Type workshop 10

Task set:

Design 2 x double page spread for a magazine.
1 x serious layout, 1 x creative layout.

Here are my final layouts:












serious












creative

My final boards

Evaluation

When looking at my original creative partnership form and what I wanted to get out of this project, I will evaluate this collaborative brief comparing it to what I originally said.


Now that this brief has come to an end, I am really pleased that I chose to do it with Charlotte. As I originally stated, I was hoping that our non-design qualities would match to make any design decisions easy and possible. This has proven to be successful, as I was right to say that we are both reliable, honest and organised. I did mention that we are both decisive, and as that is true for most of the time, there were a few days where neither of us knew where to go next with it and I think we were both lacking the creative motivation to just make a decision and get on with it. The fact that we are friends could have been an issue when analysing each other's work, but I felt that whether we were working collaboratively in the studios, or working individually and bringing our ideas together, we were honest with what we thought worked or didn't work.

I feel that as an individual I tried a lot harder and put a lot more effort in than in most other projects and was also a lot more committed to the brief. This was probably due to the fact that I really did like the brief's topic and that working with a partner, there is always that feeling that you don't want to let them down. I knew I could trust Charlotte to go away and work on her side of the action plan, and I think of myself also as someone that can be trusted, so I feel that being friends with her already didn't matter and we didn't let it affect how we individually worked. If anything it was advantage, because it meant we could confidently contact each other when we were apart to discuss options or issues arisen, without feeling shy or feeling that it was an effort in any way.

In terms of our design skills, it was also fairly successful as it was true that Charlotte had the missing elements to my design practice. She knew I wasn't a confident speaker when presenting our ideas to a group, so she always kick-started our crits, which helped me to add in anything that hadn't been mentioned. Another weakness of mine is probably my researching skills, and because Charlotte works in the library, she knew if there would be any books that could help us, which motivated me to research more in my spare time. I was pleased that I could incorporate my love for photography into the London exhibition visit and also share the development workload as I worked on the typography and layout, whereas Charlotte carefully designed the collage image and used her Photoshop skills to create it as a duotone image matching the logo colours and type that I designed. I have become a lot more confident using InDesign so I could successfully bring all the elements of the design together, once Charlotte had finished her image work. My interest in simple design layouts and limited colour pallettes continued throughout this brief, and resulted in me being really happy with our design style.

Obviously if I had been working on this brief on my own, I would have chosen to solely use typography, so it would be interesting to see how they would have looked without the use of image. When designing my individual presentation boards for module hand-in, I hope to continue to experiment with my designs and include them on them.

YCN Boards

Final Presentation Boards

I am really pleased with how our final boards looked when printed out. We went with the idea of having a statement board as our first board, then showing the other designs to complete the set on the second, and finally those designs in the context that they would be found in and around London.

Within their context

While I was coming up with layout ideas for the final presentation boards, Charlotte designed images of how the poster's would look in the chosen environments in and around London. When we visited the exhibition, I photographed potential places that we might put them, e.g. in the tube station, on a bus, in the tube itself or as floor graphics where the buskers play etc.

This was presented in our first crit, but here are some of the original photographs again.
























































Here are Charlotte's clever Photoshop skills with our designs now included:

Final poster set

I decided to design the lyrics in a playful way, using a fun font called 'two tones' from www.dafont.com. I designed them in blue, black and red versions, but went with the red to link them in with the centred artist of each poster. I kept the tagline black to sit comfortably with the image yet still stand out, and decided to choose the Helvetica Neue Bold version for that. The image was designed by Charlotte who used the colours, red, blue and white from the British Music Experience logo. The only requirement their original brief asked for, was to ensure the logo was included so we linked everything in with those existing colours. I am really pleased with how they have turned out.

Now to design our boards!

Adding the lyrics

Me and Charlotte came up with quite a few lyrics that we thought stood out over the eras:

Talkin' bout my generation*
Come 'n' dance wiv me*
Let's twist again
Well shake it up baby now*
Let me entertain you
C'mon feel the noise*
We will rock you
Forget all your troubles, come downtown
London calling*

etc...

but we narrowed it down to 5 (the ones marked with a *) and I played around with those.

I did want to include the "Forget all your troubles, come downtown" as I thought it really invited you in and made you sing along (if you are from the era of Petula Clark!) but when I started designing it, we realised it was too wordy, as you can see below, and went with London Calling instead:






















Here are the chosen lyrics as visuals:

Lyrics development

As mentioned in the crit, we have gone back to our original idea of incorporating song lyrics into the design. Here are my experiments below with various typefaces that were jazzy, fun, twisting, loud etc to match that of the era it was representing. Again I tested it in the colours of the logo to see which would work best alongside all the other elements on the posters.

Charlotte's image resolutions

Here are some of the final images that I am going to play around with and add the strapline, logo and song lyrics to hopefully pull it all together and act as a set:

Type workshop 9

This was a fun exercise in which I actually took a lot from it too. We began by looking at magazine grids as shapes and played around with colour.

If a magazine was to look approachable, then this is how I imagine it to be; a two column, lightweight text so it doesn't look too difficult to read, with a large image at the bottom and a simple bold title:






















Intense grid:





















Creative:





















Relaxed:





















(may be difficult to see on screen)


We then looked at how difficult colour is to use when involving it with type. We tried, what I thought was going to be, a simple hierarchy task of choosing which bit of information I wanted people to read first and picking a colour that would help that to stand out, then choosing a less intense colour as I went down the hierarchy. It proved to be very difficult!

Type workshops 7 & 8

We created our own CV and linked in our business card designs with a letterhead: