"Malo experiments with color and contrast in her editorial illustrations and gifs, always telling a story with a touch of humor."

Malo's style has elements of how I initially want my GIF style to be. The simple linear design with use of colour to make the design stand out is really effective. I think use of drawing tablet will be the easiest way to make a short animation. However perhaps through using more traditional techniques such as scan and cut, the design will begin to have more texture. 

She studied illustration at the Camberwell College of Arts in London, where she graduated with distinction in 2015. Lina's work has been shortlisted for Price for Illustration 2016, and AOI World Illustration Award and New Talent Award 2017.

Her style is very modern with use of Graphic shapes and bright colour. I like the idea of the figures not being completely realistic and more stylised.

Visually, this idea has turned out quite well, better than expected. The idea is for text inside the billboard to move and warp therefore it can be used as a GIF. I think if the second idea doesn't come up to scratch by next week, I will focus again on this one. To make the design more personal, I could add different things into the background of the photo, or simplify the colour way in order for it to fit within the 256 limit of GIFs. I think a typewriter font works well in for this and the public space element is very visible therefore there are clear links to the essay. 

'You are what you design' was just quick phrase I inserted into my final idea at the beginning of the project. It seems to have stuck, it seems fitting as it's a basic way to some up the intentions of my essay. 

It's a take on the phrase 'You are what you eat' ala Green Giant. It's sort of a way to urge designers to consider what they are doing and realise that you represent yourself through the design. I wanted to keep it playful, I wasn't keen on the fact in the original idea being a found image, due to copy right etc. But, I am no artist, illustration is not my strong point; as you can probably tell from the previous ideas. I saw the figure (pictured left in 'initial shape') on an instagram page briefly, but lost the original it looked similar. It was a simple drawing for a black lives matter protest, I thought the use of shape was really interesting and would translate well for a GIF. 

After playing around with the shape tools, I thought ovals created quite a nice, light character form. The character isn't meant to resemble a human directly. In my initial ideas, I wanted it to be a girl holding the sign to an audience, but I feel as though the character adds a different , more interesting element. It gives more freedom in how the GIF can transform, rather than having to make clothes/ mouths/moving limbs etc. The GIF idea is based on a sign holder, the ones that would stand outside and promote a company. The character will turn the board vertically and it will read something else. Hopefully, this will loop perfectly and create a sweet little animation. 

Theres not much to say about the process of making the GIF as there's little skill involved, more just patience. I made the character on illustrator, but the GIF have to be made in Photoshop. Therefore for every frame, I would adjust the character slightly, then copy and paste it into PS. After this has been done for all the slides, I combined the slides at a rate of 0.2 seconds and placed it on a loop. Whilst exporting the GIF, I experienced some difficulty in it being saved to the computer. The file size was too large for the computer to handle, therefore I had to lower the quality to fix this. 

The colour scheme wasn't based off anything in particular, I just knew that from the initial ideas, I had been creating a gif inspired by old label cartoons, ones with outlines and bright colours; therefore, colour had to play a role in the making. Green and pink compliment each other well, I had used yellow at first but thought it was too stark. In the tutorial, we spoke of how the font wasn't fitting, it lacked context. After the redesign, I felt the work going into a different direction, so after looking through different typefaces Lincoln/MITRE from primary foundary jumped out, this is website recommend to me during tutorials. I had previously used it for a typeface in the 16 page document which I loved. The description is as follows "Designed by David Bennewith, Lincoln/MITRE fonts are studies of the typographic system designed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory for use in various displays on the early warning air defense computer network SAGE (1950s–1980s)."

The fun features made it appealing to me, the 'S' and the 'I' showed real flair. I thought it had certain character that would be a charm fitting for the GIF. I also thought it was interesting that it was used in 'early warning defence' as this sign is an early warning defence to the designers (though just a small personal parallel).  It made me treasure the font further 

The GIF needed tweaking, therefore I remade it with this in mind. I aligned the eyes to the feet and made the image larger against the background. This took away unnecessary negative space. I also fixed the sign to say 'You are what you design!' rather than 'You r what you design' although it took up more space, I reduced the fixed kern between words to allow more letters to fit on the top line and reduced the overall font size. 

Then I added small details such as the eyes rolling round the eyeball to create more personal character and suggest movement. I am quite happy with the design, I like how it links to the essay and it involves the audience as the receivers of the public space element. I feel however, it may not be the most obvious example of public space as the billboard would've been. But this has allowed be to develop a different skill rather than simply using the warp tool. The typeface works well, the colour scheme is one I personally like but perhaps should have a deeper meaning, or stronger links to the essay, though I didn't quite know which colour would summarise this.