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: