Action Plan Week 2

Following on from the crit, my priorities are to research into editorial layout to gain a wider understanding of how I can realistically push the boundaries and to research into the content of the product - regional dialects. The sooner I have the content gathered together I can start playing around with the pure design element of layout.

Incorporating photography, simple colour palettes and creative typography layout designs is the basis of what I want to achieve, so always bearing that in mind this week my targets are:

• Collect this weekend's supplements and document and analyse them.
• Spend quality time in the library using the resources to gather research into layout design.
• Find appropriate books on culture and regional dialects.
• Gather information together with a dictionary feel to it.
• GET DESIGNING - produce design sheets of initial creative layout designs and ideas.
• Generate relevant location photography from each chosen region, edit and choose the photographs I want to incorporate into the layout.
  

Crit 1 feedback

First of all I can actually now say I know what I am doing. Not in life in general, but at least for the next four weeks. The crit gave me the opportunity to voice my ideas, which is always more helpful than just thinking them, and clarified a lot of things for me. I can now say confidently that I like the brief I have written and am looking forward to getting down to designing.

It has proven to be that I am very much print driven with this brief, but that doesn't necessarily give me reason to panic. I can design potential digital ideas, such as creating an online presence of the supplement for example, showing how it can work across all areas of design but the digital aspect to it can simply be a proposal, not a resolution.

My original problem with the deliverables I had set myself, wording it as a 'set' of supplements, raised the question; had I set myself an unrealistic target within the time frame I had? But after discussing this, I realised that was something that would be answered when I begin the actual designing. It could completely depend on how difficult the content is to gather, how long it takes me to resolve the perfect design layout, or the chosen size of the product. If it is a creative fold out supplement for instance with few actual pages, then creating a set of these would be do-able. However, if it were very much content driven and I designed a 16 page booklet, a 'set' of these would be difficult to create and could mean that the design element suffers due to lack of time.

Therefore I have decided to ensure the brief is very much design driven and I will quickly gather the content together to focus my time on creating the right format and layout for my supplements.

Ideas began to form and questions began to be raised as the discussion continued in that I could choose a set of regions to collect information from, perhaps 5 that have obvious strong accents and local phrases and dialects. Good possibilities could be:

• London 'cockney' slang
• Yorkshire
• Lancashire
• Liverpool
• Newcastle
• Birmingham
• Edinburgh
• Cornish/Devon
  

Each supplement could then be dedicated to one chosen region and as a set of 5, could come out weekly or monthly for newspaper buyers to collect.

I could design the type, colour, layout etc to relate to the chosen regions so that each supplement was different, or I could just change one element of it, such as the colour, but keep the grid layout and type the same as a running theme throughout the set to link them all together.

I also know now that I want to combine type and image together within the layout design to incorporate my photography work. These will be images of the regions I have chosen to target.

So there are lots of positive things to think about and as long as I work in a simple, efficient way, I know I will begin to produce the kind of design that is currently sat in my head dying to get out.

Collecting Supplements

I have written my new brief and decided to 'Design a set of magazine/newspaper supplements that explore regional dialect and phrases within the everyday English language. Produce promotional material to support the launch of the supplements.'

Because I am aiming it towards weekend morning newspaper readers who are interested in the culture, depth and origin of the country's language of today, I will begin to collect Saturday and Sunday newspapers, such as Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. Images of these supplement designs will then be posted onto my design context blog and analysed in terms of use of size, colour, layout, use of typography, etc.

I will work within the guides of editorial layout, that I learned within the typography module, but create designs that stand out from existing weekend supplements I research by being simple, minimal and fresh.

Statement of Intent

My new brief

What makes a good brief

• Clear content
• Interesting/appropriate content to you
• Defined audience
• Specific outcomes
• Appropriate tone of voice
• Scope for development
• Clear deadlines
• Realistic workloads
• Clearly defined context
• Mandatory requirements to stick to

Beginning Design Practice 2

The workshop session helped us to analyse ourselves, our skills and interests. The key questions we had to keep asking ourselves were:

What are you doing?
Why are you doing it?
















I narrowed the 5 briefs down to 3 to work those questions against them:












































When narrowing what I want to get out of the brief, there are 3 areas I learned that I must include; Content, Product, Context.

Content examples:

• subject
• information
• generate images
• generate research
• deliver a message
• communicate opinions

Product examples:

• format
• media
• process
• form

Context examples:

• promotion
• retail
• information graphics
• publications

I may be driven by one area more than the other two, but by starting with what I know I want, will hopefully help the brief fall into place. However, it can get quite confusing!

For example: Making a book. The book is the format, print is the media/process, publication is the context.

In terms of my practice:
'I want to make a magazine spread' = Product driven
'I want to design for publication' = Context driven

Product - Range - Distribution

The outlining brief:





















To prepare for the second part of Design Practice 2, I began to reflect over the year and think about my strengths, weaknesses and areas of design that I want to work on. This new brief is an opportunity to show how my skills have progressed so I am very much looking forward to getting started. I've worked with print based briefs, digital, typography, competition briefs and more self directed briefs, so where do I comfortably sit? What have I yet to try? What do I never want to work on ever again?

I began to read over the choice of briefs provided as a starting point to rule out options and narrow down my interests. They are going to act as a professional framework for a personal brief so I chose 5, but all for different reasons. The whole brief may not be perfect to my design practice and what I want to get out of a 5 week brief, so I have picked out areas that stand out to me on each one.






















Typography based
Postcard designs
Cultural























Typographic
Type as image
Cultural research
Typical phrases in everyday language
Open to working across a range of media























Typographic
Promotional materials
Editorial design option























Typography based
Environmental type
Photography
Information graphics piece























Re-designing a supplement's campaign
Promotional design
Typographic
Editorial design based

Typography Evaluation

At the end of this 10 week typography module, I would have to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed all 10 sessions and have definitely learned a lot. I now check many things before I begin writing, or laying out a document and even the tiniest of details will annoy me until it is corrected. The strongest sessions, and the most useful to me, were the designing of the business cards and the short press ads tasks. The final longer task of designing two contrasting double page spread designs have also been a useful challenge with end results that I can perhaps use in my portfolio to show the kind of editorial design I enjoy.

The column and leading tasks were interesting and got us working and discussing as a group, but after a while I found it quite difficult to critically decide on what leading and font size worked best on the page and what didn’t work, as it was all starting to blur into one. However, I definitely benefitted from it and will continue to analyse and experiment with text and come out with various printed solutions before deciding which option works best. The grid and colour exercises were fun and I have come away with many little tips to think about when playing with white space and grids.

Experimenting with this optional module was important to me as it has proven that I do want to go down the path of editorial design more and that I have the patience for detail to work with typography. It excites me that there is so much more to learn and that I have only just scratched the surface, so for briefs such as the up and coming design practice 2 whereby I can personalise it and write it to my strengths, I hope to create worthwhile designs out of it to show how much this module has influenced the thought process that now goes into my designing.