Real Jobs by Jasmine Sheppard, Jaf Rahman, Nelly Bridger Morales, George Wade and Ameera. Khan

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Real Job for Art students by Amy North, Karissa Ng and Wassim El Khatib

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Real Job by Ameera Khan

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Background

Andrew Mangham and Emma Aston from the Classics department at the University of Reading anranged for an exhibition presented in the Madjeski Gallery at the Reading Museum, showcasing works of painter Paul Reid and sculptor Eleanor Crook. This exhibition looks at the ‘the biological and artistic meaning of diversity and difference, and the vital role that history plays in our understandings of the dynamic working of natural history’.

Restated brief

The brief was to design a catalogue entitled In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient Myths for the exhibition presented in the Madjeski Gallery at the Reading Museum and to design and send this to print in time for their exhibition by the 25th August 2023 (dated decided on towards the end of the project). The catalogue will showcase feature short essays from experts in ancient history, literature, fine art, and gaming  as well as images of paintings and sculptures by artists, Paul Reid and Eleanor Crook.

deliverables

• Design of front/spine/back cover
  • Identify images by Paul Reid to create a front cover with presence.
• Design of front matter including:
  • • Title page
    • Table of contents
    • Acknowledgements
      
    • Foreword
      
    • Layout of 6 x 1000 word essays including provided
      illustrations
      
    • Illustrations for decoration and for essays as
      requested/suggested by client
      
    • Layout of catalogue of artworks on display, exact
      number of artworks and images thereof to be
      provided. Details are: title/date/medium

Design process

Research

In our initial meeting with the client we found that the aim of the catalogue was to create a catalogue that will effectively showcase the the paintings and short essays. The layout should assist the reader in way-finding in the exhibition.We began by looking at Rubens to Sickert: The Study of Drawing,  a previous exhibition book as our client said they would like the catalogue to have a similar design and format. 

Ideation

inside pages

We began by researching what similar catalogue books had done for their page composition. After looking at  ‘Rubens to Sickert: The Study of Drawing’ we kept our book in a square format as well and kept some of the same composition like keeping all text on the left with a wide margin for references. 

Cover

After meeting with our client we learnt that would like to have the painintg ‘The Cyclops’ by artist Paul Reid who is an artist featured in the catalogue and the exhibition.

We designed two possible cover ideas, proposal 1 following the themes of the inside pages where it used the same typefaces and alignment and proposal two was a little more experimental using a a more gothic typeface to link more with the topic of the catalogue. After the meeting the feedback was:

• Proposal 1:
  Likes the serif typeface as it gives a professional quality to catalogue

• Proposal 2:
  Likes that the original image wasn’t edited and kept to the correct brightness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Overall:
  Wants the cover to match the seriousness of the pages inside the catalogue.

We decided to continue with proposal one as it was the most liked by the client as it still kept elements from the inside of the book and seemed like it was all part of the same catalogue.

Design development

Typography

Cover

At this stage, Richard had graduated and left and I worked on continuing with this project. I had continued with proposal one but following feedback, the typography and alignment of the inside pages had changed and so I changed the text on the cover to match the inside pages.

Inside pages – Essay

Following feedback, I worked on  two different page compositions for the essay portion of the catalogue. Layout one still continued with the long text block on the right side of the page with a wide margin and with the facing page image left aligned. This layout  had a lot of white space and made the pages look asymmetrical and a little empty.  Layout two used the margin space for the essay author’s biography which helped to fill the space and had a reduced line length for the body copy. The facing page image was now smaller and aligned with the author name on the following page. This layout had better flow and so I chose to continue working on this design.

Inside pages – Catalogue images

I received the images towards the end of the project but as I had a basic page layout plan, I placed the imaged according to it. I quickly realised my planned layout wouldn’t work as my layout had squared images. I changed my layout so that bigger images would have their own page and grouped smaller images where I could so that the images weren’t too spread out.  I felt that layout two had better flow to the pages and continued with designing this version.

Final stages

I received an unexpected and sudden deadline of a week left to complete the catalogue. During this week, I had to work on completing the catalogue images section. This was a little difficult as I didn’t have all the images till halfway through the week but once receiving them I was able to place them into my planned layout. Through this week I also worked on finalised the cover of the catalogue and carried the decisions I made on the cover through to the title page.

Reflection

We regularly communicated with a clients through teams calls once every fortnight and  received relatively quick responses which was helpful during the designing stage as we weren’t waiting on the clients response. However, we had been brought into the project long before we were needed as when we had joined in March, the client didn’t have finalised copy until September and the images for the catalogue images till towards the end of the project.  We received a lot of positive feedback after the catalogue was printed and it was well received.

Background

The Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology in the University of Reading had held the exhibition Locus Ludi: Anyone can play! from 5^th September – 30^th November, showcasing the games played in the ancient world and understanding the educational, societal, and integrative role of play in the past, which is important to understand the present and widen the debate on high tech toys and new forms of sociability. The exhibition’s aim was to show everyone that people of all demographics can engage in playing games and this will be showcased through the exhibition of objects related to various games, ranging from childhood to adulthood. The exhibition aimed to teach the audience about the different games played during the Ludic culture and engage in the interactive activities included in the exhibition and send out the message that everyone enjoys engaging in various games, no matter what age. The exhibition was targeted towards everyone of all demographics as the objects on display range from childbirth to adulthood, as well as including objects related to after death.

Restated Brief

The brief was to design the physical materials for the Locus Ludi: Anyone can play! Exhibition. This included display panels, promotional banner, an online exhibition booklet and educational outreach materials, all of which would be displayed during the exhibition, with the booklet being available online. Most of the details of the deliverables were undecided at this point of the brief and was subject to change during the process of this project, however, having visited the exhibition space in person, it was ready to go forward with drafting ideas.

Deliverables

After discussion with the client on what would work best for each of the deliverables, this is what was decided on:

• Display panels:
  • To be placed in each display space to inform audience of the collections, an overall summary of the exhibition space.
• 2 promotional banners promoting the exhibition:
  • First one would be a roll up banner, which would be placed in the corridor of the building for promotion.
  • The second one would be at the front entrance of the exhibition room.
• Information booklet:
  • An interactive PDF file in A4 format.
• Educational outreach materials:
  • Including information about the games on display

All of the deliverables mentioned above would be submitted to the client in PDF format but was subject to change if needed.

Research

As there was a lack of resources provided during the research stages, there was little research conducted. However, the client had kindly provided us with their house style in terms of typefaces and brand colour, which helped with developing initial ideas for the deliverables. Furthermore, having also paid a visit to the exhibition space to find out the measurements for the display cases, helped with designing the display panels, which would work as supporting materials for the exhibition display items. Research was also limited due to not gaining enough information from the client and poor communication from both sides, leading to months of no work being done from both ends.

Colour palette

To match the museum’s branding, the client had decided on the colour Purpurrot as the brand colour of the exhibition, as it complimented well with the museum’s branding. Both the HEX code (#691B23) and Pantone code (491 C) was provided, which then helped with developing the deliverables and implementing the branding onto them.

Typefaces

According to the Museum’s house style, Parisine was chosen as the typeface for body text within the family, the regular, italic, bold and bold italic weights were to be used for body and label texts. The bold weight was also to be used for titles and subtitles.

 

 

 

For listings and item numbers on labels, the client had requested that Parisine Clair was to be used and had also provided an example how all of the styles combined would look like when used in designing the panels and banners.

The museum logo was already provided; therefore, it wasn’t needed to create anything new for that, but nonetheless, the client had provided us with the typeface name used in their logo, in case it was needed.

Other important things to consider was that the terms BC and AD when mentioning years were to be used in small caps and that hanging numbers were to be used in body text but lining numbers to be used in object numbers and case numbers. Their house style also indicated that they preferred Italics over quotes for use-mention distinction and use open punctuation for label text.

Design process

Starting off with designing the display panels first, there was three concepts in total. For the first concept, to keep it simple, the brand colour was used for the headings of each section with lines both on top and bottom of the heading. For the text, the house style’s typeface Parisine was applied. Furthermore, images were added on the display panels to support the body copy within them, with added captions to assist readers in understanding the references used throughout, as well as when they walk around in the exhibition space.

For the second concept, the same layout was kept, except for changing the background to black to try and make the display panels fit into the aesthetics of the display items. The third concept reflected more of the brand colour of the museum with a gradient background of dark red fading into black. All three of these concepts were also applied onto the introductory panels that were to be used in the exhibition space.

 

The design for the banner was kept similar to the banner that was on display during the duration of the existing exhibition and therefore the same layout was used. Modifications for the banner were made based on feedback from my supervisor, including a layout idea suggested by my supervisor himself. The main focus of the banner was information about the exhibition itself, so I tried to emphasise that by using different typesizes and weights to create hierarchy between the sets of information on the banner and balance it out with images related to the exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The design suggested by my supervisor focused on using one image to bring impact to the banner. He suggested making the Ure Museum of Greek Archaelogy logo smaller to avoid attention to it. The aim of this layout was to make the title more. As mentioned in one of his feedbacks: “In general the design lacks impact. Partly because nothing is really big, and partly because there isn’t a lot of space. You can achieve this by making more of the good image and dropping the other one. If not and it has to be small, you could try making Locus Ludi bigger – it could be across two lines in caps.”

For the educational outreach materials, nothing much was done for it as the client had requested it to be a typical A4 sheet of paper of game rules and instructions and therefore, I only designed A4 sheets containing the game rules and added illustrations, which were provided and then refined by me, onto the document, using different typesizes, weights and spacing to make it presentable

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Final product

During the final stage, due to poor communication, most of the deliverables were not delivered to the clients on time and as a result, the design ideas for each deliverable did not progress further. However, the client was still willing for me to work on the educational outreach materials and therefore over the next week, progress was made on the materials.

In the mid process of refining the materials, the client had requested to submit the educational outreach materials as it was and after making quick adjustments to the files, thet were all submitted to the client.

Duodecim Scripta Game Rules

Ludus Latrunculorum Game Rules

Pente Grammai Game Rules

Self-reflection

As this was my first real job, it was a challenge to tackle, with communication being one of the biggest challenges during the whole process. However, the support from the Real Jobs tutors and my supervisor helped me with progressing further with this, despite the final results not being what was expected or desired. Having started off this Real Job as a two person job meant that the responsibilities would have essentially been divided between me and my partner, however, by the end of this Real Job, things had changed and it became a one person job, however, I took this as an opportunity to challenge myself and get as much done as possible. Overall, this was an interesting project to work on as it allowed me to look at the behind the scenes of setting up an exhibition and the thoughts and efforts that go into the whole process. All the skills I had developed and learnt during this project are valuable and I hope to implement them in my future works as well.

Student-led guides to university is a collaboration of guides with Reading Student Union (RSU) containing personalised advice and guidance to underrepresented and marginalised new students. This is so all students regardless of background or circumstance can feel supported, represented, and empowered during welcome week. Each guide is written by students and designed by students. This ensures the provided insights, diverse viewpoints, and understanding of campus life is more accessible to new students as they feel like they have been understood, creating a sense of community and connection.

Brief

We were tasked with creating two guides: Commuter Students’ Guide to University and First-Generation Guide to University. The goal was to create a coherent visual design across the two deliverables that also had the ability to expand for future editions. The guides need to provide an engaging way to relay key tips and contact information to students. We were provided with the copy, images, QR code and RSU branding but our clients gave us to have lots of freedom with the design of the booklets.

Deliverables 

• 2 print-ready, a5 multi-page guides for commuter and first-generation students
• 2 interactive PDF, a5 multi-page guides for commuter and first-generation students

Branding

In terms of aligning our design with current branding, we had a relative amount of freedom as the clients wanted to push the idea that the guide was made by students, and therefore steering the design away from the University’s branding helped us achieve this. We were directed away from using the University branding, colours, and recognisable climate stripes. However, we did have to include the Reading Student Union logo.

Audience

We identified our target audience to be new undergraduate and postgraduate students. This meant we had an advantage when designing as we were once the intended audience. We kept in mind that these guides were specifically aimed towards commuting and first-generation students, however we decided that it would be appropriate to design for all types of students so everyone could consume it easily. Understanding our audience was important in portraying an appropriate visual route so we carried out a range of document research aimed at students.

Research and ideation

When approaching this project, we decided it would be beneficial to research existing university guides. Although there were no existing ones that explicitly pushed the idea of being created by students, this process was still useful to recognise the norms of student guides, as well as highlighting areas of improvement so we could compete in the current market successfully. The main things we found out that we wanted to take forward were that coloured backgrounds are a useful tool in visually dividing sections, images can help to make the guide engaging, and icons are helpful in giving a quick overview of what is to come. We also researched varying forms of editorial design so we could understand how different layouts work for portraying different types of content.

Creative direction

After understanding the content of the guides, the target audience and investigating some existing guides, we began creating mood boards. We discussed ideas and showed the mood boards to our clients to make sure we were heading in the right direction whilst also ensuring the clients were on board with our visual approach. From this, we learnt they were not keen on the corporate style and wanted a more fun and approachable feel with lots of bright colours. The images we were provided with by the clients gave a corporate feel which we needed to steer away from. Therefore, we decided upon an illustration route to ensure our guide would stand out and was known that it was made by students, demonstrated in the fun illustration style.

Design development

After understanding the visual route, we needed to take, we created some initial sketches for the inside pages and front covers. Our clients gave us the feedback that they wanted a more fun and approachable design.

We then moved on to develop more sketches which took a more fun and colourful approach. The ideas that were liked the most by our clients and supervisor were concept two but with the line drawing style of concept one. These designs showcase university in a fun and inviting light making new students feel welcomed and accepted by the different communities.

These are the further developed sketches for both the commuter and first-generation guides. We developed them further by looking into different illustration styles and deciding which ones worked best for these guides. One comment from our clients was that the green could span across the whole page so that the speech bubbles weren’t cut in half. This meant we changed our half colour approach throughout. An element that we struggled with was coming up with a way to make the university services page more exciting and less text heavy. A solution to this was to include icons as well as relevant illustrations to the different points talked about.

Colour and typography

We experimented with typography looking at clear typefaces that would work well with the style of guides. We decided on using the typeface that the university use, Effra. This typeface works as it is very legible, versatile, and most importantly is accessible with clear letterforms and balanced spacing, making it easy for all students to read.

Picking the colour pallet was difficult as we wanted to have a different colour for each of the sections. We decided that a bright colour pallet worked best and found 6 colours that both contrasted and complimented each other.

Content page

We did lots of experiments in order to come up with an interesting and easy way to use the contents page. We ended up using the colours from each of the sections to make navigating the document easier. This content page works well as it gives the reader an insight of what is to come whilst sticking to the theme of our guides.

 

Our tips

This section’s main goal was to clearly differentiate the five tips. Using big numbers and highlighting the topics of each tip was a successful way in doing this. Changing the colour of the text halfway through proved to be distracting and broke up the flow of reading so we removed the colour from behind the writing. We decided the short introduction provided by the clients would work better as an additional tip so we changed this, which once again enhanced the reading experience as it gave the spread a better flow. A general change we applied to the whole guide was making the section titles sentence case so they were less harsh. Another change that was made throughout was the illustration style. This developed into a more interesting style that had varying line weights and the highlights were less prominent.

Frequently asked questions

For this section we wanted to separate each question with speech bubbles. We at first kept it simple by having the question and answer inside the speech bubble. Then we were asked to include some images that related to each question. However, after showing this to our client and supervisor we decided that pictures were not appropriate in this guide as we were limited to the student union’s image bank which weren’t relevant to these guides and looked too much like stock images. To ensure we had some visual interest for each question, we continued down the illustration route, creating a relevant illustration for each question. This broke the section up nicely, gives context to each question and tied in with the theme of illustrations throughout the rest of the guide.

University services

This section brought some challenges as it included a lot of important copy which did not allow for experimental design as it needed to be quickly and easily understood by the reader. Some tools we used as a way of bringing visual interest to the pages were colour, illustrations, icons and typographic hierarchy. We created icons to represent “website”, “email” and “phone” as this emphasises the information rather than the descriptive words. Once we moved away from the half colour spreads, we drew this landscape illustration to break up the text so it did not look so heavy. We knew this orientation of illustration would work because the guides were being bound by staples so it could open out flat.

 

 

 

 

 

Glossary

Once again, this section is very text heavy so we had to ensure we created a design that would make it easy to read and highlight that there is loads of help available, avoiding creating an overwhelming scenario for the new students. We started off by using a rule to divide each definition, but this was deemed as too harsh. We then adapted our design to reflect a dictionary which was effective as it helped with navigation of the section, but it created too much white space and made the glossary too long. To develop it further, we stripped it back to just typography but used space and typographic differentiation to create an interesting but accessible design.

Union

The union page was a page that was introduced later in the project. We created and illustration of a band playing at the student union as well as the outside of the union building. As each guide had different amounts of copy for this section, we adjusted to this by moving the band illustration down to allow for some more room.

Cover

Our approach to the covers was to reflect what could be seen on the inside, illustrations and coloured pages. We went through many iterations in order to find a suitable combination of elements that sat nicely together on the page, as well as act as a tool in attracting people to pick up and read the guide. We introduced this blue colour as it is bright, fresh and positive which is a nice message to put across to new students. The illustrations had to represent the overall theme of each guide, first-generation students being relatively difficult to sum up but we decided that an image of students together and supporting each other was the appropriate message to put across.

We experimented with the placement of the blue block with the illustration on top and were advised to ensure there was a white section on the cover where the text could sit as we have kept typography on white backgrounds as a general rule. There was a stage in the process of designing the covers where we proposed the tagline of ‘for students, by students’. We thought this would be a useful way of emphasising the fact that these new students will be getting first-hand advice from current students. Our clients and supervisor were very fond of this tagline and we were suggested to create a sticker motif. However, after experimentation this did not work with our design as apart from the illustrations, we do not have any rounded graphic elements within the guides. The last major change we made was changing the text from all caps to sentence case. This made a huge difference in how approachable the guide felt as before it could have been portrayed as harsh, especially as the title was seen in a heavy weight of the typeface.

The RSU was requested to be added to the covers much later on in the project. This further solidified our choice of where to have the blue section as generally, logos are found in the top right corner of documents.

As for the back covers, we chose to reflect the design from the front cover, just with illustrations that appeared as those you were looking at the ones used on the front covers from the back.

 

Interactive pdf

As part of our brief, we needed to make interactive pdfs for each guide that will be hosted on the university website. To adapt our design to this function, we made buttons for the top right corners taking you back to the content, enhancing navigation throughout the document. We also made sure that all the links were clickable making it easier for our users to get the help they need.

Our own reflection

Overall, this project has taught me many things, number one being how to interact and communicate with our clients on a weekly basis. We learnt to address design challenges creatively and find solutions that met our client’s objectives. To meet our deadlines, we needed to have good time management skills sticking to our schedules. After completing this project, I feel more confident working on real briefs and look forward to working on more. – Daisy

I have learnt and improved on lots of skills throughout this project which I will be able to take forward and build on in future projects. We learnt to collaborate effectively by identifying each other’s strengths ad using them to our advantage to efficiently create these guides. This job brought about my first experience dealing with clients, but it was a very positive one as we worked well with them due to frequent contact and honesty from both clients and designers. Another skill I have had the opportunity to improve is file management and how to present work in a professional manner to the clients. We did this by creating annotated documents of our work so when we couldn’t show them a printed prototype of the guides and verbally go through the reasonings behind design decisions, the clients could understand the justification and edits we made in order to give us relevant feedback. Additionally, regarding file management, we had a shared folder that contained everything we created and needed for the project which ensured for a coherent experience when designing collaboratively. It helped that us as designers were often communicating with one another as well. One thing we could have improved on was proofreading the copy. Although we were assured that this had been done, we ultimately should have read through it thoroughly ourselves to ensure no mistakes were made. – Jasmine

The feedback we received was positive from both our clients. “We quickly built a friendly working relationship with you that enabled us all to synergise well as a team. I was very satisfied with the level of communication and the quality of the product. You were always both highly professional. Jasmine, you impressed us with your client management skills and struck a diplomatic balance between incorporating our suggestions and pushing back on them where necessary – I appreciated that. Daisy, you impressed us with your illustration and design talent, lending a unique hand-drawn style that enhanced the aesthetic and appeal of the design.”- Matt