DESIGN IDEAS AND DESIGN PROCESS

 Postcard Idea 1..

                                             

This was my favourite design and the one which I developed the furthest out of my three ideas. The aspect of this design which I developed the most was the type. Following on from my Podcast task (as seen in featured image) I wanted to continue to work with warping the type. I liked how this worked along side the image as I felt like it gave an impression of the crowd moving the letters around. I wanted to emphasise this sense of movement further in my postcard designs so to do this I developed different ways of enhancing the image and the format of the warped type. For this particular idea I decided to duplicate the picture, this is something I also did in my second idea but the way I utilised this differed. For idea 1 I flipped the image and cropped it (as pictured above) to create the impression of one mirrored image that frames the text. I liked the sense of balance this gave the postcard and how it emphasises the idea of the type almost being pushed around by the people in the image.

Postcard Idea 2..

                                            

Similar to Idea 1, I also duplicated the image in this postcard to enhance the sense of movement. This time I experimented with transparency, to create a blurred effect I lowered the transparency of the duplicated image and shifted it slightly in position (pictured above). I feel like this created a sense of movement in a different way to Idea 1. However I think this idea would off worked better with to similar images rather than two identical images to give the impression that the movement is changing as this would be more realistic. In order to develop my ideas I wanted to play around with the effectiveness of the warped text. Therefore in this design I warped some of the words but not all. I actually really like how this gives a focus on the most important aspect of the postcard which is the topic of type. I think this creates a sense of hierarchy within the postcard allowing it to inform the reader efficiently.

Postcard idea 3..

                                                                    

For my third idea, I actually wanted to explore using type that wasn’t warped. I wanted to see what effect this had visually compared to the warped type that I had used for the last two ideas. I didn’t want to alter the background image too much for this idea so I simply flipped it up side down. I still think this idea is effective but it did help me to realise that the warped text did work well in creating unity between the image and the text. In all my designs I made the word ‘with’ significantly smaller than the other two words as I wanted the focus to be on ‘talking’ and ‘type’ as these are the focus of the podcast/postcards.

SOFTWARE TUTORIALS

An issue that I encountered when completing this task in indesign is that indesign does not have appropriate tools to allow you to warp text. I got the idea to do this to the text through exploring photoshop in the previous task but when It came to working in indesign I realised that achieving these same effects within this software wouldn’t be possible. In order to solve this issue I searched for information on how to best transport images from photoshop into indesign.  I googled this and was able to find out that only certain files can be transported from photoshop to indesign. I created my text in photoshop and then imported it as a psd into indesign. This worked okay but i has to do one word at a time so that I could figure our where to place the different text layers once they were actually in indesign. I plan on carrying out more research on how to do this and on how to use the softwares together. I know that this will also become an issue when I need to import from illustrator to indesign in future so I found a tutorial to refer back to ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF9-l07KmDY ). I found that for this task, there was not much I actually wanted to manipulate in terms of image editing that I would need additional resources for. I felt as though my image was already prepared and edited in photoshop from first podcast task, to do this I had used a tutorial I found on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOTxsRTjkNM&t=741s ). This tutorial really helped me to learn different ways of removing parts of an image in photoshop and helped me to achieve a background image for my podcast and postcards that I was happy with. I think this Is something I could definitely  do with referring back to as I did find it quite complex the first time round, but it was good to experiment with different tools I had not used before.

RESOURCES FOR RESEARCH AND INSPIRATION

For this task I wouldn’t say I was inspired by any resources in particular it was more a case of exploring new tools within software and just experimenting until I got something that I liked and thought was effective in advertising a podcast. I wanted to represent sound in a still image so my goal was to create a suggestion of movement within the design. I searched through my own photography to generate initial ideas and found the image of the crowd. I thought this would be appropriate as a crowd of people with their hands in their air represents people listening to music at a concert/ festival. People obviously listen to a concert differently to how they would listen to a podcast but I still think this is a close enough associated. After importing the image into photoshop I thought about how the crowd could almost push the text around the page and then I developed this further by warping the text itself. I feel like this almost gives off a metaphorical meaning in how we manipulate type for design purposes. On reflection I should off taken compiled more sources of inspiration for my work however  I feel the process became more of an experimentation of tools than ideas which I think was beneficial in its own way. I think it would off been beneficial for me to have looked at examples of how others incorporate warped text into their designs and gain inspiration from this but overall I felt happy with my final outcome despite a lack of research/inspiration. I did have a look at a page provided to us for inspiration (https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/photoshop/how-to/composite-multiple-images-create-collage.html?playlist=/services/playlist.helpx/products:SG_PHOTOSHOP_1_1/learn-path:key-techniques/playlist:topic/set-header:get-inspired/en_GB.json&ref=helpx.adobe.com),  ‘How Molly Scannell created Taken’, which I did find really intriguing but I think I found this at a point in my design process where I had already developed my ideas in the first task and didn’t know how I would incorporate aspects of this kind of style into my work. The techniques of image manipulation that this designer uses are definitely something I plan to explore and gain inspiration from in future work.