OUGD603: Extended Practice - DBA "Capital North" Brief Final Outcomes

Final outcomes presented to DBA

Final identity for Capital North representing the unity of four diverse cities to create one unique entity and how they are stronger together.

Posters designed and produced by Joe Harrison featuring a hand-drawn vector illustration of famous landmarks from each of the individual cities, the illustration rotates on each design demonstrating the ‘stronger together’ concept.

 

Train and taxi liveries designed and produced by Sarah Butler representing modernity through the incorporation of the skylines of the corresponding city.

Proposal for how the branding could be applied to the top of vehicles such as trains, taxis and buses produce by me, proposal is appropriate for our big idea in terms of modernity as the idea is the branding will be able to be seen by the professionals in their skyscrapers.

Particularly inspired by the ‘I amsterdam’ installation and how it has become a large part of the tourism culture in Amsterdam.

The most effective examples of installations found during the research process were designs which not were visually appealing but could also be directly interacted with by the audience themselves which is something we felt would be appropriate with our outcomes. 

Proposal for an environmental typographic installation by Leo Sims. The use of frames as letter supports allows a variety of uses such as canvas application, plant growth, climbing frames, rope installation and in turn enabling to our branding to really become part of the environment within the city.

 

OUGD603: Extended Practice - YCN Collaborative Brief Distribution

Before producing the mockups we put a lot of consideration into how and where our message could be distributed bar the obvious route of the Library etc. With Jane being a parent herself she suggest book bags which she knew from personally experience was how a lot of the information from the school was passed onto by parent.

I suggested that it was something which could possibly be promoted at the Scholastic travelling book fair which are events I remember attending as a child.

A travelling box set of books and posters will be distributed to schools throughout the UK to drum up excitement and raise awareness of the campaign.

The flyer which will be distributed to parents through the book bags of children from reception to year six and will offer a discounted price for the box set at book shops and libraries.

We proposed that the retail price will be £4.99 as this is considered a realistically affordable price for most parents. 

Poster will also be distributed on the interior and exterior of libraries showing where the box set can be purchased.

To catch the attention of parents we proposed to place the posters around town where they may pass daily such as on buildings, near cafés where people sit and rest for a moment and can take in the message.

These various posters could also be placed at strategic points in the underground were lots of working parents pass daily. 

OUGD603: Extended Practice - YCN Collaborative Brief Jane's Contribution

Whilst I concentrated on developing the illustrations and books, Jane began to think about how the seven books could be packaged as set and any applicable promotion to raise awareness of the reading challenge within our intended target audience.

Initially we had decided to package the books similarly to a row of houses reflecting the content of each book with the idea that each story would be set in each house thereby linking the books together. However following a discussion we decided that this would be unrealistic in the time frame we had.

I still felt it was important that the their was a sense of excitement to finishing one book and 'unlocking' another as this would be something that would encourage the children to keep reading. I particularly liked the idea of somehow incorporating the concept of an advent calendar in which each window can only be opened on a certain day in order as I know this was something I personally found exciting as a child.

Jane made a few sketches and mock-ups and ultimately decided that the most practical solution would be to house each book in a padlocked draw which would be stacked on top of each other. The first key would be placed somewhere on the outside of the box ideally in shrink wrap and subsequent keys would be placed on the last page of each book fuelling the anticipation to finish the book.

The original structure for the box is made out of mount board and then covered with a design printed on standard 120 gm stock strengthening the frame. Each of the seven drawers was made out of cartridge paper which we tested and was suitable to hold the books for the purpose of a mock-up.

I am really pleased with the high standard of the box Jane has crafted. The mount board has been covered precisely by the stock with the design on it giving a professional feel which will photograph well. Initially we stubbled with fastenings for the padlocks which were quite heavy and threatening to ruin the structure however after some discussion Jane resoled the issue by designing and producing her own in acrylic using the laser cutter which worked significantly better.

Our aim in creating a box for the set to be housed in was to produce something that would ideally be a keep-sake and after the reading challenge was over would still be kept by the child which is extremely likely considering the high quality craft of the box.

Alongside this Jane also produce a series of poster advertising the box and the reading challenge itself as well as a flyer which included a money off voucher for the box set.

OUGD603: Extended Practice - YCN Collaborative Brief, DPS Design Development

Although it is not a target audience I tend to work for regularly, I do enjoy designing for children. Prior to the course I designed a book for children in which I put emphasis on experimentation of type and layout which is something I would like to develop further in the YCN Collab brief.

One of the particular pieces of inspiration for my design work was from Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland in which in the paragraph about a mouse the type has been formatted into the shape of a mouse's tail. I like the way that Carroll has used his design and layout of the words to portray exactly what they are saying which I personally believe is engaging and more interactive than a heavy paragraphs on a page.

Visually pleasing layout

The mixture of digital and hand-rendered in this design is unique and engaging

In the examples seen above the designers have used similar techniques as seen in Lewis Carroll's design, using the placement of the type or type settings such as bold, italics and capitalisation etc. to portray the meaning of the word.

As we intend to target young readers from 6-8 years old aiming to encourage them to read I believe these techniques will be effective as they would be a engaging to a child and more exciting to look at.

Another aspect I took into consideration before I began designing was the amount of body copy I would include in each DPS, speaking from experience I felt large paragraphs of type would be off putting when just beginning to read and therefore made the decision to include as little body copy as I could in my DPS.

For the first DPS of my short story 'Far Away Adventures' I spread out the body copy as much as I could so that there was never more than a couple of lines together. I wanted to make the information as visual as possible similarly to the 'mouse tail' so I also attempted this by making a numbered list.

Another technique I attempted was experimenting with type formats - which is common in children's books -  such as italics or underline in order to emphasis an important word of phrase in the sentence and capitalisation and type weights in order to represent the meaning of the word visually.

12 / 2  / 15:

Although me and Jane had originally proposed to meet up on the Wednesday afternoon due to commitments to other group projects such as DBA we decided to show and discuss the DPS layout we had been working on, on Thursday to ensure we were both on the same page and there was a continuity to our work.

Although I had not yet digitalised my illustrations I was able to propose my ideas for a more visual layout for the body copy as well as some initial sketches I had drawn by hand.

Although Jane liked the layout of my DPS she was quite concerned with how long the book would be should all the body copy be quite spaced out as our concept was that the book would be read in 10 minutes.

I am primarily a hand-rendered designer within my design practice and therefore I was really looking forward to producing illustrations in the aesthetic me and Jane chose which I felt suited my personal style extremely well.

I began by illustrating all the images from the book by hand, although this was incredibly time-consuming I think it is a lot me authentic and engaging than trying to recreate the same hand-rendered style artificially by using Adobe illustrator.

These drawings were then scanned into Illustrator and traced using the Image Trace tool which keeps basically digitalises my drawing keeping the same varying stroke widths etc. which would be difficult to create solely using the computer.

This black stroke illustration then overlaid the block colour, with a water colour brush effect. Originally I was very eager to again use watercolour by hand but I did not own any of the appropriate material and this would of further expanding the time I required for the process.

I did however attempt to make it as authentic as possible misaligning the watercolour and black stroke slightly to give the same effective achieve when done by hand which could look imperfect but visually effective.

I was able to develop what I felt was an efficient way of working in which I would read through the story, then copying the body copy into Indesign where I would be design the layout being as visual as possible with the type where appropriate, once I had the layout of the type I made a list of what I would need to illustrate to fit in with the layout.

Another concern Jane shared was the typeface which I had chosen, I had originally chosen futura as it is quite a simplistic, sans serif font which is a style we had agreed on, I also felt it would work well with the style of illustration we had chosen. Jane had chosen Arial which is renowned for it's readability. As we had both approached the DPS design very differently we decided to print both our designs out to scale to be able to compare them more effectively.

Although Jane did have her doubts about Futura she did compromise on this particular decision.

Following our meeting I digitalised my illustrations by scanning my original sketches into illustrator and using the image trace tool. By drawing the illustrations by hand beforehand and using this technique I believe their is more of a authentic 'hand-rendered' feel rather than attempting to recreate this effect using the pen tool on illustrator.

16 / 02 / 15

I met with Jane briefly today in order to discuss our current progress for the brief, although we had agreed on Futura for the typeface she had done some research into readability of type, particularly for young children and dyslexic children and raised some valid point about whether Futura would be appropriate for our final outcome(s).

Jane's Research:

Some points of interest from Jane's research which we should take into consideration:

• Good ascenders and descenders on b, d, f, h, k, l, t and capitals for dyslexic readers
• Typefaces which is like hand writing are effective
• Sans serif 
• Dyslexic people prefer Arial to times new roman
• The rounded 'g' on Arial is pleasing to read
• Century gothic is effective for the rounded letterforms 
• Century gothic - The 'n' is not a vertical reversal of the 'u' but it has no serif like cursive hand writing
• Most children learn to read by learning which sounds go with which shapes until they blend together to form words
• New readers proceed slowly and sometimes struggle with pronunciation
• Typefaces for children's books should look warm, friendly and simple 

Recommended:

• Rounded and open
• Larger x-heights are easier to read 
• 14pt - 24pt
• Generous leading
• Short line lengths

Although I admit I prefer the style and aesthetic of Futura to Arial the points Jane made were extremely valid in terms of how appropriate our final outcome will be, which I do agree with. Ultimately our books need to fulfil the purpose of the brief which is to encourage children to read and therefore Arial is a more appropriate typeface.

Final DPS for Far Away Adventures

Overall I am extremely pleased with how these initial DPS designs have turned out. I made a conscious decision during the course of the development stage to keep the layouts as visual as possible as I know from my own experiences as a child that a large wall of type can be off-putting, I think this idea of numbering list etc. which I have used achieves this effectively as it breaks down the information further and clearly.

Taking inspiration from C.S Lewis's 'Mouse Tail' I was also able to add more a design element to the placement and aesthetic of type in the layouts rather than just copying and pasting large paragraphs of type. I particularly enjoyed the challenge of visually representing a word purely by different type formatting and this this is effective in the final designs.

The layout of the type also incorporates in the image into the text a lot more making the whole composition as a whole which is again visually appealing to children.


25 / 02 / 15

Once we had our initial DPS designs me and Jane decided to meet up in order to get an idea of where we were up to and how to proceed from this point.

Although we had initially agreed that we would each design and illustrate three books each and then possibly design the final book together and had initially set a series of rules and an aesthetic we wanted for the illustrations we discovered at our meeting that each of us understandably interpreted these differently, and approached it out own way

As a result we found it difficult to match our styles in order to create a sense of continuity. 

We asked a couple members of the year and the consensus was that it would be more productive for the brief to have one concentrate on illustrating books etc and the other to think about the packaging and other promotional material which was necessary for getting our message across, which would solve this issue of continuity throughout our series of books.

Jane's illustrations which she produced solely using Adobe Illustrator

My initial illustrations which I hand-drew and then scanned into Adobe Illustrator

As a result of this I was left with the responsibility of designing the body copy and illustrations for seven books which did feel quite daunting especially with my own personal briefs I was undertaking for the extended practice module at the time while Jane produced a range of promotional material and the packaging for our books.

Final DPS mock-ups