motivate me

How do i motivate myself to work? No seriously, how? Just kidding. Or am i?
My problem (just for the brief? hmmm) is when i'm sat at home, and i have a variety of possible distractions around me, how do i motivate myself to ignore it all and just get down to work? When deadlines seem like a far off thing, where does that push come from to knuckle down and not procrastinate? And that, fair people, is my question, nay, my problem.

So, what am i going to do about it? Well i've broken the reason we students do work down to two main things - pleasure and pain. On a long term basis we want a good job, job security, money, to do some thing we like - pleasure. Or to stop ourselves getting into a dead-end job, poor pay, being bored - pain. Short term, we like the work, we enjoy it, to get good grades (pleasure) or the opposite, to aviod bad grades or a rollicking (pain). From day to day then, when there are no deadlines pressing, and there are plenty of other more enjoyable activities available, there needs to be some kind of motivator. I'm thinking this should be some kind of incentive (pleasure) or some sort of punishment system.

How am i to do this? Hmmm well as for form, i'm not quite sure. It really has to be personal, self contained and self monitoring, so kind of a fun way to handle out of college hours time. The usual comes to mind, bedroom poster, handbook, etc. Maybe some kind of buddy system to do with your mates? i don't know as yet.

final presentations

site specifics

final website

in context

hmv sponsored

final design

lanyard process

original presentation

sample sites

first products

tape samples

the world

Here's some very simple imagery that i actually only just recently got! But it is very subtle. Its an advert for UK Trades i saw at Wakefield Train station on my way home from work. I was impressed with how simple it was as most billboard ads are none too subtle and often quite garish, but this is minimal, 2 colour (tiny bit of red in the corner) with a lot of flat black. It gets its message across without overcomplicating. The bit i only just got was the white circle representing the world. I just thought it looked good ha. The only thing i would say is what would it look like with lower case lettering?

playstation 3

I was flicking through my favourite Playstation magazine at work, checking up on the new releases etc, geeking out over Burnout and God Of War 3 and i came across this little number. It was started by this guy who decided to re-envisage his favourite console games cover art work. He got quite a following, with many others uploading their own interpretations. Quite a few are classic Saul Bass-esque and in the old school Penguin Books style format, and there's some really awesome ones in there. My favoutires are Hitman and Resi Evil.

The guy who started it is a guy called Olly Moss, check him out at www.ollymoss.com. He's got some great film poster stuff on there.

fuchs&felix

From the Guardian Weekend magazine a couple of weeks ago, ripping on the Republican party's failure in the elections and current state in US politics. Apart from being humorous i think there's a real skill in being able to take such a small and already simple icon and manage to work out so many variations of it, in such a satirical manner.

It was designed by two guys, Thomas Fuchs and Felix Stockwell. (www.felixstockwell.com, www.thomasfuchs.com)

Here's some more of Fuchs work, and it relates back to the work we did on icons in visual language

He's done quite a few portrait images for articles featured in Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly as well, so check out his website for full portfolio.

up obama

This is a designer called Sarah A. King (www.sarahaking.com) and it really encapsulates exactly what i imagine everytime Fred says "type and image" because it is literaly. type and image. Or more precisely, type IN image, or even type AS image. most of her work is black and white, or generally 1 colour plus stock, and the major contributor to the overall image is the thickness of the type.

Some of it includes small images...

Some is pure text to form the image....

What i like about this one is the use of negative space. even in such a small area as the windmills.

Now the type in this has less to do with the overall image in terms of building the image like the Barack Obama one, but its the content of the type that links it to the image. There seems to be, visually, little reason why certain words are highlighted or stand out, other than aesthetically, but it works.

Look at the little cubes!! Its a cube of cubes!! Look closely...