ITAP Design Cannons - week seven

This week's lecture was about vernacular typography and about what happens when the fine arts meet commercial design. Vernacular means anything that is hand-drawn or original; everyday type such as signatures and graffiti. The hero this lecture was based around was famous art director So-me.
So-me is the art director for head banger records. I've always been interested in designing for a record label so i found his work very inspiring and decided to research more into what he has designed. I found out that he owns his own clothing company called Cool Cats. These are some examples of his clothing designs that caught my eye. 

This was one of his designs for the Ed Rec 7th birthday celebration in London. I thought the image itself was very well designed, how he has intertwined different things to do with London but what i thought was really clever was how he has reflected the design so it includes the illusion of the River Thames. 

This caught my eye because of the old-school look to it.  I noticed how the logo is in the shape of a head boy/girl badge and the jumper itself is in the shape of a school jumper, especially with the tightened cuffs and bottom. I like how he has made a relatively simple white logo more interesting by putting it on vintage coloured fabric.

I then moved on to looking at some of so-me's work he did for the record label. 

 This is a promotional piece he designed for Ed Banger records. The use of typography in this piece in incredible.  Using more than one font or font group is a difficult task to get right in design but so-me has pulled it off here perfectly. You can see that he has used visual hierarchy to make certain words and phrases stand out more than others as your eye reads around the circle.  

So-me did a collection of portrait designs for Busy P.  He did a collection of 30 designs all in 6 hours before Busy P's show. . 

To the left are a couple of examples of these portraits. 

I particularly like the top one because of the use of texture that makes it look as if the logo has been sown onto the background. It  gives the image a 3D feel and keeps it looking interesting which makes up for the limited colour palette . This has inspired me to try using only black, white and one colour in my work to see  if it could improve my  work.

I like this second portrait because of it has a pop art Andy Warhol feel to it. The use of bright colours is very eye catching, especially as some of them clash, such as the red and pink. Again, so-mes use of fonts and hierarchy in the typography is very clever, especially how when you read around the portrait it explains the reason for it. This image shows that you can take a high contrast. nit very detailed image and make it more interesting by adding typography.

To finish, this is an image of an exhibition by so-me showing perfectly how using less colours can be more, especially when you use other media such as texture and lighting to excel in your work.