Benjamin Carr

Loving Benjamin Carr's work! Gotten really into my typography and packaging design recently!

Meet my new website!

My brand new website is now live! It's my first crack at web design so it's not perfect but feel free to check it out at www.jakethompsondesign.com

There's a few bits of my work up there and I hope to be updating and improving it all the time. It was a great project - I really enjoyed it and it's an invaluable skill.

My best friend announced her engagement yesterday! It's very exciting, and got me thinking about invitations and all the other great design stuff that comes with weddings.
Which in turn reminded me about an awesome studio called Studio Seed. The girls who runs the studio, Tamsin and her friend Jess make beautiful individual wedding invitations, VERY jealous!
Check out their website here www.studioseed.co.uk

Two friends and I started a student night at a local bar and I got to create all the branding (along with my friend Connor)

Here it is!

Playing with Layouts

Our first brief of year 2 was to create 8 layouts using collected magazines and newspapers - the aim was to explore and challenge conventional layouts and to learn the basics of creating a spread. These photos are not my final layouts, they're a few experiments, I'll load the finished ones later.

Degrees of Vandalism

Final image produced on Illustrator as part of a brief on Isotypes. It's based on 'what's hot' tables, the idea being that less serious acts of vandalism appear on the top, and the more serious acts are on the bottom. I'm really pleased with the result!

Tracey Emin - Sketchbook Module.

I really like Tracey Emin's mono prints; I like the naive quality of the text she uses and the misspellings. I think it's a positive thing that she's so personal in her work, it shows the passion she has for what she does. I did some Tracey Emin inspired mono prints during the last week of my drawing module at Caldewgate with Martin I'm really pleased with them, I'll upload soon!

Screen Printing.

Last Monday I was screen printing, and we had to create a one or two colour design for a t shirt. I designed an indian head dress. I was so excited to print, I've always liked lino printing and etching and I screen printed once on my Foundation. It went really well, I made two t shirts, one for me and one for my brother, here they are!

I'm really pleased with how they turned out!

Clever typography..

Personal Work

On Thursday, a friend at Nottingham University asked me to produce four images to help with her dissertation. I was given four words; Isolation, longing, strength and intensity. She asked me to make an image representing each word and to send them to her on Friday. Here are the results - I'm quite pleased to say it's only 24 hours work:

Isolation

Longing

Strength

Intensity

Artists...

BRETT HELQUIST

I've looked at a few artists during the Seeing Double brief, including one who is probably my all time favourite illustrator, Brett Helquist. He illustrated the Lemony Snicket books I grew up reading, but I love the complexity in his cross-hatching, versus the simplicity of some of his images. His B&W works are my favourite, and they've been a big inspiration for this project...

I like the Victoriana feel to his work, and he's incredibly good at capturing atmosphere accurately and subtley. His framing, or lack of, is also one of the big successes of his work for me.

TOM GAULD

I like the framing in Tom Gauld's work, and this had transferred to my images. His use of like to create atmosphere is also very interesting and his work is very successful considering how simple it can be. It just goes to show, sometimes less is more.

ULRIC COLLETTE

Collette is a photographer who, in a long-running project exploring genetics, photographs two members of a family, and combines their faces cleverly to show how alike members of the same family are. This inspired me to experiment myself with images of me and Ben in photoshop, the result of which ended up being one of my final images. His work is beautiful, and with some of the couple who are of similar ages, you would never guess it was two separate people!

Sketchbooks at Caldewgate

 A series of four images produced thinking about the different points of view in a current news story. I chose the sinking of the Costa Concordia..

What is it like to be a twin?

The honest answer is I haven't got a clue! I don't know if i like it or if i don't. But that's not to say I don't like MY twin. Ben is my best friend and it's really hard being at separate uni's (Ben is at Falmouth).  These are some things that you might find interesting about being a twin:
Ben and I are mirror twins, which means we're identical twins whose egg split at 9-12 days (late for twins and sometimes ends in conjoined twins). This means that although our DNA is basically the same, we have opposite features: Ben is right handed and I am left-handed, my cowlick/coreflick in my hair is on my right, Ben's is on his left < this means our fringes go in opposite directions.
We lost the same teeth at roughly the same time, but on opposite sides of our mouths. Ben, being the oldest, lost his first tooth two weeks before me.
Ben looks like me in the mirror (obviously) although we don't really look that alike in person.
Coming to uni has been the longest amount of time we've ever spent apart - before that the longest was a weekend residential with school.
I'm sure there's some other things but I can't think of them right now, if i do I'll post them! If you've got any questions, post them on the comments and I'll answer! For now, here's a photo of me and Ben for you to nosey at...