Charity Posters.

The new year has started with some new posters for the charity I volunteer for, Action for Family Carers. These posters are similar to the designs for the same event last year, with a few amendments.

It has been quite tricky to finalise these, as due to my and their office hours we are not able to communicate in person so we keep going back and forth by email. But it's worth it when we have a finished design :)

Charity Posters.

It's been a while since I was asked to do some work for Action for Family Carers, a local charity that I volunteer for. However, they have asked me to design some posters for a club night, and here are the three initial ideas I sent over to them:

They're nothing too out there, it's only a small charity so simple works best. The wording was all provided so unfortunately I can't cut it down because it seems like quite a lot for a poster.

I've enjoyed doing design work again, I've kind of lost the drive to keep designing in my spare time. I'm constantly looking for jobs in design but I'm also lacking confidence in my ability and they don't make a good combination! I still have faith that I'll find the right role for me though, and that's what's important.

Feeling Lucky?

Well apparently I didn't blog about the previous lucky dip posters I designed for Action for Family Carers, but oh well. I've redesigned them anyway for the next fundraising event they have in December, hence the Christmas theme.

As well as the twelve week Christmas countdown I've started on my photography blog, 27 Kodak Moments, I'm feeling particularly festive right now...and there's still 12 weeks to go! I'm also determined to make my own decorations this year. I did a few last year and I've bought the materials for a few ideas I have, so watch this space for posts about that! I don't want to start too early though and be fed up of christmas before we even get to December!

Anyway, what do you think of the posters? It was a bit of a struggle to get the logo to fit in!

FUNdraising.

You might have seen my previous fundraising posters I designed for Action for Family Carers, well they've decided they want something a little more fun and lighthearted so I've sent them over this idea:

Quiz Time.

On this blog I've talked quite a bit about Action for Family Carers, the charity I volunteer my design services for. Well they've now given me something else to work on - a poster for a quiz night.

Below are some ideas.

Idea 1

Kinda expected I suppose to incorporate a question mark into a poster about a quiz night, but this uses the colours of the charity's logo and keeps it quite simple - something I think is important to a small charity.

Idea 2

This idea also uses the same colour scheme, which I also previously used in the posters looking for fundraising volunteers.

Idea 3

This is just a different colour scheme to the idea above; it uses the same colours and circle motif as previous posters I designed for the jumble sale.

(On a side note about the jumble sale, posters for this are now up in various supermarkets and other locations around Essex. Exciting!)

Idea 4

This was was just a bit wacky! Thought I'd try something different but I don't think I like it very much.

I don't know which is currently my favourite, but definitely not idea 4! Any thoughts?

Fundraising.

I've been designing for the charity I volunteer for again, Action for Family Carers.

They loved the posters I did last week for the Jumble Sale, so this time they wanted some to attract people to fundraise for the charity. Here's my initial ideas:

All pretty similar, but they stick with the colour theme from the logo, as well as the bright bold, colours and simple shapes similar to the Jumble Sale posters and other posters I've designed for them in the past.

I'm going on holiday on tuesday so these were just a quick thing before I go, but I'm still going to send them off for feedback and make the necessary amendments (I made up the wording, and even though I write for a living I don't think it's very good!)

Unjumbled.

I did a post last week on some posters I was designing for a local charity, well now they've come back to me with feedback and here's the updated versions:

They liked all three of these, so I've tweaked them with the extra details they needed and added the charity's logo. Very pleased with the outcome of these, they'll be going in my portfolio and I hope they bring in more interest for the charity!

My Mind's a Jumble.

It feels like forever since I've done a full post relating to graphic design, and it probably is, so here's one now!

The charity I volunteer for, Action for Family Carers, is having a jumble sale and have asked me to design some posters to advertise it. I don't have all the information going on them yet, so they're a bit sparse, and they want three - 1 as a general advertisement for the sale, 1 recruiting volunteers and 1 asking for donations for things to sell. I don't know if I should have just one poster and change the wording or have three variations on one theme. I'll send them off to the charity first though and see what they think.

So here's my initial ideas:

I did a google search for 'jumble sale' and it came back with a lot of ideas incorporating bunting, so I've tried to use that in my designs as well. This one is a combination of bunting and string lights, but I'm not sure how much I like it yet.

This one was based off a similar idea I found during a google search.  l like bright, bold colours, and hopefully that means it'll draw the eye and get more volunteers and donations.

I don't really like this one very much, it was based off a similar idea on a t shirt, but doesn't work so well on the triangle (which was meant to be like an individual piece of bunting) and I think it would need a lot more text to look good. I therefore don't think I'll send this one off to them for consideration.

This one is a bit more simple, which I think they'll appreciate. It's only a small charity after all!

This one took me ages but I don't like it especially much. I think the idea comes across well (a jumble of the letters in the words 'jumble sale' at the bottom) but it still feels like there's something missing.

Any thoughts?

Charity Ball.

I probably mentioned somewhere on here before that I do some volunteer graphic design for a charity, Action for Family Carers. Anyway, they have an upcoming ball that I designed a poster and some tickets before :) quite simple design, but I think also quite elegant, considering they're for a ball!

Tombola, Face Painting, Balloon Modelling!

I'm meeting with the head fundraising volunteer from Action for Family Carers (who I volunteer for) today. He lives in the same village as me, so that works out rather well! I'm going to present to him my ideas for the three posters for the 'Make Maldon Magical' christmas fair.

Here are my three posters:

I'm not doing my usual take-more-than-one-design thing, I don't think it's really necessary for this situation. Plus there's still another week before the fair so there's time to make amendments if necessary :)

Designing for Charity.

I spent today at Action for Family Carers, a local charity providing support and information to unpaid carers. I've signed up as an admin volunteer, but I will mainly be designing posters and such for events and advertising.

On December 3rd is the 'Make Maldon Magical' christmas fair, and AfFC have a stall there. They asked me to design three posters, one for each of the fundraising activities; a tombola, face painting and balloon modelling. I took my macbook along to their offices; they only have PCs with no design software and I couldn't cope with that! Haha anything I did had to be able to be transferred to Microsoft Word though, so I used Adobe Illustrator to design the graphics, then laid it out in Word (I'd have preferred to use InDesign, but say if they want to use the same design next year but just update a few things, they wouldn't be able to do that if I'd only done it in InDesign, and I like to cater to their needs :) )

So I had this idea to use stars, in the shape of a christmas tree (well half a christmas tree anyway!) so as well as being unique to each activity, there would be a recurring theme throughout and it would be slightly christmassy. These are the first couple of ideas:

The three posters will be displayed all in a row so I was thinking they could be designed so that when they're next to each other they'll make a whole christmas tree between two of the posters, but I have no way to guarantee which order they'll be put on the display boards, and the stars probably wouldn't line up too well either. 

Another idea in development for the ballon modelling poster, a christmas tree made from balloons:

(I'm very proud of this! Designed in Illustrator)

Everything in this post is in development, so please excuse the unfinished designs!

Freelancing Day 2.

Bit of a faff with emails again am (this seriously reduces the amount of work I can do for them, but there's nothing really that can be done about it)

So, work.

Job 1
Organisation Chart

Same as last week, except this time all the names were Norwegian, so that added an extra little challenge! It's hard to add accented characters when the font is missing so you can't get the glyphs, so I had to copy and paste from the internet :S worked out well though!

Job 2
Poster

This as just a quick job to recreate a poster that they have in Illustrator and put it into InDesign. They didn't have the Illustrator file though, just a PDF, so I actually had to resize the image and re-write all the text.

Job 3
Three Peaks Challenge Poster

For this poster I had a bit more artistic license - they didn't want anything corporate, they wanted it fun and colourful. I created some mountains in Illustrator, and they provided the image of the little girl. Unfortunately due to the email faff at the start of the day and only working a half day anyway because of having to go to the job centre this afternoon, I didn't get to develop this as much as I'd have liked to. I know if I had a lot of time to spend on this I'd be able to come up with a much more developed idea than what I have so far, but this isn't like uni where it's all up to me, clients have deadlines! Haha this is all good practice though for increasing the speed at which I can come up with a design.

As always I like to come up with several variations of a design. These are the ones I sent over:

Of course I also had this to contend with:

Yes there are 2 dogs on my lap. No it was not comfortable.

I'm doing a couple of hours for them tomorrow morning as well. I think I'll suggest next time that they send all the jobs over first thing, then I can be working on other ones while they're looking at them. Seems like a much more effective use of time!

My Day as a Freelancer.

Really long, wordy post coming up. This is more for me to remember what I did today!

Ok so a number of different jobs, all sent over via email. Several communication and file problems, which wasn't too great.

If you can't be bothered to read all this, skip to the end for my thoughts on my day as a freelancer.

Job 1.

Poster

(1 hour, including phone call to sort out pay rate (now getting what I originally asked for, which isn't even that much, so yay!))

Provided with a small amount of text and a couple of images, as well as what the previous poster looked like. Creative reign to design. The images were pretty uninspiring so I tried to get creative with typography (even though I could only use Times New Roman!) I even went all out and used a drop shadow. The work is for a construction/engineering company so the poster was about eye protection. So the usual photos of goggles/safety glasses etc, but also one involving a piece of drill or something sticking out of an eyeball. I'm the most squeamish person about eyes so it was really hard to look at that image, let alone use it in the design, but I persevered!

UPDATE

I sent over three designs. They preferred my first one (always the way), the least typographic one with the most images (also the one I didn't really like that much, but it's not up to me!) but they did want me to jazz up the text a bit so it was more similar to my other 2 designs (making key words bold etc) So they did like the more typographic ones, they just wanted more images on it too.

Job 2.

Recreating a power point chart in InDesign (x2)

Easy peasy, once we'd sorted out a template I could actually use! They're using CS5 whereas I have CS4 so they can open my files but I can't open theirs. They found an older version for me to change the content and move/remove text boxes.

Job 3.

Poster

Another poster, this time it had to be pretty much the same as the previous version but I didn't have a file so I had to create it from scratch. Pretty simple stuff, shaped text boxes, drop shadows, converting images to cmyk, rotating images and so on.

Job 4.

Italian newsletter

No I do not know Italian! Just copy and paste Italian text from a word file into the English version indd file. I had to do some resizing moving text boxes etc to get it to fit, but I don't have the font they use on my mac so it probably didn't look the same to them as it did to me!

Big gap here.

[45 minutes]

Sent over job 4 and heard nothing back yet. The same happened earlier, I thought they’d gone to lunch but turns out they had a problem with the server. Possibly happening again. Don’t have anything else to be working on. Blogged about owl slippers and Imagine That.

[1 hour]

1 hour 20 minutes later...

Job 5. (Hooray!)

Poster

This one was to be less corporate, and I had a bit more free reign. I therefore got a bit more creative with typography. As it was about a survey I used the tick boxes usually found in surveys with red ticks, er, ticked, sporadically throughout. I only had about half an hour to work on this in the end due to the network fail earlier, but I sent off a quick version at about 10 past 5, so haven't heard anything back, and I don't know where it'll go from here because I'm only doing one day :S

(I figure as this image is mine I'm allowed to use it here, I don't know about the rest of it)

CONCLUSION

I don't really know what to make of my day as a freelancer. I mean I definitely enjoy the freedom of working at home, although I could get very lazy if I was doing that all the time. I don't enjoy the wait between projects, although if I was actually going to be a freelancer I'd no doubt have more than one thing for more than one client to work on at once so that wouldn't really be an issue. As much as I enjoy not having to talk to anyone (I'm a bit of a loner!) I don't really like communicating by email, I can never tell what they really think of my work, and it's hard to just judge for myself.

If I was going to try freelancing full time, I have no idea how I'd get work. How do people do it? I don't really have many contacts in industry, I've tried approaching design studios directly and got nothing, I don't know anyone else who needs design work done, I've applied for "freelance databases" or whatever and told I don't have enough experience (errrr?) and I've got quite a strong web presence (or so I've been told) and nothing has come of that either. So I don't really know what else I can do :S

It would've been really good if my uni had helped out with this, but it was like as soon as we'd picked up our work, that was it, on our own. The final show was a bust, graduation is in december and I'd hoped I'd be doing something worthwhile by then but that doesn't look likely.

I'm sure I'll get my big break soon, I'm just impatient waiting for it!




UPDATE
I did get an email in the end, they said they were impressed by the speed I worked at (I thought I was really slow!) and liked what I did, so would like to send me some more work in the future if I'm interested. Result! I don't know what I have to do about this in terms of taxes and whatever, but that's what daddy is for! Haha


Can I officially declare myself a freelancer now? Can I put this on my CV?! (I say yes)