Had an illustrator tutorial after that with Darren and once again I got a bit frustrated with things not being able to work how I wanted. Whether it's just my begginner skills keeping me from grasping how things work or just weird incapabilities of the software I don't know but I guess time after practice will tell. I am improving though just from messing about in those sessions. Fire alarm didn't help!

With what I'm left overhanging in my mind now, the thing that foremost sticks out to me as to what I need to get done is organise my work, experiment and get my book done of artist's I like. That baby will be such a gem when it gets stodged out a bit.

Anyway Derrick, I'm off for an early grey. I'll bring you one up fella.
Far out as Darren would say.