Graduation 2015

Graduation 2015

Green light | presentation

Green light | showreel from Mirjam Leppers on Vimeo.

Friday 23th January I've held my 'Greenlight presentation' for teachers and students in order to get a 'green light' for my graduation, which took place in Concordia Enschede. I've showed a little showreel to support my talk and a slideshow about my travel through the course and working up to my graduation idea. Here's a small text which sums up a bit what I talked about:

Loads of imagery, loads of ideas. 
I tell my stories through imagery, but today I'll talk about it.In the first year of the AKI, which was an orientation year,  
I couldn't be happier with what was offered to me, painting, sculpture, drawing, video , photo shopping etc. 

Great, but that did made me doubt until the ultimate day which course I wanted to do.
 I wanted as much freedom, in material and media-choice, themes and ideas. 
I chose to do Sculpture.Which I did for half year, experimenting with different material and subjects, combining and tasting,
which was really nice for getting to know different techniques and material. 

It didn't make me as happy though. I missed something essential, a rhythm maybe, and inducement, a question or problem?


Then there was something as ACD on the AKI, Art & Crossmedia design. Which, in that time, was spoken about with some fine-arters a little bit as:

                           "That's just making logos right? Corporate identities?"

                                                    "Do whatever a client wants?"

                          "Being ubergood in photoshop?"

                                                    "You do earn lots of money with it tough..."

                          "How can you develop a signature with that?"


Well, was I mistaken. When I switched to ACD, a world opened up to me, just as much media freedom and material choices,
 but we had questions or problems that we had to solve.

Where it didn't ever matter as much what the question was,
 coming up with an idea for a jewelry commercial,
programming a flash game and designing the concept for it,
making a hand drawn animation starting with nothing.. etc.

Over the three years I had loads of fun experimenting with media,
 getting new assignments every week and let a process go on that.
I discovered that my fascination isn't in being able to use all the media that I want and practice,
 but to choose the right medium for the question. 
Although I also believe that there is no perfect solution to a 'design' question, only a suited one.

Last half year I tried to discover what my point of view is and clarify that,
by looking into some more critical and political subjects with my dissertation,
film minor, working with dogma and identity research.

This was my story, and now for my graduation I'm going to look in other stories.For my graduation I'm going to look into the column, IK@NRC, a daily column with little personal anecdotes of readers, and translate that into imagery. Loads of imagery, loads of ideas and translations Where I'm going to use all the expertise in from the last years that I gained, my view and signature and as always: let the process guide me and let that frame the end-result.

Slides used during my talk.

Identity | Website

For my website research, I looked into many possibilities to give my work the platform it needs, considering different presentation forms. I want to present it 'big', not on one page, no titles as links. For now the design will work as a carousel. The next step will be choosing the define the selection of work that will be shown and make descriptions with them. As I'm not done yet with my personal logo, the pixel perfectness and the look and feel might change slightly.

Also the personal text is still a long version of the text I am working on.

Some defining research:

Identity | the big question

Classmates describing my work

"The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in the service of others" Gandhi. A frequently used quote from a wise man, which I personally try to live up to.

Maybe more personally than work-wise, but still worth quoting. With the identity project this year: coming up with a personal logo, house-style, writing your role as a designer and finally creating an online portfolio, I tried to evenly work on these separate aspects. Whereas this obviously all has to match together to come across convincing and confident. The logo has to breath my vision, and instantly be 'recognizable' as 'me' and my work.

The process started with classmates describing you and your work. Where luckily, most words I got from different mates overlapped. From there on, an A3 poster was made with all the hook-up words and imagery found on the web that would match your personal  style and working-method. I tried to look for work that would match the touch and feel of my work, and matching colour pallet. Because my work is very cross-medial, i try to not focus on the medium itself. The poster will be a base for most of the matching identity solutions.

The 'my role as a designer'-text is still in progress, where i think I'm at version five now, I do realize I'm not as much a writer as an image-maker, quite hard to catch your essence into a few sentences.

With my personal logo, I'm still in the phase of looking around with different aspects, looking at different typefaces, shapes and forms. Mainly looking at how i want to shape my name into one block, staring from black and white, with little detours with colours. As i tend to work from colour, and not shape, so just for 'fun', some colour experiments.

All together, it's getting a little bit of shape and form. As I did had a little bit of trouble while thinking how I want to come across as a designer. Where do you focus on: your best skills? How do you want to come across? Is that medium wise, personal wise, skill wise? Loads of thinking and self-reflection this year, but at this point, the whole process is doing me good, and in a couple of weeks I believe I'll have a clear visual language for myself.
The last year is different in the way that: I'm quite used to production ongoing, project after project, dipping into new assignments. This year, I'm much more looking around, what inspires me, who inspires me and why...

Exchange Falmouth | Last Report

The last little bit about my Exchange at Falmouth University, writing and creating a report what the half year did for me. My final year is starting, getting back to serious (dutch) work and finish at the AKI Enschede this year! Woo!

Montagen Jeunesse | final bords

The Brief : “We want you to choose a famous brand, product or service and redesign it in a breakthrough way.” Designers Bridge’s brief is all about taking an original design and taking it to the next level. So taking that in consideration, I should pick a brand that really needs refinement but also one that has
potential to grow.

Montagne Jeunesse : Thinking of a product that desperately needs some drastic change I thought of the Company Montagne Jeunesse, a brand that I bought some products from when I was a teenager.
Montagne Jeunesse is a beauty brand that sells all kinds of beauty products but the company mostly focuses on face masks, where it is also known for. Founded in 1989 this brand started off small in the UK and nowadays sells internationally.

Goal: The goal is to create a new identity for the brand and with that create a new logo. With the new identity I will focus on creating new packaging for one particular line of theirs: Peel-off face Masks.

Plan of approach: Jeunesse is a company that specializes in face masks, so logically I took it upon me to rebrand the logo and the packaging of their “peel-off“ line. The products are very popular among young girls (12-25) . Altough, if I ask my friends if they have ever used Montagne Jeunesse, they say they didn’t. If I show them the packaging though, they say they didn’t. Reason why my friends couldn’t tell me that they did  se it, is that nobody seems to know the product by name, it is just known as the fasemask with the tacky  ackaging. So that would be the first thing to keep in mind: make the brand name more clear to spot. It is not an expensive product, bearing that in mind I wanted to rebrand it with more focus on: Natural ingredients, Fun, Easy, Young and Lively.

Come up with a nice design, without trying to make it look too expensive, so a little tackiness
may be required. At this moment the product mostly just screams: very chemical.

Course Promotional Material | presentation bords

 Final presentation bords for the assigment Course Promotional Material. Brief, description and development are described on the bords.

Montagne Jeunesse | Reincarnation

The project of reincarnating the brand Montagne Jeunesse has had some steps forward. One thing, i might even get over my fear for illustrator here in Falmouth. 

Montagne Jeunesse is a brand that's mostly popular with younger girls, cheap brand, and known for their lovely tacky packaging. As redesigning i had to keep those properties in mind, trying to find a balance in well done design, but not too fancy expensive looking. For starters I started on the logo first, and tried to make it more soft by making it handwritten and "curvy", starting by sketching some ideas, putting it in to Photoshop and later on editing in illustrator (oyeah). I know im never going to be a professional font maker, but i thought for a single logo, i'll give it a go. 

Second thing was the packaging, i wanted to keep the "peel-off feeling" into the packaging, so in the end i got to the decision that the face would have the structure of the gel itself, or not having it, but really showing it. So leaving the face as a gap, which would show a little sachet underneath. 

The project is nearly finished, some proces is shown here above, now it needs a final look at some details, readability and proper mockups.