Logo

I've made a logo for my website using Photoshop, the name I'm using is Char Moon Lyrical Typography and Photo Editing.

Lyrics

As i will be using The Summer Set lyrics for my lyrical typography i've decided to blog about some of them. Because they are an American Indie Rock band their lyrics are often very meaningful and so really good for typography.

Another Pinterest board

I've started to make another Pinterest board on Lyrical Typography (Pinterest Account: http://pinterest.com/charlotte1241/)

Change of plans

I've decided that I'd make the concept for my website a little bit simpler and I've make it a lyrical typography and photo editing website. I'll still be doing The Summer Set lyrics but i will no longer be doing merchandise designs. I also said I'd update my Blogger as I change the design of my website. This is how far i've gotten so far.

Enter Page:

Home page:

How the internet can help to expose your work

Lots of websites are very useful for putting your work out there for companies and possible clients to find, without websites like these it would definitely be a lot harder for you to show your work to a global audience. Websites like Blogger, Pinterest, Instagram, Behance and Deviant Art make it a lot easier for people to find you and your work and so it has become a popular thing to put your work on the internet. 

The internet can also help the people that see your work on websites like these get into contact with you to offer you jobs and commissions to work on. It also helps you to send your work (especially big files or documents) with websites like bigfile, that can send large documents and files by email. 

Today's work

Today i've been doing sketches for possible merchandise designs, i prefer to do these digitally but as i didn't have the software at home that i do at college and i needed to improve my drawing skills i decided that this would be a good idea. I will eventually turn these sketches into digital designs. I have also been researching lyrical typography and have made a board on my Pinterest account: http://pinterest.com/charlotte1241/ of other people work.
I really like the idea of lyrical typography because i really love music and graphic design so it is a way to mix the two and create my own work. Some lyrics are also really meaningful and can be great sayings and quotes to use as lyrical typography. I've created some lyrical typography using The Summer Set lyrics before and i will put these designs onto my website when i get it running.

More patterns

I made another pattern today but i experimented with using two photos.
These are the two photos i started with:

This is the pattern i ended up with:

Website

As a separate part of this project we also have to create a website, the first part of making a website is planning and so i have to mock up what i would like my home page to look like. I must use all of my own images and edit them all myself. I decided to make this website as a way to show the work i have created, it will be a website full of lyrical typography that i have created for the band i have previously mentioned (The Summer Set) and some merchandise designs for the same band. On the website i will show the research i have done about band merchandise and lyrical typography and also some information about the band themselves and their music.

The Summer Set are an American indie rock band and so at first i was confused as to how i could use primary imagery for this project, after a talk with one of my teachers he suggested that i take the name and come up with things that it reminds me of (summer, trees, sun, blue skies, cherry blossoms) and use these things as my primary imagery. Another idea we came up with was to take pictures of the band when i go to see them live on 1st June at the Deaf Institute, Manchester, England. These ideas have definitely helped me come up with more ideas and i have now started to mock up my home page, i will blog more about how that is going later in the week and i will probably upload photos of the mock up as i go along.

This is my mock up of my home page so far:

Making patterns

Today i decided to make some patterns that could be used on clothing, i took pictures that i had taken of random things like trees or the sky and turned them into patterns using Photoshop. To do this i edited the picture until it was bright enough or the colour was right and then duplicated the image and placed them around the page until the pattern repeated itself, this is how the image started and what the pattern turned out like:

Web design companies- Clock Creative

Clock Creative- http://www.clockcreative.co.uk

Clock Creative have worked with:

• Virgin Media
• PetSafe
• The Lowry
• Care Shop

They can be contacted in multiple ways

You can view their work on their website but here are some examples of the kind of work they do

Web Design Companies- Creative Spark

My tutor has set me another task to check out local web design companies. Web design companies generally do design websites, to do this means having quite a few skills such as web graphic design, interface design, authoring (standardised code and proprietary software), user experience design and search engine optimization.

Creative Spark- http://www.creativespark.co.uk

Creative Spark have worked with:

• Kitbag
• Co-operative
• Manchester United
• Universal
• Basics
• JD Sports
• We Buy Any Car
• Sony
• Mag
• Nike
• BBC
• Gigs and Tours

They do four kinds of work

You can view their work on their website but here are some examples of the kind of work they do

You can contact them too

First few of my own designs

I went away and spent a while designing some example merchandise for a band called The Summer Set, I incorporated their logo in the designs and i came out with quite a few good designs. I used tshirts and socks to begin with as they are some of the more common merchandise that bands sell. Here are some of my designs:

The design above is my favourite of all of them because it could be unisex and the logo is clear. I used an existing piece of The Summer Set's merchandise (shown below) as an influence for this design but I changed parts of it to make it my own design.

The Summer Set

As I am using the Summer Set as influences in my band tshirt designs I decided to show you my pinterest board about them and give you thier social networking info.

Official website: http://thesummersetband.com
Twitter: @The_Summer_Set
Instagram: The_Summer_Set

Band Merchandise

I've made a board on Pinterest of band merchandise that i found. My Pinterest account is: http://pinterest.com/charlotte1241/ and I have quite a few board on my account that I will talk about in my blog.

Band Merchandise Board

Merchandise is really important for bands and artists because it is a way for them to advertise themselves using their own fans, fans also like to own merchandise to show that they like certain bands or artists. Each band/artist has different merchandise designs and some have more than just tshirts, there are bags, wrist bands and more that can be bought. Some tshirts have the band's name or logo, some have an album cover and some have lyrics. I've decided that I would like to design some merchandise myself, I've chosen to do this for a band that I really like called The Summer Set, I will post results of this on my blog.

Decades of fashion and music

I have made boards on my Pinterest account for each decade of fashion and music from the 1960s up to the 1990s:

1960s Board

1970s Board

1980s Board

1990s board

Not so good Websites cont.

Sip hawaii doesn't have any tabs to find other pages of the website which makes it extremely difficult to find what you are looking for, it is also difficult to find what the website is even about as there are no real signs telling you what the purpose of the website is.

Indiana is a very very simple website, it's layout is similar to the way websites looked about 10 years ago. The home page isn't appealing and it doesn't make you want to look further, if anything it makes you want to leave.

Lings Cars is a very busy and colourful website, it even has music when you open it, this makes it difficult to find one specific thing to look for. All of the colours and pictures confuse you and you have no idea where to look, this doesn't look like a professional website at all.

Not so good websites

I found three bad websites, these three websites all have really bad layouts and are quite difficult to find your way around. Sometimes there can be too many photos and it makes the home page look too busy and complicated. Theme websites do not make it quick or easy to find what you're looking for and so they should be avoided

• http://www.siphawaii.com
• http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/
• http://www.lingscars.com

Good Websites

Blue Banana has a good layout, it is visually appealing and easy to navigate around. All of the links work and all of the information is correct, the tabs at the top of the website make it even easier to find your way around the website and find exactly what you are looking for.

Grindstore has a colour scheme of black, white and red which means that the website isn't too bright and colourful. The links to other pages on the website down the left hand side of the home page make it quicker to find what you want and most importantly they all work.

Pulp's home page contains a slide show showing that Pulp provides products for all types of people, it also shows some examples of the band tshirts that they sell. Opening times and a phone number have been put right at the top of the page to make it clear, again the tabs and links make the website easy to navigate and you can quickly find the band/artist you are looking for. 

Good and Bad websites

I've been set the task to find 3 good websites and 3 not so good websites to do with my chosen topic and explain why i have this opinion of them.
Good

• http://www.bluebanana.com/
• http://www.grindstore.com/bands.html
• http://www.thisispulp.co.uk/browse/mens-bandmerch_12_0_0_na_1.html

These websites are all really easy to navigate around, you can search for things and the links work. All words are clear, they also all have tabs that make finding things a lot quicker. 

Okay so this is the start of my blog about the fashion in music and the ways music can sometimes influence fashion. I will mainly be looking at band merchandise because it's something that I've become really interested in. I also have a Pinterest page set up: http://pinterest.com/charlotte1241/ . This blog is mainly for the purpose of college work, it will be used in the place of an InDesign document and will be marked, hopefully I do well!