My name is Lewis Staines, welcome to my portfolio website. I am a freelance graphic designer currently working from Upwork. This site is a mixture of university briefs, personal projects, and client work from my five plus years, everything you see was created from coding in HTML, CSS and javascript which has all been self-taught. Thank you for taking the time to visit my page and please head over to the contact page, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions and would love to hear any and all feedback.
Starting in 2018 while studying Art & Design at college I got my first part-time job at a print company specialising in vinyl printing for cars and wide format printers. It was here I began working with clients from design to outcome and we could do all the printing in-house. I found great satisfaction in being able to bring clients' ideas to life and learning the print process too. It was this early experience that made me want to pursue graphic design further and the next year I began my study at the University of East London.
Coming from a busy graphic design role I was able to bring a lot of this experience to my university which helped throughout my course, this allowed me to start exploring different avenues of design such as coding and 3D printing. I found great inspiration from interacting with fellow peers and tutors and offering ideas from less traditional techniques of design. I began to experiment with graphic design and my personal interests in 3D, and how they could become one. This concluded with my final year project, a 3D printed lithophane light box constructed with laser-cut plywood and LED lights coded with javascript. You can check that project out here.
During my second year of study, I organised a 3d design workshop for the level 5 and 6 graphics class where I went through the basics of CAD modelling and showed how they can be exported for 3D printing. This gave me good experience in presenting my work and allowed me to connect with peers that were also interested in the field. As with working at a printing company, it's very rewarding to see the design process throughout all the stages, working with 3D printing as it gives you control to work from sketching to modelling and prototyping to have a physical outcome.
Continuing through the second year I was given a collaborative brief to create a virtual gallery space along with creating the content to go into it. With my experience with 3D, I was in charge of creating the gallery while the rest of my group would be creating the content. To do this within the given time I used online tools to create the space but found this to be very limiting. This was a starting point for me to begin looking into VR further. VR is an amazing tool in design, being able to take someone into a world you have created with infinite scale and possibility, the only limitation is having access to a headset.
Over the summer I wanted to create my own VR gallery from scratch, to do this I began teaching myself the unity game engine. The work I displayed inside my gallery all consisted of randomly generated 2d and 3d artwork which I created in blender and using the javascript p5 library respectively, this became the basis of my second-year FMP which can be found here.
So, for my third year, I began further research into augmented reality and its uses in graphic design. The biggest use of AR we see today is its use in social media filters, from the early days of Snapchat and Pokémon Go to now where nearly every camera app or social media has inbuilt filters and Ai correction software. This led me to my final major project, creating augmented reality educational books using Snapchat filters. Check out the project here.
My name is Lewis Staines, welcome to my portfolio website. I am a freelance graphic designer currently working from Upwork. This site is a mixture of university briefs, personal projects, and client work from my five plus years, everything you see was created from coding in HTML, CSS and javascript which has all been self-taught. Thank you for taking the time to visit my page and please head over to the contact page, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions and would love to hear any and all feedback.
Starting in 2018 while studying Art & Design at college I got my first part-time job at a print company specialising in vinyl printing for cars and wide format printers. It was here I began working with clients from design to outcome and we could do all the printing in-house. I found great satisfaction in being able to bring clients' ideas to life and learning the print process too. It was this early experience that made me want to pursue graphic design further and the next year I began my study at the University of East London.
Coming from a busy graphic design role I was able to bring a lot of this experience to my university which helped throughout my course, this allowed me to start exploring different avenues of design such as coding and 3D printing. I found great inspiration from interacting with fellow peers and tutors and offering ideas from less traditional techniques of design. I began to experiment with graphic design and my personal interests in 3D, and how they could become one. This concluded with my final year project, a 3D printed lithophane light box constructed with laser-cut plywood and LED lights coded with javascript. You can check that project out here.
During my second year of study, I organised a 3d design workshop for the level 5 and 6 graphics class where I went through the basics of CAD modelling and showed how they can be exported for 3D printing. This gave me good experience in presenting my work and allowed me to connect with peers that were also interested in the field. As with working at a printing company, it's very rewarding to see the design process throughout all the stages, working with 3D printing as it gives you control to work from sketching to modelling and prototyping to have a physical outcome.
Continuing through the second year I was given a collaborative brief to create a virtual gallery space along with creating the content to go into it. With my experience with 3D, I was in charge of creating the gallery while the rest of my group would be creating the content. To do this within the given time I used online tools to create the space but found this to be very limiting. This was a starting point for me to begin looking into VR further. VR is an amazing tool in design, being able to take someone into a world you have created with infinite scale and possibility, the only limitation is having access to a headset.
Over the summer I wanted to create my own VR gallery from scratch, to do this I began teaching myself the unity game engine. The work I displayed inside my gallery all consisted of randomly generated 2d and 3d artwork which I created in blender and using the javascript p5 library respectively, this became the basis of my second-year FMP which can be found here.
So, for my third year, I began further research into augmented reality and its uses in graphic design. The biggest use of AR we see today is its use in social media filters, from the early days of Snapchat and Pokémon Go to now where nearly every camera app or social media has inbuilt filters and Ai correction software. This led me to my final major project, creating augmented reality educational books using Snapchat filters. Check out the project here.