Category: Student work

Listings for young adults

My original sketches were designed based on varying users, but the two final sketches I landed on were based on working for teenagers, couples and young adults. I chose to achieve this by having the actors, titles and times of the highest hierarchy as these are the things which appeal most to these categories without the presence of a trailer, poster or synopsis due to the familiarity of names or attention grabbing titles. I decided to highlight these elements through the use of all caps, italics, weight and varying colours. I also chose two different text alignments to style the information.

I decided to have the age rating at the bottom of each listing, but in solid black as it would not likely be as relevant for my chosen users than, say, a family or someone looking to avoid adult themes. In one of my listings (Title emphasis) , I have used grey text across the actors and directors as well as the additional contexts of the films, to further emphasise the details in black (the title, length, age rating and location and time) which are left solid black. I made this decision to help separate the listings further from one another in addition to the breaks between, but I feel that the placement above the title leaves the actors still high in the hierarchy. In this example, the title is also italic unlike the other of my layouts again to further emphasise this and put them higher in the hierarchy of information.

In the second of my layouts (Actors and title emphasis), I used black for the actors and kept them above the title but smaller in size, to have these two details similar in hierarchy. I also kept the time and date of similar style to the actors as this is likely the next most relevant piece of information for my targeted users.

Overall, I found formatting these details fairly challenging which surprised me since there are so many different combinations which achieve a multitude of effects. However, this task has taught me the impact of such tiny details such as the difference a pt size can make to the whole page. Going forward i will apply my knowledge of these details into my work in varying contexts to achieve the desired effects.

Title emphasis

Actors and title emphasis

Price’s Candle

From the vast range of Ephemera I chose to look at a set of advertising for Price’s Candles, which could be advertisement to be displayed in a shop, or more likely to be labels or packaging from the candle its self. 

I think that this set is from the Edwardian era, of the early 1900s, due to the rather recognisable white tie dress code and the elaborate table decorations that are associated with this time period, featured on Image D. 

To begin with they look like rather decorative forms of branding but at a closer look they tell us a lot about the time period, in particular the role of women in the home. 

Image A depicts a house maid or nanny looking after a young child, perhaps showing that any wealthy Mother need not to be tucking the child into bed, but leaving that responsibility to one of the house staff. This image suggests that it its not the lady of the house hold to be choosing which candles to purchase but rather than head house keeper. 

In Image B shows the women or wife in the role of entertainer, but also highlighting her education in the arts and music. Any aspiring women should be able to play the piano. The design is rather clever in the way that on the surface it looks like it is about the different candle types you can buy, but further than that is it informing women, in a rather passive aggressive way, in how the ideal women or wife should be.

In Image C the Mother, of all people, is shown taking the child to bed rather than the nanny! Perhaps this is a more bit more of a modern image in comparison to Image A since it encourages (wealthy) mothers to take a more active role in the raising of their own child. 

Finally, in Image D the ideal wife in hostess role. I am assuming that the hostess is dressed in red, making a last minute tweak to the cutlery. This suggests that it is the female’s role to make sure the house is well presented, and thus it is her role to chose the candles. Her husband is not the focal point, but he is still present none the less. 

To summarise, a women has a high calling, since she has to take on many roles: the soft and motherly side, the wealthy home owner, the educated entertainer, the extravagant hostess, and a wife. The home is the place for any women, her husband is merely at her side.   

The colour illustrations indicate that this is an expensive make of candle, looking to sell to the large estates. Any cheap candle makers would not have gone to the effort or cost of printing colour labels. The content of the illustrations confirm the indented buyer.

Each of the labels have a slight different take on wording of “ Price’s ” which lead me to believe that they are not part of the same set, but rather have been collected over serval years. 

I think Image D is the oldest because the illustration is placed in a box, unlike the others where the image is softer without a definite edge. Images A, B, C have serval of the same features including the golden swirls, a similar style of the women at the focal point. 

In Image B there are four different styles of text, which goes against the typographical rules of the present, to only use two typefaces, even more so when the wording “ Price’s “ is repeated twice. Yet the overall style reflects the very traditional and decorative era that this design comes from.

70s logo

For this brief we had to pick a theme to develop ideas for upcoming logo type trends. My chosen theme was 70’s retro.

I first created a moon-board to start looking a different colours and shapes involved with the 70s. The retro 70’s theme also has a very warm toned colour palette, which is something I knew I wanted to incorporate into my design. I noticed there were a lot circles involved within the theme, along with a lot the fonts had rounded edges. I started experimenting with different bold ‘bubble letter’ type fonts, however as I started playing around I began putting the logo into different shapes. Once I put the type into the circle, I started playing with the leading, seeing how the type looks both up close and dispersed. For my final logo design, I decided to fit the text close to each other within the circle and use the warm toned colour palette.

If I could change anything about my design I would have space out the lettering a bit more, as the two Gs are very close to each other. I would have also added a ‘S’ to George, making it ‘Georges Designs’, making both words 5 letters to equal out the colouring.

Obsession

My chosen theme – Obsession

The brief stated that the protagonist was paranoid by the noise she suspected to be a mouse and the novel unveils her gradually going mad and destroying parts of her house to track down the noise. For my very simple design, I used a crafting knife to curve out random circles on each of the pages to represent the characters irritation with the noise and the damage that would have been caused by the rodent. It would also impact the readers into understanding the characters obsession as when they would turn each page, they would automatically try to look for the next circle as they are placed randomly but mirror the characters tension.  The book opens to just one hole in the very centre of the page, to present the initial disturbance of the mouse then the last page of the novel is blank to represent there wasn’t a mouse after all.

Reading Film Theatre Cinema Listing

For my cinema listing design, I decided to aim my first one for ‘A retired doctor and her husband, both of who have a passion for old Hollywood’. When researching, I looked at old, vintage Hollywood cinema listings, movie posters and screen prints in order to help me with the colour scheme, layout and font. I first chose quite a bold font for the title, however, I did not really like it when I wrote the rest of the information out as it did not have the old style Hollywood theatre feel that I wanted. So I searched for more fonts and found a very eye-catching, retro style one which felt very suitable for the theme.

I then looked at colours and thought that red and black had a very distinct look, which is quite conventional when looking back to older cinema listings. When focussing on the text of information, I decided to order the films in terms of age rating; the films more appropriate for older couples would be first, then the more family friendly ones would be at the bottom. However, after the feedback session on Friday, I realised that this order could be slightly misleading as all the dates are jumbled up and in most cases, people would not read this listing in order from top to bottom, but instead, scan through and see the films that look most interesting for them. Therefore, I decided to group them into adult and family films, then order them by date.

For my second cinema listing sheet, I wanted it to target ‘A father with two children under 10’. I copied the same layout from my first one over and changed the font to make it more exciting and fun. Then I also changed the colour from red to yellow, again to make it seem brighter, happier and more inviting to a younger audience.

And similar to my other one, I decided to group them again by age and date by boxing up the family friendly ones and putting them at the top, and then leaving the other non kid friendly ones for adults to browse around in their own time.

The Great Gatsby

I am fairly new to using InDesign so this took a lot longer than I thought it would. Using the paragraph styles was something that I haven’t done before and thought it was fairly time consuming, but when I changed the text for my spin off version, there was no extra work require, since it was like a template. 

Noise

I created this based on the storyline of Noise, where a brother and a sister inherit their parents house and oneday they hear a noise and escape out of a smaller section through a door. The several doors I created using a craft knife and sicssors, shows the smaller sections they go through day by day to escape to finally go onto the road through a small window empty-handed.

 

Good Omens

Brief

Complete the Great Gatsby cover we began in class, ensuring that, as much as possible, every detail is a match for the photograph we are copying. There is no need to ‘distress’ the paper. If you like, have a go at changing the colour of the book (perhaps use another well known Penguin colour) and change the book title and author to something else, to prove that your file is robust.

Once you have completed part 1, select another book and author – ideally something you have enjoyed or which means something to you. Something you know well. Inspired by the David Pearson’s Penguin cover for 1984, or both other artists or designers whose work you enjoy, create a new cover for your chosen book that:

    • Sticks to the basic rules of your first classic Penguin
    • Introduces new elements, or alters existing elements to create something funny / witty / insightful / relevant to the content or nature of your chosen book.

Process

After finishing the initial penguin book cover tutorial, I decided to have a go at changing some different elements of the book to see if I properly understood how the mechanisms in Indesign we learned worked and how to use them.  For example making my own style sheets and making the cartouche again were especially good ways to see if i remembered how to make and use them, instead of just copying the tutorial.  For the alternate version, I decided to make the cover for ‘Heartstopper Vol. 1’ by Alice Oseman. As the original is illustrated, I wondered how it would look as a penguin cover which is much simpler.

PDF’s for the two covers:

The Great Gatsby 01   Heartstopper 02

For the second part of the brief, I decided to use the book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman:

“[A] somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon — each of whom has lived among Earth’s mortals for many millennia and has grown rather fond of the lifestyle — are not particularly looking forward to the coming Rapture. If Crowley and Aziraphale are going to stop it from happening, they’ve got to find and kill the Antichrist (which is a shame, as he’s a really nice kid). There’s just one glitch: someone seems to have misplaced him. . . .”¹

In the book, the demon Crowley is often portrayed by a black and red snake, while the angel Aziraphale is usually only shown with wings to identify his true identity; another common motif for Aziraphale is his flaming sword. As these are the most commonly known portrayals of the two characters, I thought that including these would be the best way to make the cover more interesting while tying in the theme of the book.

I started by altering the details of the cover such as the title and author, as well as the small words on either side of the cover. After changing these main elements I took a picture of the altered cover and began to sketch the snake, angel wings and flaming sword over it. I decided to put the snake around the middle banner of the cover, as though it was coiling/hanging over it, and used the wings and sword to decorate the penguin. After sketching it out in Procreate, I transferred it to Illustrator and traced a clean, smooth outline using the pen tool. To make the colouring process easier, I took it back to Procreate and coloured it using a monoline brush to create flat colours. I saved the finished illustration as a PNG to make it transparent and placed it in InDesign.

 

However drawing the snake hanging over the banner looked too imposing and didn’t mould well with the rest of the cover’s components, whereas because the wings and sword were smaller to be added to the penguin, they fit in. For this reason, I thought about making the snake smaller so it blended in well – the only problem being its placement. Going back to my initial idea, I thought about having the snake wrap around something, but wasn’t sure about where to put it. After confiding with some peers, I decided to make it go around the cartouche. I thought this was rather ironic, having the representation for the demon at the top, and the angel at the bottom.

Again I sketched it in Procreate, but I decided not to trace it in Illustrator; after the first attempt of the cover, the smooth lines and flat colour looked somewhat out of place and too modern for a classic cover. So I made the decision to use a textured brush from Procreate and drew an outline that looked more like a pencil drawing or rustic print. I was much happier with how this looked, to took it forward and began to colour it; similarly to the outline, the flat colour didn’t merge well with the aesthetic of the cover, so I coloured it with a charcoal textured brush, making the colour slightly speckled and not entirely even. I was much happier with this result as it looked more fitting for a classic cover, and the added illustrations were balanced in their placement. For the main colour of the book, I settled for a deep blue that still allowed you to see the outlines of the illustrations and created a good contrast with the warmer colours used.

Reflection

Overall I really enjoyed this project as an introduction to using Indesign and it covered a lot of the main features that we will use in future tasks, while still allowing us to have some creative freedom and explore with it. Doing this project also made me understand why working with peers is very important – if I hadn’t confided with the people around me, I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project to a higher standard. Furthermore creating this cover made me think about how to develop something that already looks ‘finished’ even further and how to introduce a new theme, in this case the book’s premise, into something that already exists, and how to tie the two together. I think this project helped me make a confident start with using the InDEsign software, and developed my critical thinking skills.

Final cover PDF: Good Omens 03

¹taken from https://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/Good+Omens/

Human analysts

One of my favourite pieces in the collections I saw today was this ‘Human Analyst’ ticket, from what I can assume came from a fairground stall, or similar environments. I was drawn to this piece particularly because of its simple format which is designed so efficiently for its purpose, in the way that the exact same design can produce a large number of readings for customers and would also provide a personal experience for the user. The use of hole punches allows a large amount of information to be communicated quickly and clearly which feels optimal for not only the user’s understanding but also business in aiding speed of work therefore enabling more customers.

Caution

For Eric’s project we had to take images of signs or letters in our surrounding environment and come up with a theme. My chosen theme was “caution”.

I wanted to portray how signs can be used in a way to inform people of danger or important information. Different shapes and colours are used to catch the viewers attention, such as the continuous use of bright yellow shown in danger or informative signs. Some signs have further written information whereas others don’t. This may be because people are used to seeing the symbols, making it easier to get information across.