Category: TY1DP1

Work by Part 1 students as part of their ‘Design Practice’ module.

Managing space – Flyer Design

Movie flyer, print-ready

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:

  1. added extra space between the vertical bars and the text, so that it is not mistaken for a letter
  2. changed the colour of the text, for further differentiation between the text and the vertical bars
  3. re-aligned the text boxes
  4. 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

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

Reading Film brochure2Final

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

 

A Bone-Breaking Clown

Three facts that I was presented with were that someone had two birthdays, someone had never broken a bone, and that someone fell off of a horse once. While reusable birthday cake and horse stabilisers looked promising, they were ultimately dead ends. Oner rejected idea was a birthday cake Rubik’s cube– enough combinations to see you through every birthday you’ll ever have.

The fact I went with for my final idea was that my partner had never broken a bone, so I reasoned a thoughtful gift would be a chance to finally break one. A bone breaking machine seemed a little too on the nose, and two random words, bottle and skeleton didn’t lead anywhere. My final random word was clown, which I think had potential.

COVID-19 – Blue or Yellow?

Sue and Emma’s project was all about gathering real-life examples of COVID images around us. Since it’s been months since the first Corona outbreak, it’s fair to say that we all got used to the repetitive posters and announcements that routinely remind us about the laws put in place to stop the spread of coronavirus in the UK. Having said this, a lot of us stopped paying attention to the posters themselves. I highly valued this experience as it’s not often that I look or analyse real-life examples of information design. It has taught me a lot about features found in Covid imagery, from the choice of colour to the specific fonts and typefaces.
As expected all of the imagery I collected using a sans-serif typeface. Most likely, this is a result of sans-serif fonts are often considered as cleaner and more serious, while also easier to read from up close or distance. A lot of the posters and images I have found had a centre alignment and used a very limited number of colours (2-4 at most). ‘Keeping it simple’ is the key fact in information design as you want everyone to understand the information you’re presenting. A lot of the posters were also accompanied by icons and vector images that illustrated what was stated on the posters.
Notably, I have noticed that most of these posters came in 3 colours, blue, red and yellow. Blue is quite commonly used in information design as it is a neutral cool colour. While I agree that the posters in blue were effective, I feel like they are more of a guide rather than enforcement of the law. On the other hand, the yellow posters were combined with a highly contrasting colour such as Yellow (in the examples presented on this page). Unlike the blue posters, yellow draw much more attention, as the combination is known in nature for indicating caution.

Minding the gap is a tricky task

This session for design practice was taught by Gerry and was a very technical session where he explored different typefaces and analysed their individual properties. I thoroughly enjoyed being taught the effectiveness of how we should hold our pencil and the techniques that to use which can improve our sketching. For the morning exercise we had a look at the word ‘hesion’ which had been presented in three fonts and try guess what the letters would look like in the word ‘Cadbury’. I chose one font and tried analysing the way it goes thin in some areas as well as where it is thick or bold. My attempt was a little bit off from the correct version but from Gerry’s feedback I could see where I had gone wrong. I also learnt how to be a bit more precise when using fine liner pens. For the afternoon exercise we did a similar task however we were given some bits of the word ‘aden’ and we had to fill in the rest of the areas in the way we thought was correct. I found this time I had completed the take well but messed up some of the thin and thickness.

Reading Film Theatre Flyer

The Reading Film Theatre flyer task was a challenging but enjoyable one. As I’m quite new to Indesign compared to other Adobe softwares, I struggled a little bit in being able to make things the way I wanted them to be. However it was a perfect opportunity to implement what James taught us in one of recent sessions, which was using paragraph styles which made the process quicker than it would’ve been without the use of them. For this task I had various ideas on how I wanted to format it however along the way and across different drafts I found myself tweaking and changing things. I found that alignment was one of the things that I was concerned about the most as I found the flyer was more visually appealing and the information was articulated better when it was organised in that form.

During the feedback session, I was told to improve on trying to see if I could make it easier to read as they said there was too much typographic difference because the colour was hard to read. So for my improvement I decided to select a darker colour which was still engaging but softer on the eyes. I decided to pick a dark red as I liked how in class it was mentioned that it gave of the cinema feeling that you’d want to promote. Another point of feedback was that I could’ve chosen black for the dates to make them stand out more. However for the brief we could only have two colours so I decided to create that visual flare I would alternate between the red and grey colour.