Alistair Nimmo: Typography workshop week, with guest teacher (guest star) Gary Day-Ellison

my illustration class

Class photo (tagged): http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=351986&l=2f7dde0b17&id=100000772157570

Back in January - yes, my blog is that far behind in terms of updates (I'm only going to include stuff from this year) - my class had a week long typography "workshop" at uni with a guest teacher, Creative Director for both Pan Books & Decca Records, Gary Day-Ellison.

Gary Day-Ellison blog post about his experience: http://day-ellison.posterous.com/art-students

(golly, he included a page from my sketchbook!)

It was a great, mad week. With the deadline so close it meant I had to work fast and push myself to think and produce on a tight schedule. Goodbye weekend! :/

For the task we had to produce 3 double page spreads which incorporated typography and illustration together in a creative and interesting way. The subject matter of these spreads were up to us to decide upon, so I reasoned it would help me to focus on a scene in the Brothers Grimm story I was working on as part of the current module, in which the young man claims a favour from the fish.

Many of us had little experience with InDesign, which made things very tough and frustrating (not to mention the setbacks caused by the many problems and bugs I contemptuously discovered in the InDesign CS3 software we're offered on the macs in our studio).

I came up with so many ideas I produced 5 spreads instead of 3. They lacked polish, and some didn't have the correct text, but that's deadlines for you. :P

Thank you Gary for the pleasant and informative introduction to layout and typography.