OUGD406 Studio Brief 4 | Further Development

I wanted the book to be simple and easy to read quickly, kind of like as if someone had to read it while walking.

To make it easy to read I decided to use big titles and clear text, so I chose Helvetica Bold for the titles and Helvetica Light for the body for good legibility.




The order of my book was important, as I wanted it to be easy to take in the information, I didn't want it to just be thrown at the reader.

The idea is they all lead into one another.
First you find out when it's open > What can you print when you're in there > How much would that cost > Anything that's isn't covered already





I also wanted it to have some sort of interesting element to it so I made the accent colours on the pages CMY(K). I think this will be good because I'm so used to working with just black, white and grey and I said in my PPP work that I wanted to experiment more with colour in the future.

I was struggling for a while to think of a suitable front cover for my book. At first I was just using type and playing round with the positioning of it. Then me and a few others were talking about our work and I suggested making my front cover like a test print page or a pre-press page and they seemed to think it was a good idea.

I then looked into pre-press pages such as newspapers and saw that they had a number of things. Things like registration marks, crop marks, colour examples. I thought this would look good on a front cover if it was done right.

OUGD406 Studio Brief 4 | Development

I made a quick list of some ideas


Sorry it's upside down - you can't rotate on Blogger

This is a quick list of ideas I had at first of some things that I think would help out new students, things like a map of Leeds, how to do all the boring stuff like doctors and dentist but then I realised I don’t know my way round Leeds well enough and I haven’t even set up my dentist yet so that would be pointless.

Then I started to think about university, and things I was unsure of when I first came here like:

-Where Tom’s office is

-What to do if you’re ill

-Where to print out you work

-How does print credit work

-Where’s the library

-Where’s Rossington Street

Then I thought for a Graphic Design student, which is most important? And the answer for me was to do with the print room. That's when I decided to make a quick and simple guide to the digital print room downstairs. 

OUGD406 Studio Brief 4 | The Brief

For this brief we had to ‘Produce a graphic response/ graphic product /piece of work that makes a statement, comment, observation or gives advice about your experience on your first year of this course.’

When I first read this brief I thought back to the start of the year when the second years showed us what they had done for theirs and being impressed by how simple some of them were but how good they looked. I wanted to achieve this with my piece of work.

I then thought about what I didn’t know at the start of the year, at first I was thinking Graphic Design becauseit turns out I knew very little, but then I thought I don’t want to try and teach them anything because they’ll learn it anyway. So then I thought about what I didn’t know to do with Leeds and the university itself.  I came up with a list of ideas and possible pieces of work I could do to help the new students.

I wanted to pick one that would not only help them, but also mean something to me in a way because it will round up the year well. That’s why I chose to do a booklet of some sort, because at the start of the year I had no idea I would enjoy any sort of editorial design but now I find it incredibly fun. 

My aim with this piece of work was to create something that would help multiple students instead of just one. So I needed to find something that none of them would know.

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | Evaluation

I really enjoyed Studio Brief 3 and I think part of that was to do with my team. We all got on really well with each other and were all supportive of each other's ideas. We worked well together as a team, quickly establishing who was doing what role taking into consideration everyone's strong points when it comes to designing and it seemed to work well.

Although at first we didn't come up with a concept as quickly as we'd hoped, once we did we were able to work very efficiently. Once we had our set tasks, everyone was able to just work for a couple of days without really worrying about what everyone else was doing. We did check on other's work to make sure what we were doing was still in-line with the brand and we were still on the same page, but overall everyone was set.

Once we had the interim crit we realised we would have to quickly change or alter our brand and we were able to do that incredibly fast, and we then managed to do a lot of work in a short amount of time. Although we didn't win I was proud of our finished branding and I really liked that brief which I wasn't expecting to.

One thing I would change if I were to do a similar brief is that I would make sure I documented all of my work a lot better. In this brief I got caught up completing the work and making sure I had done my part that I forgot to take the time to stop and record what I was doing and why.

But, overall I really enjoyed this brief and James, Lo and Becky were really great to be in a team with and it's made me look forward to another collaborative brief.

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | Final Presentation

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | The Brief & Plan

Studio Brief 3 was another competition brief but this time we were in groups. It’s the first proper project that we have been in groups for so I wasn’t sure how well it was going to go. 

The brief was to brand the Level 4 and Level 5 exhibition for the the book cover redesigns that was taking place in the Leeds Library.   The winning group, chosen by the tutors would then have to produce everything and their branding concept would actually be used for the show. It was exciting to hear as it would have been more than likely everyone’s first time seeing their work printed and used for an actaul event.

When we started we started we wanted a clear plan of our project.

As a group we planned to do individual research to see what we liked, why we liked it and see if we could think of any concepts. 

We established what we wanted it to look lke quite early on but were unsure of a concept and reason for it to look like how we wanted it to . 

We then set ourselves jobs to do so we knew who was doing what, to make sure we didn’t waste time doing things twice for no reason.

With jobs set we were able to just carry on with work for a couple for days.

Overall, at the start we were moving slower than we had hoped for but eventually got the ball rolling. 

OUGD406 Studio Brief 1 | Evaluation

At the start of this brief I was really excited to get going with it. One being that I’m a huge music fan, music, art and film are my biggest interests so to be able to combine the two of them for a breif was great. Another reason being it was our first ‘live brief’. It was the first time we were designing a piece of work for it to be taken into the outside world, rather than it being just for our degree. I think everyone felt the same way, and the added element of competition made it even more exciting for everyone.

We only had a week to complete the brief, this includes; the research, initial ideas, developing those ideas and then finalising the response. At the time I was ill, so I didn’t start straight away and I missed the crits we had in class, which really did effect my progress as I wasn’t able to get other people’s opinions on what I was doing. So when I went back in to college after being off I made sure I asked people what they thought of my work and got some feedback at least.

If I were to do this brief again, I definitely would gather more feedback, although the feedback I did get was helpful, even more would have been better. Also, looking back I didn’t explore a range of ideas thoroughly enough as I would have liked, which I say every brief. This is something I will definitely work on improving in Level 5.

Overall, I am happy with how my final response came out as I was able to do what I wanted with it, so I did illustration which I haven’t done a lot of since starting the course.

Although, I would have liked to have a wider range of ideas and possibly even do more than one song.

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | Finished Booklet

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | Interim Crit Feedback & Alterations

 Overall Simon could see how our concept worked but said it was too futuristc and sci-fi like. He said the logo was too complicated and wouldn;t work on a small scale and it was too complex, but it wored well on the larger things such as the fron of the booklet and the posters Lo designed.

Simon also liked the idea of focusing on the rectangular shape of an A4 piece of paper, and said it's something to stick to as the front of the booklet looked 'striking'.













Some more feedback I got was it was either show everyone's work, or nobody's.

Another thing that changed in our brand was the colour scheme, the blue only added to the sci-fi look.








-Logo is too complex
-Brand is too futuristic
-Change the blue
-Change elements of the booklet

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | Booklet Development

One of my jobs was to create the booklet that would be handed out at the exhibition. There were no set guides as to what should be in the book so I had to think of what I would find useful if I were a viewer of the exhibition. I decided:

-Information about LCA
-Information about the course
-Information about the work on display
-Names of students
-Exhibition information

Design wise I wanted to focus on the size and ratio of an A4 piece of paper as all work was going to be displayed at that size.


This is all I had done going into the interim crit becauseI was unsure of how much our brand was going to change and I wanted to get some feedback off Simon before I went any further with this look.

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | My Own Initial Branding Idea

When we were doing research everyone was looking into things they liked, and what they thought worked well and making notes, and coming up with some ideas. I did this as a quick idea by myself.

The concept was to focus on the shape and size on the A4 piece of paper that all pieces of work were displayed on and then use jigsaw like geometric shapes to make up the A4 shape.

The whole group weren't too keen on this idea so we didn't go with it.

OUGD406 Studio Brief 3 | Research and Initial Thoughts

We all did out own research at first to get an idea on how we wanted our work to look.
But when it came to coming up with out own ideas it did take a while as every idea we thought of had some sort of flaw.

In the end we did come up with an idea based around the concept of 'joining the dots'. We thought this was a more than suitable concept because all of the book covers are for different types of theory books and it's in a library, a place of learning. The idea of joinging the dots links to the learning process.

From the research we did we decided that geometric shapes would work really well. James then had the idea of linking it to the flower of life. Which has connections to knowledge and enlightenment through learning.

We got to this shape as it links to the flower of life but also keeps to the aesthetic of geometric shapes that we wanted and also is connected by dots.

For this concept we had a range of names such as; Re-connect, connect, connections, connects, connecting, links, joins, connect the dots, theorise. We settled on Re-Connect because it was as if the old books are reconnecting with a  new, modern audience. This is similar to the fact it's a modern exhibition in an old building. 

Next we decided who was doing what.

Invites - Dan
Posters - Lo
Flyers - James,
Signage - Becky,
Booklet - Dan,
Labels/plaques - Becky,
Exhibition website - Lo,
Bookmarks/post card - James

OUGD406 Studio Brief 2 | Magazine Covers

In past briefs I have taken a lot of inspiration from magazines such as Port, Elephant and Fufu when it comes to layout and composition. Although this is a magazine, not a theory book, the key elements are the same. Colour, type, image and composition. I need to look into all of these to make sure my book cover looks good and effectively communicates important bits of information like the title and author. 

Port

With all of Port's covers it features a portrait of a single person. This looks really great and striking for a magazine cover as it quickly tells the viewer who is featured inside, but for this brief doesn't work. I think having a portrait of Josef Albers on the front of my book would be very strange and doesn't fit the academic feel I want to achieve. 

Elephant

I really like Elephant magazine and I have taken a lot of inspiration from it in the past so I thought it would be useful to see how they used image and type on the front of their publications. 

Out of the three shown I prefer the at the bottom as I really like the composition of the type; the way it overlaps onto the image and it isn't even on both sides. 

OUGD406 Studio Brief 2 | Book Covers 1

Although not they're theory books, I think looking at what these books have to offer will be useful because the main focus is obviously graphic design. I will be able to see how the covers represent the content of the book. 

'Thinking With Type'

This cover shows that overall it is about typography, and makes it appear it is naming the different parts of the letters, where really it's telling you what is inside. For example where the descender on the 'Y' is circled, instead of it saying 'Descender' it reads 'how/why'. This may be to make the reader look inside and buy it to find out more about the anatomy of type.

'Graphic Design School'

 The cover of this book is pretty horrible in my opinion. I'm not entirely sure what it is they're trying to get across. The images kind of show what might be in the book such as the CMYK one and the type image but it's very unclear and looks untidy. It seems like they haven't followed a grid which makes me not trust this book. 

'The A-Z of Visual Ideas'

I really like this cover because at first glance it really doesn't make any sense until you read it. The concept is pretty simple once you see what it's called. The mounted deer on the wall represents the middle of the word 'ideas'. I think this works really well because the idea behind it is pretty funny and unusual in order to grab the viewers attention, and this book is telling you methods to get the attention of the public.

'100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design' 

 I don't think this cover makes it very clear as to what is inside the book. Apart from the sticker, which people may remove, there is no mention of the title on the front or back cover, only on the spine, but the spine isn't on display in shops. I think the idea behind the cover is that it's making it as busy as possible, to represent all of the information that is in the book. I'm not sure exactly how many words or phrases are on the cover, but I suppose it's possible they have put 100 on there.

'Just My Type'

The cover of this book makes it very clear what this book is about. The large lettering, the multiple typefaces and the name to go with it all contribute towards the communication.