Brief 9: DR ME

Yesterday we were to work on a one day brief, set by agency DR ME, who do a lot of design for music, a sector within design that I am very interested in working in.

We were split into pairs and I was working with Grace Buckley, whom I've enjoyed working with previously.
The brief was simple but involved a very quick turnaround, completing a vinyl cover, a poster for a gig and a personal piece of work, before 4pm. I was excited to work at this speed, as I find that in this area I often find myself creating a lot of variations on one thing in a small amount of time.

DR ME had explained their work process to us. They are usually confronted with a very short timescale and so they do not spend a lot of time doing research and just rely on their own interpretation. They advised that in the amount of time we had, we spent a very short amount of it doing research, perhaps just listening to the songs/bands featured.

Grace and I, starting by listening to the song the vinyl cover was for:



There was an element to the song that was very fragmented and seemed to follow little set rhythm, finding a rhythm of it's own. I Started trying out some geometric patterns that, in the same way would follow a subtle underlying pattern, but perhaps appear otherwise.

I overlaid this pattern to create a more hectic aesthetic, which still had order within it.

When we moved on to the Odonis Odonis gig, we were kind of given free reign to interpret the band and their music as we like. Below are the songs we listened to to gain some sort of understanding of their music










We each did some initial poster designs and then shared them with each other to see if there was a manner in which we could combine the two, or start a new one.

I found the music to be quite technical, and so constructed a mechanical looking image in a circle shape to resemble an O.

I experimented with some forms of layout this design. The typeface i used for the information and title is Canter.

While I liked the design of the poster, Grace and I both felt that neither of our designs worked for the band and their kind of music.

Another typeface I was keen on using is Polya Regular, which is a decorative typeface featuring very sharp and angular lines, which could also be put in conjunction with the technicalities of the music produced by the band.

When an outline is placed on this typeface, the result created a sharp shatter effect around the letters.

We both felt that this embodied the bands music well, so decided to create posters using this as the main focus and maintaining a white or black background, pulling the viewer into the name.

The third part of this brief was more difficult as it was left completely up to us. We were to design something 'personal', which could be anything in our interest.

I chose to focus on type as this is my biggest interest within design, and so used a typeface I had just designed called Melt. I hadn't digitised it yet so I worked from the drawings I had done of it, and constructed something to speak for the type itself.