EVE WHELAN

We live our lives through filtering; we are unable to process everything around us, so we naturally ignore somethings. We are consumers of everything around us however most of this happens subconsciously so as a designer you must design so the consumer is consciously aware of it and doesn’t naturally filter it out. The way we process images is the light is diffracted through the lens in our eye and hits the retina at the back. When it hits the retina, the image is inverted, messages are then sent to the brain via the optical nerve where the brain then decodes and flips the image. Our vision does have blind spots to it; this is when the diffracted light hits an optical nerve rather than the retina. Colour blindness is most commonly with the colours red and green but can also be for the colours yellow and blue. There is a nature vs nurture question about our depth perception, is it something we are born with or something we learn in our earlier years? A test was done with young...

               A brand is the idea or concept of something in the eyes of the user; how the “product” is received by its target market. Branding has become the driving force of communication in the modern world. With vastly increasing rates of consumerism and a global capitalist markets we’re giving brands the chance, nay power, to influence us more. A great example of this is the bottled water industry, an industry that marks up ten-fold an item we can get for free from our kitchen taps. People can develop, unknowingly, psychological and emotional connections to a brand; making a brand appeal to a user because of past associations or experiences. An example of a brand that changed a big part of its identity to boost the user appeal is BBC 2 when they recreated their logo. Making what is a small change gave such a large impact. BBC 2 was losing ratings and people thought the channel to be somewhat boring; they cre...

Advertising has changed and developed so much over the past few decades. Through the years vast amounts of experimental, new, iconic and simply brilliant design work has made its way into the public eye. Going back to the 1960s in this radical period where youth cultures were born, young people had an income and things were looking up after the recovery of the post war economy. Graphic Design was a fairly new career and advertising was naïve, there were only three television channels; with only one of them, ITV, being able to advertise. One of the very iconic 1960s advertisements was that of the Volkswagen Beetle, selling it to Americans (as lovers of unnecessarily large Cadillac’s and Corvette’s), the ingenious idea to play on its small size and make it appear as a toy car on the posters. This wave of “Beetlemania” rushed across the states. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/147492956519827761/?lp=true In strode the 1970s; a decade where Graphic Design really came int...

Helvetica (or Neue Haas Grotesk) is a sans-serif font created in 1957 by Swiss designer Max Miedinger, with help from Eduard Hoffmann. The font was renamed in 1960 from Neue Haas Grotesk to Helvetica; the font was named after Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland. The pair wanted to create a clean looking, neutral font which was completely different to many of the 19 th Century fonts. Helvetica was what the world of typefaces needed at the time a fresh face that could convey a message in a clear and neutral manner. With an uncommonly high x-height, very densely packed letters and neo-grotesque style Helvetica became a hallmark of International Typographic Style that came from Switzerland.  However, since then the font of Helvetica has been so widely used to the point where it has become overused and generic. It has been used by many big companies as their logo font, companies such as Lufthansa, American Apparel, American Airlines and Nestlé. Even the New York Subway system a...