The start of this research project, started with the question “How does positionality affect the creative/user/audience experience, in your own practice?” The positionality of myself, a Graphic Designer in 2023 working through a Masters degree whilst also working in-house as a designer and separately as a freelancer. I also had to consider the positionality of myself as a self taught Graphic Designer, who over the last 10 years has consumed 1000’s of books, videos and online tutorials which enabled me to achieve the position I now currently have: a working Graphic Designer.
I believe the issue with this method of learning and processing one’s practise, is that it leaves a lot of holes in one’s knowledge. I can only really learn and progress in certain areas, when I am asked to do so by a client with enough frequency that it becomes a reliable tool in my designing arsenal. For instance, I believe I can hold my own with document creation, social media post design, poster making and logo making. But it is this last one where I feel I have a sizeable gap that requires more than just repetition to master.
This thought process started when I was asked by a Fish and Chip shop to create them a logo, brand package and digital menus for their new store. We went through my standard new client interview process where we discussed their goals, their competition, their standing the community and what they would consider a success with this logo. One of the main aspects that the client kept coming back to me with was that they wanted a fish mascot and that the fishes mouth should become the ‘C’ in The Big Catch Chip Shop - the name of the store. This created a few issues, not only that I wasn’t personally a fan of this method but also that the fish has to work in a way that its mouth would be positioned in the middle of the type; ‘The Big Catch’ being the main section of type. ‘Chip Shop’ was placed lower down on the hierarchy of text. The other personal issue I knew I was going to have, and one that I wasn’t going to let on to the client, was that I can’t draw! I can sketch, I can plot out and I used to be able to draw, but that was during my college life and my Foundation degree when I was regularly going to life drawing classes and working with oil paints and sketching multiple times a day. In the 15 odd years since I’ve left university with my degree in photography, my drawing ability has dwindled. That being said, even when I could draw, it was based on realistic representations of things, this logo needed a cartoon or illustrated approach which is something I’ve never been good at.
As seen in the sketch ideas, I worked out the general layout of the logo. The main issue I had was when it was time to flesh the idea out, as I wasn’t going to be able to teach myself how to draw a cartoon fish in the exact style I needed in the time allocated for this work. My only real course of action was to find other examples of illustrations that closely followed what I needed, and then tweak, change and combine them, in Frankenstein’s monster style, to the shape that I needed. Here is the illustration of that process:
The final logo, incorporating this mascot, was successful and the client was more than happy with it. We then went on to make a second version for the sign with a slightly different fish illustration but again, this was something that I couldn’t whole hearted say was 100% my drawing.
https://www.darren-tate.co.uk/work
At the same time I was working on this logo, a friend of mine, Darren Tate, who is an illustrator and animator was working on a design for a hoodie for a skate shop in Winchester. We were discussing the designs and our processes when he showed me this hoodie. Looking at the design I realised that I wouldn’t, at this stage of my practise, be able to uniquely create something like this. And so, I began to debate the positionality of my practise. Do illustrators make better logo makers? Is it easier for an illustrator to learn graphic design skills than a Graphic Designer to learn illustration?
And so this is where I feel my research path will begin: “Illustration in logo design”