Studio Brief 3 - Concept

Today in our team we started working on our concept for the exhibitions. We wanted something that was contemporary, unique and a style that in the end would represent Leeds college of art Graphic Design students. We had came up with so many excellent ideas and concepts, which would look fantastic. However we soon realise that we had to think rationally and take on board restrictions with location, money and time.

We came up with the concept of 45 and we first created a mind make and came up with a number of different ways we could interpret the term '45' in different ways:

• Roman Numerals
• Level 4 + level 5 = 45
• 45 Degrees
• Maths 45 is some special number

Below is our overall concept :

XLV (forty-five) is an exhibition of first and second year graphic design students at Leeds College of Art. The work shown are redesigns of various theorist book covers. The first year have focused on graphic design theory where as the second year have chosen any book relating to general theories. This exhibition shows the range of visual interpretations from creative minds and showcases the work of upcoming designers in Leeds."

For the overall exhibition we wanted to give a sophisticated vibe that showed that even though we are students our work is still of a professional standard. We came up with the concept of 45 which is from the combination of level 4 and 5 students. 45 is also quite a significant number in other ways - it is a triangular number, it represents the sum of all decimal numbers and it has strong historical links (see more here). The thing that stood out to us the most was that designers interpret the number 45 as an angle of 45 degrees. This gives us lots of room for designs focusing on angles and lines. Even though the concept itself doesn't relate to the designs we felt that the concept of angles could make the exhibition more engaging to the viewer. Also the fact that we are using degrees of angles could slightly represent that we are degree students. One of our ideas was to hang the work at 45 degree angles to make the people tilt their heads to look at the work, making them have to focus on the work rather than having just a passing glance. We didn't want to go for obvious concepts like colour and shape as we felt that they were overused within exhibitions.

After coming up with the concept we produced another set of mind maps to firstly decide what style we wanted to portrayed. will it be modern? sophisticated? reserved? and then another mind up detailing what event collateral we will be needing.