Inside My Graphic Design Sketchbooks

I love the creative process. I love seeing the stages an artist goes through when creating a piece of work. All artists go through this to some extent. I love this process so much I thought I would share some of my graphic design sketchbooks where you can see some of my own creative process

I’ve been studying graphic design for over two years now which means I have a lot of sketchbooks (over 20). The process remains the same with graphic design but there isn’t so much ‘artistic’ stuff in my sketchbooks. A huge part of graphic design is working with type and grids. This means while I have some pure art, there is also lots of work with fonts and layouts.

POSTER DESIGN

This was part of an advertising project where I had to create typographic posters for three films. On this page I am developing an idea I had, I was using gradients to create a futuristic background and used reflections in acetate as a basis for where these gradients would be.

This page is from later on in that same project. I also had to create ticket stubs for the same films. On this page I am trying to figure out the orientation of the ticket and the wrap it would be held in. The easiest way to do this was to create a mock up because I knew exactly how it would look. I then went on to work on the layout of the ticket. Based on research I had done previously I knew there were certain pieces of information the ticket needed to display. So I’m figuring out the layout of the type and printing this at full scale so I can see how the layout will look on a physical ticket.

MIND MAPPING

This is from one of my more recent projects on branding. Graphic design is far more complicated than just creating something nice. Especially when it comes to creating an identity. In each project I need to come up with a concept for the final design. This is the idea behind the design, this will then go on to inform the final outcome. Working out concepts is the hardest part of a project and it takes a lot of written work to create a good concept.

EDITORIAL DESIGN

This was an editorial design project. I had to create a pamphlet containing information about two designers. This pamphlet had to be physically made making the project slightly more complicated. The way the pamphlet was bound meant it had to have a number of pages which was a multiple of four; because one sheet of paper makes four pages when folded over. So on this page I am trying to figure out how many pages I would need, and what information would be displayed on each. I then went on to create a mock-up of the pamphlet, this way I had a better idea of the size and what binding I would use.