Hi all.

Blanc is the title of my final concept for Design Concept Development Brief 2. As you know from my previous post at [link], we had to come up with several different colour concepts (anything, but only using 2 colours each) and then expand on one.

I had originally wanted to do a 4 page mini-comic introducing a new character to the world. It took me too long to script and storyboard so that when I came to actually illustrate it, I discovered that I was just a little bit more than out of practice.

I hideously rendered the first page and began the second before pulling the plug and deciding to do something that my current skills in packaging and in Illustrator would compliment.

So I came up with this, it's a different take on a comic book cover. It is slightly larger than A5 and is designed as a glued sleeve and contains a coverless comicbook. When I say coverless, I mean that the book inside will all be lightweight paper and will rely on the envelope for protection.


I actually think I'm onto something with this story concept too; if only I weren't the King of Procrastination, I could probably produce something that people would enjoy reading.

The only problem is, now it's 11:55pm the night before the project is due and I still have to come up with 2 other design concepts using colour. I am going to use my unfinished comic work as one of my other ones (red and black being the colours). The problem is, I'm at a bit of a loss.

You see, I had a pretty bad day. I've had a bit of a bad run actually, but I'll focus on today for now.

I was flat out all day today. As usual. But I finally got to work on this red-hot urgent job for a new customer (we need to complete his packaging by the second week in December to get onto a boat for New Zealand so that it gets there before Christmas) and I have to design his packaging. This client is in California.

Anyway, I'm working on his design this afternoon and I'm saving and saving, and it's all going well. I do a fairly big change after doing about 15 minutes of clipping mask around some cherries and click save again.

"Could not complete you request because of an unknown error."

You've gotta be kidding me. So I try to remove certain elements that I know I can recreate quickly, or already exist and try to resave. Nada. This continues for about 20 minutes as my blood-pressure reaches bursting point. Finally, something looks like it's working and it's saving and saving, and then on the last bar. Kaputski.

I think it's time for a reboot.

I bite the bullet and shutdown Illustrator and reboot my computer. Oh, this is all at 4:55pm and I finish at 5.

Computer boots back up and I go to open the last file I had saved successfully.

It's corrupt.

Suddenly letters and numbers are showering down upon me as I realise I've put my fist through my keyboard.

The next hour is a blur of typing and pen work as I recreate the carton as best as I can so that I can email it off to the customer. I leave at 6pm.

I then have to drive down to Officeworks so that I can print my various assignments that I have to hand in tomorrow. I get there and it's the same girl who served me on monday, when I first tried to print out my What Is It Good For print. I'm trying to print it again today, because on monday, certain elements weren't showing up correctly because of transparencies in the Illustrator file that didn't translate proplerly into PDF.

So I've showed up now with a 300dpi JPG file. We plug in my iPod and print away. I still get errors. This time its the contrast settings on their image setter that are fucking with my print. We finally get it sorta printing ok and I decide to walk around the store a bit.

It's then I hear the jingle of the store chime and a voiceover rings out "Would the owner of a black car, registration number..." before they even begin reading the number I start walking to the front. Sure enough, they read out my number. Fuck, what's happened to my car?

I get to the front and there is a car parked behind my car, but wait, my car is on the road. What the fuck?

I get out there, and this Pakistani guy (who was the security guard at Kmart next door) is standing there going, "is this your car?"

It turns out that somehow my car has rolled backwards ever so slowly because and he has turned the corner and thought there was someone backing out. He has flashed his lights because the car wasn't stopping and keeps coming. Scrape.

Now there is a metre long scratch and scrape on the back bumper of my car. The fucker doesn't have insurance either.

I'm fuming.

I get home, cook dinner and somehow fall asleep on the loungeroom floor, not waking up until Maddy gets home at 10:30-something. Fantastic.

I've been in kind of a half-asleep daze ever since.

And I still have to finish off these concepts and do specification sheets for 5 different fonts.

I think it's gonna be another late one.