"Rules Are Meant To Be Broken"

Last week I was lucky enough to have a portfolio viewing with the Creative Directors of Branding and Packaging Design Company, ‘Blue Marlin’. While providing me with priceless advice and information on the industry and my own work, what I found particularly interesting was their suggestion for changes within my own work. Both guys I spoke to were very much of the opinion that rules are meant to be broken, and that pieces of work shouldn’t necessarily be stuck to a grid or strict layout where everything should line up. I thought this was quite ironic, as in terms of my personal thinking, when designing a piece of word, grids and guides are one of the first things to be broken out n Illustrator and Photoshop. By speaking to them, they made it clear that maybe breaking out the grid (and I don’t mean in extremes) it would allow your work to stand out that much more and not seem so rigid and caged. Whether “breaking the rules” is something to take forward into our final year, it is nonetheless food for thought.

The images below are of one piece of work that I had done for the faculty brief and my development of this particular image based on the advice I was given at Blue Marlin. Apart from the colour change, they said to make more of a feature of the foetus, by increasing the size, and then join and re-size the faculty and university logo to make them a much smaller, key feature. This immediately meant that my initial thinking of separating the two logos to “balance” out the page and by having them larger so the viewer would know more immediately which University was being advertised, was what seemed to them what was holding the poster back.