Event Research

“The Young Ones” is a very useful day for young parents to get together and be social with other parents, this along with allowing the kids to play and being very cheap at just 50p a visit this service is brilliant. With a bit of radio publicity it could potentially raise awareness of the service to the local area and make the day more successful. You can see more information about the event at (http://search3.openobjects.com/kb5/hull/events/event.page?record=mZF8CnWG_Hw).

May might be a bit too late to record but I found “69 Shades of Black” which is obviously a play on words of the blockbuster “50 Shades of Grey”, which is a production to be held at multiple theatres including Hull New Theatre (https://www.list.co.uk/event/415737-69-shades-of-black/). It would be a a brilliant event to cover because it has a lot of leads to other conversations, this could be funny as the presenters can poke fun at the event but at the same time raising awareness. A great example of this would be when Chris Moyles broke down the lyrics of ‘Pass Out’ by Tinie Tempah when it was first released mocking them for their meaning, this later became a sensational hit, you can hear Moyles’ breakdown here;

Promoting a healthy lifestyle would be something a little different encouraging people to get out and exercise more. SKY Ride have set up group bike rides, there would be interview opportunities before and after the cycle, and maybe behind the scenes access with sky, it may also lead to future jobs within sky for the journalists within our group, this is an excellent option. (http://www.goskyride.com/search/Results)

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Wyke Printers company visit

To understand the process of creating a physical hand out like a business card or letterhead, I found it was vital to research the companies that produce these things. I organised a visit to G.F. Smith, the paper manufacturer and Wyke Printers.

One of the first things I learnt when being showed around Wyke Printers was about the ‘blueprint’, a paper cutout of anything that needs to be folded and cut to create a certain shape. The photo below shows the blueprint design for a folder that the company Lincat are paying Wyke printing for. You can see the design has dotted lines for folds and hard lines to be cut. The layout of the content is shown as it would be so that should there be any mistakes, they can be easily resolved. There are many machines in the building that do lot’s of different jobs, things like stapling books together, printing, checking colour levels  etc.

Along the top of each piece of paper printed, there is a set of colour codes which are read by the computer system, this will determine whether each machine has the correct amount of each colour in it. Wyke use CMYK (reason for this has been mentioned in previous research). You can see the numbers on the machine actually match up to the different colour sets on the paper.

Finally I shared the initial ideas for my self promotion material, and was shown the piece of equipment you can see below, if I was to create my designs on a mass scale, I would use a printing press, this basically is laid out like the blueprint you can see at the beginning of this post and will make the relevant scores and cuts on the paper, this saves time and money. Then all that needs to happen is the relevant folds, glue and and then they are shipped to the customer. This is obviously ideal and has shaped the way I will arrange my designs. This is the press I was shown:

G.F. Smiths Paper Company Visit

To understand the process of creating a physical hand out like a business card or letterhead, I found it was vital to research the companies that produce these things. I organised a visit to G.F. Smith, the paper manufacturer and Wyke Printers.

G.F. Smith is a paper manufacturer founded in 1885 by George Frederick Smith. The start of any printing process is with the type and style of paper you are going to print on, so i took a trip to the premises and got a private tour. I spoke to a manager about the history of the company including how debt almost destroyed the company in 1915, supplies being shortened in 1939 because of world war 2 and the purchase of the Hull premises in 1969.

During the tour I was shown the room with their clients whom had had used their paper in their packaging. It also showed off all the different colours they could offer their paper in. You can see an example of this book here:

This room full of different types and colours of the paper which was for clients to touch and feel the actual materials they might be using in their product. The most important lesson I learnt during my visit, was there are different weights of materials measured in GSM (Grams per square metre), different colours,  and effects that can be applied to the card such as a gloss. These allow the card to be styled in a certain way. The company also offer press services to imprint the card with a certain design, a client would buy a press designed specifically for their needs for anything up to £2,000 depending on size and intricacy. You can see one of G.F Smiths presses below

Companies like G.F. Smith offer hand made services as well, to do jobs that cannot be done by machine, things like making bespoke envelopes. You can see a team of women sat at a table here making hundreds of these type of letters. With hundreds of clients around Yorkshire, they have a huge warehouse that stores all the paper. This means they can work hand in hand with a company like Wyke printers to meet a clients need for a really speedy delivery on the deadline.

I was also shown another client area, where customers can come and physically feel the paper itself. As you can see with these images:

There are lot’s of different types so by having the client actually being able to touch the product they would be buying is a brilliant way to make sure you know what your buying, having the right quality material is very important for any business and the market is estimated to be around $23.8 Billion a year.

References:

http://www.bugwood.org/intensive/forest___paper_industry.html

Presenting my Images

I knew that presenting my images as a collection would be important, to look professional and be enjoyable to look at. Therefore I started to research how to present my images, the first lesson I learnt was that the purpose of setting this up is to show of my work, so it had to be all about the images, no distractions. The format I had chosen for my images were square with one horizontal rectangle. I decided the best way would be to split up the images into three, this would give the viewer more visual space to concentrate on the content and would also allow me to have a set of images. First I had to chose the images in each set and which order they would go in,, this was reasonably easy as I picked images that related to the other based upon their location being close. The next step was the actual order they were to be arranged in, I wanted the leading lines to draw they eye across the content so that the person viewing the collection would be lead from left to right with visual cues.

With my images being black and white I thought the best way to present them would be to use white borders and them present those on a black piece of card. In photoshop I created the layout for the overall portfolio pieces, I used rulers to measure 1 inch borders to each image. This meant the images were evenly spread out. Finally I printed them and applied them to self-adhesive mount card. After using the guillotine  to cut them to perfect size, I was left with well present, professional version of my images.