Real Job: Georgina Wade, Lydia Hall and Taria Khan wrote and designed the fourth issue of the Typography and Graphic Communications’ ‘I am, we are… different by design zine’. 

Background:
The ‘I am, we are, different by design’ is a zine created by students from the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. The zine aims inspire a conversation by showcasing a diverse set of perspectives on design practice from students, alumni and design practitioners. This student-led project advocates for diversity and how to design with an inclusive mindset. We all got involved with the entire process of the zine, from planning and interviewing, to writing and designing. The opportunity to collaborate and learn from a variety of different creative perspectives we an inspiring part of the project to us. Seeing as this would be the fourth issue in the different by design, it made sense to continue the zine being A5. 

Audience:
The zine is particularly aimed at those who have an interest in the creative field and would like to be educated in how to become an inclusive designer. The main audience would be those associated with the Typography and Graphic Communication department, such as fellow students and tutors but also prospective students.   

Research:
The first task was to come up with topics that would suit the next issue of the zine. Coming up with the content proved to be a lengthy process, therefore as a team we brainstormed a variety of different topics we could potentially include within the zine. We created a mind map and came up with a few articles which we were very interested. We wanted to ensure our topic choices were diverse, yet still focused on diversity and inclusion. Initially, we looked at a variety of popular and current topics happening across the world, including the BLM movement or the Russo-Ukraini war. Additionally, we began looking at wider topics such as mental health, focusing on post pandemic mental health and the effects caused by the pandemic. Alongside our diverse range of topics, we wanted to showcase different artists and designers. Whilst also looking at a range of popular and current diversity topics happening across the world, we also wanted to include topics that were personal to us. 

Interviews:
The first interview stage involved looking for a range of designers which specific interests to our zine topics about diversity and inclusion. As a group, we were each assigned one interview topic each to follow up and research. Since all our interviews featured our interviewees work, it was important to have the ethics approved before conducting our interviews. Our initial contact with our interviewees was conducted over email, enabling us to arrange our interviews online through emails or zoom calls. Our interviewing process allowed us to develop our own professional skills due to the professional nature that comes with conducting interviews. As well as giving us first-hand insight into diversity and inclusion about our chosen topics.  

After collecting all our interview content, we then set about writing up our articles. All our interviewees had provided us with a wealth of information to work with, especially the Sky interview with Aanand and the ‘Design Can’ interview with Sabine. Copy writing the information to fit the zine proved challenging to us to ensure all out topics fit into the zine. By copywriting the information down it enabled us to consider our audience more and how they might engage with the zine’s content. 

Copy Writing:
After one member of the team left, we had three people, we all spent the entire summer and autumn term collecting data for articles. For all the articles we read appropriate books, articles and other online resources to help us understand what we wanted to show to our readers.  

Designing:
We started our design development stages by looking at the previous zines, focusing on the individual styles within each of the zines. This enabled us to get a better understanding of how we might create the potential style and layout of our zine. We eventually decided that each article would have its own personality, which each related to the subject of the article, whilst still also being consistent to the rest of the zine. By ensuring that each article had its own theme, it enabled us to demonstrate a diverse range of article designs throughout the zine. Additionally, this also enabled us to experiment with a range of different design methods, such as designing with an inclusive mindset through colour blindness, as well as culturally through Pakistani truck art and Urdu. 

Typography:
Our choice of main text typeface was Halyard, as it was already being used in the latest issue to help created a sense of branding amongst the ‘Different by Design’ zines. By using existing paragraph styles from the suggested zine layout, it helped create the typography consistent throughout the zine. Each article then had a heading typeface which was related to the content, this allowed each article to have it’s own personality.  

Grid:
Lydia provided the group with a grid layout, that was to be used for all the articles. Since the design of our articles were all different, it was essential that our page layout was consistent. One challenge that we faced was caused by the nature of our topics, it was important that our page layout didn’t appear rigid. Our grid system was an A5 page, that consisted of 6 columns with a 10pt gutter. The left and right margins were set as the default (36pts), with the top and bottom margins set to 39.638pts and baseline grid set at 12pts. By having these column widths, it enabled us to have more flexibility with image size and column width for each of our articles. 

Interview sticker: 
To help differentiate the interviews and book reviews from our other articles, we created different coloured stickers at the top right-hand corner of the zine to help the reader find each of the interviews easily. The interview stickers are blue, and the book review stickers are pink.  

Example 1
Below are some of the developed spreads, from the first version to the final product. 

Example 2
Below are some of the developed spreads, from the second version to the final product. 

Production: 

The specifications of the zine: 

• A5 portrait booklet 
• 36pp text prints 4/4 on Edixion 120gsm 
• 4pp cover prints 4/4 on Edixion 250gsm 
• Saddle stitched 
• 1000 copies 

After Rachel and Eric had approved the zine, we created the press ready pdfs and sent them off to print. Geoff, our in-house print technician, was incredibly helpful in this stage of the project and suggested to make a few minor changes, such as changing the photos from RGB to CYMK. We were really excited to receive his email saying that the printed zines had arrived, there’s nothing quite seeing the printed object which we had written and designed!   

Reflection: 

Taria:
We felt like if the zine had some kind of branding which would make it consistent to all the past and future zines. For example, we had troubles with the typeface if we had consistent branding it would limit the errors. 

George:
Being part of this team helped me build on my communication and teamwork skills, enabling me to learn how to become more responsive and learn about methods such as ethics approval, which will be useful for the dissertation module. Having more freedom to choose and explore our own topics of interest for this zine was something I really enjoyed, as this is a unique opportunity on this course therefore it helped me to stay more focused and involved in the project. The challenges I faced were mainly focused on the Russo-Ukrainian poster, as this is something very personal to me therefore, something I really wanted to perfect.  

Lydia:
I really enjoyed being on a wonderful team of designers and collaborating with my peers. With a zine about diversity and inclusion it makes sense to have a team of people with different backgrounds and experiences. This project was different to others in the sense that there wasn’t really a hard deadline, while this was good in some aspects, I did struggle to motivate myself and to move the project forward. I have learnt that creating those deadlines for myself and the rest of the team will help to keep the project going.  

What are the Connectedness reports?

A set of three reports summarising past conferences taking place at Manchester University that will be given out at the June 2023 conference, Connectivity and Inclusivity in HEIs – A solution-based approach. The first report focuses on creativity and inclusivity in higher education and women in environmental science, followed by a smaller booklet that summarises key outcomes from the Women in Science report.

The Creativity and Inclusivity in Higher Education report showcases engaging and accessible resources which convey the methods, processes, and outcomes to key audiences and stakeholders. While also addressing the need for equality, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) initiatives to recognise lived experiences as essential to knowledge sharing and to directly inform practice.

The Women in Environmental Science report focuses on the way that the climate crisis will impact women, how we can bring women together with diverse backgrounds, lived experiences, ethnicities, and disciplines, to promote inclusiveness, widen participation and foster discussion, help to inspire women to engage with their environment and environmental sciences. Focusing on the key themes of Women’s rights and issues that comes with this, climate change, sustainability, leadership, community, relationships, and communication.

Brief

The brief was to create three reports that would be printed and handed out at the next conference, we also had to create interactive PDFs for each report that would be showcased on the website. While also combining elements from the different stakeholders, Manchester University, and the co-brand Engaging Environments.

Our goal was to create an interactive and engaging set of reports containing a strong super-graphic and illustrations throughout to capture the reader’s attention as the content was very text-heavy. The super-graphic we created needed to represent ‘connectedness’ as it was used throughout the documents, tying them together visually.

Deliverables:
Design x3 documents that will be hosted as PDFs with a limited print run.
Deliverables:
PDFs and limited print runs of:
• Women in Environmental Science report (A4)
• Women in Environmental Science Toolkit (A5 Booklet)
• Creativity and Inclusive in Higher Education report (A4)
• Super-graphic

Branding

For the branding of the reports, we needed to use both Manchester University and Engaging Sciences branding. We were given guidelines from both brands which showed us the appropriate usage of logos and typography.

Audience

Looking into the audience and stakeholders was an important part of the process of coming up with a visual identity. Looking at past events from Manchester University which was provided by a video from our client allowed us to create a list of potential users for each report:

Women in Environmental Science

• Women working in or with an interest in environmental sciences.
• Equality, Diversity, Inclusivity & Accessibility (EDIA) practitioners
• Higher education professionals
• Policymakers in environmental science
• Students
• Early career researchers

Creativity and Inclusivity in Higher Education

• EDIA practitioners
• Academics staff
• Students
• Researchers from the UoM comprising diverse ages, ethnicities, and career stages.
• Friends and community partners of UoM
• Communities and participants from all parts of the UK

After researching and speaking with our client we came up with a list to cater our work to the specific audience. The client was very open with what he wanted the design to be but put emphasis on using bright colours whilst avoiding gender stereotypes. The client also wanted bold and assertive graphics throughout as opposed to illustrations that could be seen as passive. Our main goal was to create a design is visually appealing, assessable, clear headings, navigation and easily understood data.

Finding a creative direction

After understanding the content of the reports and the target audience we began creating some mood boards and investigated some existing reports. Showing our client our mood boards allowed us to make sure we were heading in the right direction while also being able to ensure the client was on board with our aesthetic approach before designing.

Design development

As we had a lot of creative control over this project, we began with some initial sketches based on the mood boards. Overall, the client was excited about these initial ideas but commented how they wanted the front covers to focus less on science and more on hearing different people’s voices while showcasing diversity.

We then went on to develop some front cover sketches based on the client’s feedback by incorporating different women and avoiding science or gender stereotypes.

Feedback from our supervisor, we decided it would be better for the pages to be landscape as the content was text-heavy and contained multiple graphs and tables. After further feedback, our client liked concept three as it included a vibrant colour palette and the text in four columns made it legible.

Super-graphic

Our client wanted a logo/super-graphic that would be used to tie all three reports together. The three examples shown were given to us for inspiration, and we then began to create some sketches focusing on “connectiveness and community linking to the natural world element. Nature and ecology”. After speaking to both our client and supervisor, we decided to take a different approach and create something a bit simpler that could be spread across each of the pages as well as shown on the front covers.

The final super-graphic shows connectedness through two circles overlapping each other, this also helps add visual interest and break up the text-heavy pages.

Women in Environmental Science Report (WIES)

For the WiES report, we wanted to use bright colours and powerful illustrations that would be relevant and helpful alongside the text. Finding an illustration style was something we found quite difficult at first due to the content being very text-heavy there would therefore be lots of illustrations throughout. To help with this we came up with another mood board to help with some visual directions.

These two images show two different illustration styles that we experimented with showing the use of block colours and female empowerment.

Here are the illustration styles that we implemented throughout the reports. Showcasing women in different relevant elements of the report. We decided on this style as it is simplistic and easy to replicate in many forms while still being visually interesting.

The inside pages consisted of us using different colours for each of the different sections. This worked well in separating each section and carries through in the titles and super-graphics of each page. Through making this report we worked hard in creating visual interest in each page through different illustrations and images. We aimed to keep the pages different and not too text-heavy as this would bore the reader. This visual interest was upheld using speech bubbles are boxes to emphasise the standout information in the report.

A challenge that we faced was coming up with a way to show clear information in a table.  Below shows an initial table where we used different shades and lines to separate the information. However, this wasn’t a viable option as it is difficult to read with the line width being too small and not engaging for the reader. In the end, we had to think of a new way to display this information and decided to scrap the table idea and take the information out into its own sections. As you can see this way of displaying information works a lot better as the reader can take a glance and understand the text through the strong visual hierarchy that has been used.

Creativity and Inclusivity in Higher Education Report (C&I)

The client wanted us to focus this report more on nature and humans connecting with the environment. To do so we used blue, green and earth tones for the different sections as well as incorporating illustrations of trees, water, and rivers throughout. Although the two reports have different themes and content, we kept the same structure and illustration style as the WIES report.

Lessons from Women in Environmental Science (The WiES toolkit)

This report is a summary of the main WiES report but follows a different structure of an A5 landscape booklet. As this report is a summary it has a lot less text but still contains elements of visual interest with a clear structure.

Front covers

For the front covers we wanted them to reflect the content inside while also appealing to the reader. We began experimenting with different front covers the first being using an image that spread across the whole page and the other being more of an illustrative approach.

However, we decided that both of these didn’t fit and also didn’t give the reader an insight into what the report was about. The final cover designs that we came up with use typography and illustrations in a fun and engaging way that makes it clear what each report is about and follows the design inside.

Reflection

Feedback from are client was very positive. “Both of you worked extremely well on the Real Jobs project for Engaging Environments and our partner University of Manchester earlier in 2023. You absorbed a lot of complex information contained within the reports and on our calls regarding the project to produce designed outputs that were of a really high standard and reflected the themes of the work. Our partner was extremely happy with the reports, to the extent that they would like to produce a final report on Pt 3 of the C&I workshop in the same style, and the materials were also very well-received by the intended audiences at the event where these were shared.

You also worked to very tight deadlines, which was impressive given the size and scale of the reports that needed to be produced, and the commitment you showed to the projects throughout was very much appreciated.

I wouldn’t have any negative comments, I thought you both did a great job.”

Overall, this project has taught us many things with the main thing being time management and prioritisation. As it was such a big project with just over two months to complete three printed reports and three interactive PDF’s we needed to be realistic with what we could achieve in this time frame and didn’t have months of planning and sketching time like other projects would traditionally have. We were able to split the project up well to showcase both of our strengths while also allowing us to stay efficient in work production.

After this project we can both say that we have gained a lot more experience in editorial design as well as interacting with a client. We worked on our project management skills making sure the reports were ready for the event. We learnt to take on board feedback from both our clients and supervisors and create different revisions based on our feedback. Worked with branding guidelines, making sure that all the logos were placed correctly and maintained brand consistency. We learnt to address design challenges creatively and find solutions that met our client’s objectives.

Where to find the reports

All three reports can be found on Manchester University’s website under the WiES sections.

https://www.meri.manchester.ac.uk/wies/research/resources/

 

Background

Universal Voices is a free community choir for children aged 7-12 at the Institute of Education (IoE), run by Dr Rebecca Berkley and a volunteer student team. Singing Communities is a project funded by the UoR Communities fund. It is an inter-generational song sharing project, where the children in Universal Voices ask an elder member of their family (grandma, granddad, aunt, uncle, friend) to teach them a chant, singing game or song that they knew when they were children. Through this community, Rebecca aims to highlight the different cultural backgrounds of the students. Through the eBook, she aims to also disseminate it  to the local primary schools, to allow them to teach their students and also spread multicultural values to the students. Therefore, our aim as desginers, were to create an eBook that would allow users to both learn and engage in various cultures through the joy of music.

Restated Brief

As mentioned previously, based on the client’s goals, our brief was to create an eBook that celebrated the different cultures through songs collected by the children through their family members, with both front and back covers. This meant creating an identity that was playful and innocent, to reflect the contribution of the children, but at the same time informational, to reflect the educational value of the songs. All three of these elements needed to be balanced as Rebecca had mentioned that she aimed to distribute and use the eBook as an educational material for teachers to use, therefore, we had to make sure that it would be accessible and easy to navigate and understand.

The client had also requested us to design the eBook on Canva, with them also kindly providing us with the Pro version of this website to use during the designing of the eBook. This was so that it would allow them to make changes or add more songs in the eBook in the future. This was a new challenge for both me and my partner, Zainab, as we have never used this app before for editorial design, but nonetheless, was excited to start on this, as this meant that it will allow us with new skills and experience.

Furthermore, after further discussion, we had also agreed to refine their existing logo to allow them to have better formats of the logo for their future use as well as improve the clarity and quality of the logo.

Deliverables

After the initial meeting with Rebecca, and going over multiple options, we opted for an eBook that would be interactive, where each song will contain:

• Supporting music score
• Embedded video and audio links
• Lyrics, along with phonetic pronunciation and translation (if applicable)
• Description about the origin of the song.

For the book covers, the client’s vision was to make an inclusive and interesting cover but was open to discussion with us and therefore we were given the creative freedom to work on this.

For the logos, we agreed that we will provide the client with two sets of files, containing the appropriate file format, depending on whether it would be used in printing or on screens. The formats decided were:

• EPS, PDF, and TIFF files for print use
• SVG, PNG, and JPEG files for screen use

Research

When discussing the work with the client, she had mentioned that she was inspired by Nordic Sounds, an online e-book containing ‘pedagogical collection of traditional music, dance, songs, games, rhymes and lullabies from the Nordic countries: Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden’ (taken from the description used in the website) and although the website uses illustrations to support the songs, for this project, the client had decided not to include any illustrations as all the songs are from different cultures and would have no correlation between each other.

Moodboard

To help with developing our ideas and visualising the theme we aimed to design, we also collated a series of moodboard to help with this. Each moodboard contained ideas and pictures of a singular theme and using each of them helped us during the design process.

 

 

Colour palette

The client requested that we somehow incorporate the colour palette used by the Nordic Sounds website onto the eBook and therefore we tried doing that through taking the colours from their wordmark logo in the home page. However, she wanted them in pastel tones as they believed that the colours used in the Nordic Sounds website are quite bright. The choir consisted of children who are really young so therefore she wanted pastel colours to be used to make it soft and easy to read, instead of it being distracting with the bright, bold colours. They had also asked us to use a light beige colour for the background as this was what they use for their backgrounds in presentations.

Typefaces

For typefaces, we mainly went for the theme of childness and innocence, and therefore, focused on typefaces that resembled children’s writing or overall appeared handwritten. At the same time, we tried choosing typefaces that were legible and had a range of different weights for flexibility, however this was limited, as we had to choose from the list of typefaces available at Canva only and most typefaces had limited weights or had none at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After going through a range of typefaces and showing it both our supervisor and our client, we decided on Children One for the headings, and Childos Arabic for the body text. The different weights within Childos Arabic allowed us to create hierarchy within the body copy and also separate the song lyrics from the translation and phonetics. As some of the songs had lyrics in its native language, we had to find typefaces similar to Childos Arabic to accommodate. The combination of Children One and Childos Arabic worked well, as Children One highlighted the childlike appearance of the book and also reflected the contents of the book with its uneven letters, and it was well balanced by Childos Arabic, a Sans Serif, with its roundedness and flaired descenders.

Kids’ drawings

Since the children of Universal Voices were involved in the collecting and recording of the songs, we also wanted to reflect that on the eBook visually, and therefore we decided to do this on the front and back covers of the eBook. In order to do this, we paid a visit to the children during one of their rehearsals, where we got to talk to them about what they love and think about Universal Voices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After gaining some insight from the children themselves, we had also prepared an activity for them which involved them drawing out what they had told us regarding Universal Voices. This proved to be very productive, both for us and the kids, as this kept them engaged and also allowed us to have a good collection of drawings to select from when making the covers.

 

 

 

Design process

Sketches

To start off, with the advice of our supervisor, we sketched out layout ideas, focusing on clear and concise layout, as the goal was to make the pages be as much easy to navigate as possible and some of the layouts, we considered were having text on one side with all the images based elements to be the other side and vice versa. We also sketched out layouts where we made use of separating the content into top and bottom halves.

Initial layout

In our initial layouts, we wireframed some quick layouts to show to our supervisor and after getting feedback on how to create better layouts, as we had initially lacked the creativity in our design ideas, we went back on track and started using colour and different combinations of typefaces to create layouts, allowing us to better understand what worked well.

Some of the layout ideas we tried out involved colour coding each section of the spread, or by blocking each section in colours, as well as having a coloured background and playing around with placements of the score sheets and the video and audio links.

Reflecting the song’s origins

To make the eBook more educational and make it engaging for the readers, we brought up to implement another way kids can learn more about the origin of the song with a more visual approach, instead of only having a written section at the bottom of each page. Therefore, we suggested to add the flag of the country that the specific song originated for. In one of our suggested layout designs, the client had really loved the idea of the pages having a coloured border, which reflected the colours of the representative flag and therefore, to keep them consistent, we added those borders onto the prelim pages of the eBook as well, but instead used a combination of two colours from the main colour palette.

Refining logo

Since the logo only required refinement, the only thing done was redrawing the main element of the logo and vectorise it in illustrator. The original logo was used as a reference to redraw and for the typeface used on the logo, Futura was used as it resembled the closed to the original. The logo was drawn in three different colours: black, white, and red, with red being the brand colour, as the children in Universal voices wear a red t-shirt while performing in events and we wanted to reflect that on their logo as well.

Covers

As previously mentioned, we wanted to reflect the kid’s contribution to the making of the eBook and decided to do so through the covers. Having collected their drawings during the visit to one of their rehearsals, all of them were scanned and using both Canva and photoshop, the covers were made. Using Canva, I added in the selected drawings and created a collage. I specifically chose drawings that reflected very clearly what Universal Voices meant to the kids, as well as using hand drawn lettering done by one of the children as the title of the eBook, to highlight the innocence and enjoyment of the children and also reflect what the eBook was about. A crumpled paper texture effect was added onto the background of the covers to once again, reflect the childish nature of the eBook.

Final product

Combining different elements from each layout idea, we made our final design where each section was colour coded, and it was specifically emphasised for the video and audio links where the colour coding stayed consistent throughout the pages and this was useful as it allowed users to know which link referred to the audio or video as some songs only contained either one of them.

It was a great success, as we managed to deliver the eBook to the client on time. we also had the opportunity to present our work on the launch day of the eBook in front of all the kids and their families.

“At the launch of the e-book in November 2023, Jaf and Zainab came and presented to the audience explaining the work that they had done. Their presentation was clear and interesting, and they both spoke very well.”

– Rebecca Berkley, Artistic Director of Universal Voices

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, the client was very impressed with our work and loved the use of borders in the book and keeping a clear layout as mentioned below:

“They communicated regularly with me presenting draught ideas for the layouts for each page and the overall design of the book. They were very good at taking my ideas and turning them into reality. I was particularly impressed at how careful they were to make sure that their rendering of my ideas matched my vision. They were always cheerful, helpful, accurate and delivered on time. They made several suggestions about the layout which also improved the content of the book. Their communications were always professional and they delivered the product to the agreed timeframes. When we had to make an adaptation to the deadlines or the content, they were always very helpful in accommodating that. The overall design of the book was delightful. They created a visual style for the book which had a primary school feel to it, using bright colours and a clear layout. They matched the borders of each page to the colours of the national flag of the language of each song, which was a lovely detail in the design.”

– Rebecca Berkley, Artistic Director of Universal Voices

Self-reflection

Having the children involved within the designing of the book was a very lovely experience, as I got to see their creativity and apply that onto my own as well, and seeing their lovely work really inspired me to work on this eBook more efficiently. Knowing that the children liked the cover of the eBook was very heart-warming to me and made my experience working on this eBook very valuable.

“Jaflenur and Zainab came and worked with the children in Universal Voices to create artwork for the front and back covers of the book. They asked the children to draw pictures and write sentences about what the choir meant to them, and then copied the children’s art work and made a collage for the front and back covers. The children really loved seeing their art work in the e-Book. It was particularly popular with the children, because every child could see their artwork in the book and it made the book very special to the children. I have found working with both of them fantastic. Their credit to their department, and a really good example of what a great programme Real Jobs is.”

– Rebecca Berkley, Artistic Director of Universal Voices