Final week action plan

• Come up with 3-5 different song lyrics to act as strap lines on set of posters - Both

• Incorporate lyrics into poster layout design - Nichola

• Finalise set of images to have a variety of different poster collages - Charlotte

• Design presentation board layouts - Both

• Print and arrange boards - Both

Crit response: Week 3

I was really pleased with how the crit went this week. I felt we had more visuals to show, making it easier to get our ideas across and now we had a strong design direction I was a lot more confident. We wanted to ask for others' opinions in the group about a few things as, between the two of us, we couldn't decide. As Charlotte and I were approaching the crit we had near enough decided to scrap the interaction games ideas for the posters as we thought the tagline and strong image should speak for themselves. This doesn't mean to say, however, that researching interactive media designs and playing around with pop out and playful paper ideas was pointless, it just means that we have narrowed our concept down, hopefully strengthening it too.

The response we got back was to definitely not spend any more time working out how to make posters, billboards etc interactive, because the environment we wanted our designs in, wasn't exactly right for that. Tube travellers, for example, are always in too much of a rush to 'play' with posters and on-the-street interactivity will probably just get damaged.

The 'Get in on the Act' tagline was favoured over the 'Get involved' which we were pleased about, so we are going to use that on each poster to emphasise the interaction of the exhibition and link the set of posters together giving them a running theme.

We previously experimented in the second week with song lyrics to grab the viewer's attention but our design direction moved us slightly away from that...until this crit. It was suggested that by using a song lyric per poster would engage the passer's by more and define different eras on the designs to show how broad the exhibition is.

We had by-passed that idea, thinking it was too obvious, but maybe obvious is what we need to really polish the designs off. So we now aim to research and choose lyrics that are fun and would get stuck in your head if you saw them whizz by on the side of a bus or tube etc.

As for the image itself, a good point was made that if we were having one song lyric per poster defining an era of music, then perhaps a certain artist/band can be enlarged in the centre that fits that era. The clever arangement that Charlotte designed will still work around that, but the centre artist will just sit in the foreground standing out a little more than the others.

Type layout

To take to the crit, we decided to go with the 'Get in on the Act' line and I carried on playing around with where it might sit on the page with the image that Charlotte designed. I tested it in red, black and blue and went with the Helvetica Bold typeface for now, just to show as a test piece. The experiments are below:



I was continuously thinking about the context in which these designs would be found and we had already decided that we wanted it to be seen in a music magazine, or a free tube magazine/newspaper, so i thought about designing it as an advertising poster with an interactive element to it. The design below would be the front, acting as a statement page. This design will be what is used then across all media. We aim for it to be seen on the side of buses, in the tube stations etc.




















This extra design below I came up with to act as the informative side to the magazine advert. The idea being that it would have a perforated line to be able to tear it out and take with you to use as directions to the exhibition.

Another plus to actually visiting the exhibition was that we knew how it was laid out inside, so I used that map from how we'd remembered it as the design on this side.



















I played around with it for some time, so I hope it gets its use in the final resolutions as I am quite pleased with it. Here are some of its colour development below:

Type Development

It was my job to play with different typefaces for the tag-line. We wanted something bold and simple, so I tested fonts such as Helvetica, Baskerville, Verdana, Gill Sans, Cooper, Arial and many more. I tried them in various weights, condensed them and altered the tracking on some of them to make them more legible.

To begin with, after spending time playing with words to come up with a strong strapline that pulls in the audience as well as getting across the interactivity side of the exhibition that we really want to emphasise, we ended up with two possible contenders. We couldn't decide between 'Get Involved.' - Simple, straight to the point yet intriguing. Or 'Get in on the Act' which gets across the interaction more, as well as playing on the meaning of 'act', suggesting that you could join in and play in a band or sing like your idol perhaps.

Here are the typeface experiments for both versions:

Action plan: week 3

It's a fairly simple set of aims this week:

1. Type ideas & colour experimentation - Nichola
2. Image - Charlotte
3. Layout of them both combined as poster designs - Nichola

Business Card Final

Further experiments:





















Final:

2nd week crits