Bobby      Abley

Week 1: 18/02/16

The first week we collaborated as a group to discuss the assignment and what potential designers we could choose to centre our project on. We then decided to individually research designers and return as a group to select our chosen designer for the project.

We then each carried out the Belbin task to assign team roles. My Belbin result was ‘the Plant’. The roles helped to delegate the workload to cater to each members strengths and weaknesses.

 

Week 2: 25/01/16

Our finalised designer option was Bobby Abley. The rationale for choosing Bobby Abley was because none of the group members have chosen a menswear designer for a project before, therefore we thought this would be a good opportunity for us to push ourselves further.

 In the workshop we were given a styling task. The task involved taking an ordinary piece of clothing and styling it to become something else which it was not originally designed for (the outcome of this task can be found in under the contributors tab on the group tasks page). This helped us to think outside the box which would help us with the brainstorming of our assignment to think outside of the box, and not follow the obvious routes of Bobby Abley’s collection.

During that week, we also visited the Whitworth Gallery to further inspire our brainstorming. I took some pictures from the visit (which can be found on the primary research page), this helped broaden our minds when thinking of potential ideas for the assignment.

 

 

Week 3: 01/02/16

From visiting the gallery, we came together as a group to brainstorm potential ideas for the project and what outcomes we could pitch that would be appropriate to the brand and target market.

From further research into the designer we discovered a key theme to Bobby’s collections which followed a nostalgic route from his playful Disney designs. Bobby Abley quoted “Who doesn’t like to feel a bit nostalgic and remember that time when you’re a kid when anything was possible.” (Maul, 2014: online). He further added he related to fictional character and used to watch cartoons on repeat. Furthermore, we decided to elaborate this idea into digitalising Bobby and his bear logo into cartoon characters that would be incorporated into a comic strip or video game, in addition to ‘Bobby’s friend’ which we would recreate the group members but into male cartoon characters.

In the workshop we were tested with a typography task on reforming words to signify what that word means. Our given letter was ‘T’, from testing various word plays we selected the word ‘Tea’. Carrie discovered a teabag in her handbag, which we played around with to create various forms of the word using the teabag (the outcomes can be found under the group tasks page).

The same week we arranged a group meeting with Jen to pitch our current ideas and outcomes for the assignment, to ensure we were meeting the assignment criteria and if she thought these ideas were appropriate to the chosen designer.

 

Week 4: 08/02/16

One of our chosen outputs was a QR code and potentially a video game, so we arranged a meeting with Paul from the Digital Innovation Hub who could brief us on instructions to carry this out. Although we managed to create the QR code with Paul’s assistance, however from speaking to Paul he informed us that to create a working video game would be difficult to develop within the selected time-frame, therefore we decided to disregard the video game and in replacement would digitalise the cartoon character in the comic strip to move as gifs.

 

Week 5: 15/01/16

As one of the social media outputs, I set up a Pinterest account which would showcase the development process of the characters and the inspiration behind the project (the link can be found in the blog header or the social media page).  On Pinterest I researched key themes that correlate with our project, i.e. comics, tattoos, London, Bobby Abley collections and graffiti.

I also set up the blog on Wix for members to post on and update their weekly diaries. It is a platform that displays all of our outputs and the rationale behind the development of them.

Later in the week, the graffiti pins on Pinterest inspired me, so I decided to carry out some of my own research on graffiti. I visited the Northern Quarter in Manchester and explored the area for graffiti (the results can be found on the primary research page).

 

Week 6: 22/02/16

From the success of visiting the Whitworth Gallery that helped inspire our original ideas, we decided to visit the Manchester Art Gallery. We found a few technology-based exhibitions that helped inspire our technological elements further and the popularity of these exhibits at the art gallery helped fuel our ambition to develop this element of our assignment.

After the sketches of the characters and the first comic strip were drawn, I then scanned them into the computer and began to digitalise the characters on Adobe Photoshop. We used colours that have been used in Bobby’s collections are varied the colours to create an electric mix of cartoon characters. I also helped to pitch storyline ideas for the “Lads night out” and “Lads holiday.”

 

Week 7: 29/02/16

I finished digitalising all of the cartoon characters, and uploaded the final product to the “meet the team” section of the blog (this can be found by clicking the contributors tab). The final characters were also uploaded to the creative development process on Pinterest.

I was also delegated the role of organising the blogs layout and navigation. I hyper-linked images and text to direct users to the correct pages for seamless integration.

 

 

Week 8: 07/03/16

I was in charge of designing the comic book cover, which as a group we decided to name “BAMF!” (The rationale behind the comic strip can be found on “output 2 – comic strips”

The cover was designed as a police line-up of the characters to portray the delinquency of the characters, as well as a preview into their personalities, for example the nervousness of Johnny. The cover was then uploaded to the homepage of the blog, the outputs page and output 3 – comic strip page.

Once the bear logo GIF was created, I then uploaded it to the blog in addition to the QR Bear Logo and its development process (found on output 4 – QR code page).  

 

Week 9: 14/03/16

For the final week, I helped to assist with the edit of the final comic strip storyline and upload to the blog (found on output 3 – comic strip page) as well as updating the social media pages.