Category: Student work
Reading Film Theatre
Every time I add my flyer as media it seems to add a link to the PDF version of it. But anyway here is the link below to click on if you want to have a look.
I chose to use only black and white, as I felt it differentiated it as a flyer rather than a poster (whilst keeping it simple). I used lines to separate each film and make it easier to read. I used a grid system within the 2 columns, to make the date, rating and time easier to follow and read rather than just a block of information.
I added in about us at the bottom as I believed that it is important to know who to contact and where to go.
A list for Reading Film Theatre
The feedback I was given was pretty positive but I made a few changes to the listing. I added a key for the symbols (cc) and (ad). This is something I chose not to do in my original design as I didn’t think it was necessary with the symbols being well known but after feedback I remembered the brief stating the listing must be suitable for international users. International users may have different symbols for subtitles and audio description so the key is important in this sense. Another criticism was that the text within the film descriptions often cut of mid word onto the next line so this is something I altered.
Bunny cinema listing
Here is my current final draft for the cinema project, my feedback suggested that I re arrange the halloween listing so that it flows down rather than across, and so that the ownership of the heading becomes less ambiguous. I edited my work by placing all the halloween showings on one column, and the regular showings on another.
I considered putting the halloween showings in a box but thought this might not look quite right, so i just moved them and edited the sizing and spacing a little to make it line up. I also changed the spacing between some paragraphs a little by moving the showing time onto the same line as the showing date, widening the space between the paragraphs and the headers.
Although I had a comment that the colour scheme might be visually confusing, I felt that it was what worked best and so kept it as it was. I did change some of the decorate elements as they did seem a little overwhelming, so I removed a few and changed others to give the illusion of more space.
Managing space – Flyer Design
By far one of my most favourite ‘mini’ project we had so far. Unlike other projects, this one was all about arranging and organising information, which is something I enjoy doing and hoping to do more in the foreseeable future. At the beginning of this task, I received a list of movies and information that needed to be embedded stylistically. Having first looked at the sheet it was quite clear that there was a lot of minor ‘flaws’ that made the text difficult to read and comprehend. Ranging from various time and date formats to misused hyphens.
Due to the limited time given to complete this task, I had to work under pressure; however, having seen existing movie flyers and work of other students, I had an idea of what I wanted my outcome to look like.
My aim for this project was to create something simple, clean and organised. This gave me an idea to embed the key information (according to my judgement) in small boxes, staring from time to the age rating and any other extra information. While designing the boxes, I also wanted to highlight the language and whether the movie had audio description/subtitles. The reasoning behind my decision was that I thought these features affect the movie directly.
In terms of the hierarchy, It was important to me to tailor it to the needs of most adults. As a lot of us live a busy life or work, it was important to me to make sure that the time, date and place are clear and obvious, as it would be pointless for someone to read all the information about the movie, if they can’t attend it.
Although the feedback I received was mostly positive, I introduced some changes in terms of space:
- added extra space between the vertical bars and the text, so that it is not mistaken for a letter
- changed the colour of the text, for further differentiation between the text and the vertical bars
- re-aligned the text boxes
- made sure that the names of the actors were not separated
En dash!
For this project we were set to design our own movie listings flyer, sized A5. The aim was to understand hierarchy or text and to appropriately apply this through spacing, colour and extrinsic features of type. It took me a while to get started with this because there were so many different paths I could take, for instance, I had to decide which pieces of information to prioritise over others.
I ended up putting the movie title as the most important by making it the largest text size (other than the main title) as well as making it bold. I differentiated between other pieces of text by using italics, different weights and sizes. In an attempt to stop the repetition of information I decided to make each column correspond to a different month, however due to lack of space on the second column I had to be a little more creative with my placement of November, making it vertical and sit on the side of the column. I’m still not to sure if this was the right thing to do because I’m slightly worried that it isn’t too clear that the second column belongs to November or not.
It was helpful to go through some critique with the class on some examples of work, this reminded me that I had been hyphenating wrong and had to go through and change everything to an en dash.
Flying Car
For Kim’s Ideal gift project we were asked to prepare 3 interesting facts about ourselves and then share them in a group. We then had to use someones facts to create an ideal gift for them and use prompt word to further develop our ideas. My partner said they had met Bear Grylls and been skydiving so I thought a a flying jeep would be suitable (jeep is adventurous like Mr Grylls and they must like flying if they have been skydiving so…flying jeep). One of my words was ‘fan’ so I added some rotatory fans to the car.
Modernist Style Cinema Listing
For this project we were tasked with arranging information about 2017 showings at the university cinema onto an A5 sheet with two columns. This was a really fun task and was good for developing my skills on indesign which at the moment are pretty limited. I tried to arrange the information in a way i thought made sense with the title of the films being the most eye catching however during peer assessment someone pointed out the rest of the information sort of merges into one.
For my flyer I wanted to incorporate some styles we have been studying in the history of graphic communications module. Last week Rob was talking about Swiss graphic design so I’ve tried to make my outcome visually similar to the movement. Swiss graphic design, like modernism, uses black and red colours and sanserif fonts.
‘Hesion’ sounds like a good tequila
For Gerry’s project we were given several examples of sans-serif and serif type. The type had been deconstructed, only leaving small parts of the letters anatomy such as the stem with a spur. The remnants were left to serve as a reference point of how the letters might modulate in weight and structure. The letters had originally spelled out a word and the task for today was to experiment with different ways to render the forms.
For task one I picked the rendition of ‘Aden’ in the sans-serif face. The word had its letters deconstructed, forcing me to analyse its remaining anatomy as reference points to then draw the complete letters. I found this particular hard, I found I kept having to change the weight modulation in letters such as ‘a’ and ‘d’ due to their bowls. I thought that I had finally got the weights right but after filling them in I could see how they were still too thick and oddly shaped. I was also too generous with where shoulders and bowls would join the spines, whereas they should have been much thinner.
For task two I analysed the word ‘Hesion’ that was rendered in a sans-serif typeface. We had to analyse its characteristics before attempting to sketch out the word ‘Cadbury’. Cadbury was chosen as it has enough contrast in its letters forms, allowing us to recreate almost all similar anatomy that would be inspired for other letters across the alphabet in that face. I decided to draw out the baseline and x height on a sheet of layout paper, allowing me to overlay my work with the example word. I would then try and incorporate some elements of letters into similar ones, helping me get more of a reference. for example I recycled the shoulder of the n to recreate the same modulation that I think would occur in the ‘u’ and ‘r’ of the face. I also tried reconstructing the bowl of the ‘a’ by using the thicker and broader part of the spine in the ‘s’. I feel like my result wasn’t too bad and was similar to the actual rendition. I noticed that the bowl of the ‘d’ was actually higher than the bowl of the ‘b’ instead of the other way round like I previously thought.
Pre ‘Coroni’ 2017 listings
We were given film listings from 2017 and were given the task to present our own film brochures with this information. the list of information wasn’t written properly and contained several errors. for example a lot of them didn’t all include the run time. With this in mind I started sampling bits of information and re-writing it all to read in an order that could more coherent, allowing me to reorganise things more easily if need be. I was aware that there was a lot of information for a single listing which would be difficult to put into an a5 document whilst maintain legibility. I decided to then shorten the information taking liberties like shortening dates and only including start times of the movies. I noticed that for each listing it mentioned the month and year, something that I felt was too repetitive. I didn’t want my design to do this so i started sketching layouts, allowing me to distinguish the listings by month. I also wanted to distinguish that the movies were either adult or family friendly. I settled on the idea of having two columns, the left being adult movies and the right being family friendly movies. I then thought I could distinguish them into two halfs, the top being listings in October and the lower being ones in November. I knew I needed the listings to line up so I went back and adapted them to share the same amount of lines, creating uniformity in my design
I then started experimenting with using the face Gill Sans Nova. I chose this for its variety in fonts and its reliability for short headings, as it was originally designed as a displace face. the Nova style also allows me to use much thinner weights for the main listings. Instead of incorporating lots of colour I decided to reserve it, only using it for the for information that might get lost in the structure of the document. I then had to rely on weight variation so I used a bold for the title, semi bold for the subtitle and medium for the rest of the listing. I wanted to make the listing into two halves again, the top being the most important information and the bottom being more contextual. I did this by significantly lowering the point size of the second half in the medium font, allowing it to still feel breathable. I thought that it needed more contrast for some key words such as ‘directed by’ and ‘staring’ so I lowered the point size and increased the font to a semi bold, giving it a subtle change in weight.
Analysis
I feel like the design went fairly well but struggled to add the contact information at the bottom. I had to decrease the size and up the font weight as well as slightly increasing tracking to suggest a similar size. I still feel it looks too small and a clumsy effort to include it at the bottom. I also know that the RFT logo that I made to fit the design doesn’t solve my alignment issue. The last block should be where all the text is aligned on the right hand side yet it’s not as I felt that increasing the column margin to space it towards it would look disconnected. I also think that the use of colour for the icons worked well as they would have been overlooked if not used, yet I think its a shame the rest of the design is in black and white. Having said this I don’t think that using more colour would have made the distinction between itself and the black type any more effective, as more colour used decreases its impact as suggested by Tschichold