OUGD405 - Studio Brief 01

Design Process - Frame Shape

The brief involves us creating 3 designs to go as backing papers on photo frames. I initially thought that this brief was going to be slightly challenging due to my recollection of backing paper only consisting of black and white photos of family's etc. So I decided to go look at some photo frames in shops such as Asda living, M&S Next etc. What I found was mainly typography and shape based backing papers and I didn't want to do this. As seen in the images below. This made me think further into the demographics, i.e the target market. I then looked into possible theme's such as; Shape, Nature, Geometry, Time, Universal, Family, Organics, Tradition etc.

I looked into a couple of the themes in more detail particularly shape and nature; sunsets, flowers and butterflies etc. I  really liked the idea of nature as it is vastly broad. I then looked into flowers, as they are particularly homely, something that is in a home itself and simply pretty to look at, similar to a photo frame. I looked at a couple pictures on the internet of flowers as they were relatively good quality and showed the geometry of the plant which I knew I could use to manipulate in photoshop. As well as butterflies on plants. I liked the colourful nature of the images, and how they were cleverly photographed, something I would find particularly challenging to do myself.

After looking at a couple of these images, I used the select tool, paint brush and various other tools on photoshop to create a draft idea seen below.

However, I felt that this image wasn't very eye catching and homely so I looked into another approach to the nature theme. I looked at a couple of photographs of scenery I had captured on my phone including beaches and sunsets.

I manipulated a couple of these in photoshop however, I didn't feel they worked very well as backing papers to a photo frame as they were simply just photographs.

I then referred back to the flower theme, and created an design piece from a photograph of a rose. I manipulated it in different ways, such as changing it to black and white, adjusting the colours, changing the exposure, brightness/contrast/colour and using the gradient map, inverting the colours ,selecting different colours etc. My initial designs are featured below.

For my final designs I will follow a similar manipulation technique when creating them.