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

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.

When I think of cinema listings my immediate thought is of the little image displayed by the title, e.g. a still from the movie. Something it gives you a glimpse of what it may be about, other times it catches your attention or causes curiosity. This made the task a bit more difficult to me as we weren’t meant to utilise images merely type.

Having said this I found the challenge quite fun to do as we needed to highlight things such as subtitles, audio subscriptions as well as ratings, whilst also highlighting the date, time and location of the screening and what is being screened amongst other things. We weren’t given the movie blurb which to me meant we were given the bare necessities so this made highlighting particular things more difficult and I really had to think about the importance and hierarchy. Creating this myself made me realise how much help these leaflets have always given me without me realising it – the hierarchy and layout themselves ensure we understand everything and can easily navigate the cinema listings without really having to think too much.

Furthermore, this task truly taught me the importance of ensuring I utilise the correct document size before I start designing in InDesign. You cannot make it smaller once it’s been designed – it will chop the design down and you’ll end up with only a small section. If the brief says A5 don’t create it on A4 accidentally.

CINEMA.LISTING

As part of this task, we were asked to recreate a cinema flyer using some information provided to enable us a better understanding about how it works  in the professional world, when working with clients. We were given the opportunity to create our own categories according to what we felt was appropriate regarding our target audience. I split mine into three categories ensuring that the wording was fun and engaging just like it would be on a flyer. In these categories I put the films in order of the dates they were being aired to allow easy reading and navigation.  I’ve used a san-serif typeface  for similar reasons and to allow more of a modern feel.

I decided on black and white as a colour scheme to keep it relatively simple but I also felt like black was a colour commonly associated with cinemas and therefore fitted the criteria nicely. I’ve tried to create an order of hierarchy with the name of the theatre being the most important. The times of the movies are at the bottom of the criteria but i’ve done this because i thought the names of the movies were more important and if the consumer is interested in a movie they can easily see when and where it is below.

I’ve added the recognisable  age certificates to not only add a pop of colour but too again, allow for easier navigation. One of the target audiences we were given was a family and so they would only be interested in the U or PG movies so they know where to look straight away. following on from this i wanted to create the same effect with the Audio Description and F-rated movies so I made sure to include to certificates for these.

The first adjustment I did was the the space between the location and the director. The first feedback was that the space looked odd, I assumed that it was took big, so I adjusted the leading. This made my columns  nearly have the same length, which overall made it neater. The 2nd feedback was the underlining of the director’s name. The feedback says that it was distracting from the  location and time. Another feedback was that the director was not as important as the date and time. To resolve this, I underlined the location, date and time instead of the director.

Brief

Design a programme flyer for the Reading Film Theatre. The flyer must be single sided A5, with two columns of text, unsing a maximum of two colours and two typefaces.

 

Process

• First, I went through the text and removed things that I considered to be unnecessary or repeated information. I also researched missing pieces of information to add things that I felt would be helpful or bring consistency. This was to remove noise on the page and to communicate as clearly as possible.
• I decided to use the branding of the theatre for my colour scheme. As we were only permitted two colours, I took the darker red and grey from the logo and tinted them to 74% each for the lighter numerals.
• Because of my design I didn’t have space to put a short summary of each movie, which upon reflection is a bit more style over substance. However, in our feedback session the large numerals to convey the date were appreciated as a style choice and the lack of summary was not mentioned.
• To display hierarchy I chose to stick with one typeface but to use different font weights, type size, and use of spacing to differentiate key pieces of information.
• For my columns, I separated information by month of screening. This meant I only had to put the date of the month and it also opened up space in the October column to add general theatre information such as address, ticket price etc.
• In my first draft I had lined up each section so that the top of each movie section was level. This meant inconsistent gaps between the showings. After the feedback session, it was suggested that unequal spacing indicates hierarchy. Therefore I adjusted my design to priorities equal spacing between each showing. I had to widen my margins to do this, but I this improved the overall design.

 

Reflection

This task emphasised how important it is to be aware of the purpose of the finished product you are designing. If the final product is in print, throughout your process you should be printing physical drafts to know how your ideas translate from screen to paper.

 

For this project, we had to use Adobe Indesign to create a cinema brochure for the Reading Film Theatre. I wanted my design to be clean and contemporary, using red as the accent colour, to put emphasis on certain elements of text. To continue with this simplistic look, I only used one typeface, but used intrinsic valuables, such as size and weight of the text. This will hopefully allow the viewer to see a distinction between the different elements of the brochure. For example, I put the contact information for the theatre in italic and made it smaller than the main body of text.

Here you can see my initial design sketch:

 

Here is my first brochure design:

After a blackboard feedback session, it was highlighted that the lack of colour variation removes the importance of the highlights of red. It was suggested to use the tint tool on Indesign and create varying shades of red to allow the largest emphasis to be on the titles of the movies. I also used this tool to add some grey tones into my design to add further contrast. Continuing with this idea, I also incorporated more variation within the main body of text, allowing a clearer hierarchy of information. Finally the alignment of the title in my first design was pointed out as being a little confusing. As a result, I took some steps to try and make this more logical and more visually appealing.  Finally, we had a peer review session in class where we were able to give feedback on each other’s brochures. Taking this advice on board as well, I refined my design.

My final outcome can be seen below.

I really enjoyed this project as it allowed me to explore Indesign and put my new knowledge about typography into practice. I also found the feedback sessions extremely useful and I am very grateful for all the advice I was given from both other students and tutors.

Last week in TY1INT we were given a mini week project to design a cinema leaflet of film listings. The project prompted us to think about the reader and how we could make the experience of reading a cinema leaflet easiest for a range of different users.

By the time I began the project I had already forgotten the shortcut for applying a paragraph style to text in InDesign. And now I’ve finished, I doubt I’ll ever forget it.

This project really helped me get a feel of using InDesign for my own work, outside of technical sessions where help is always at hand. I find that learning this way helps me remember shortcuts and learn handy things about the toolset provided in Indesign and how to use it to create interesting yet useful things.

I didn’t focus on the aesthetics of the leaflet as I wanted to get to grips with using a hierarchy of text in an applied manner. To start off with I found Reading film theatres logo to give the leaflet more of an identity and give myself a guide as to what colours to use. It was fun to see the variation of style you can achieve with a limited colour guide and using only one (or two) typefaces.

After today’s feedback session, I am aware of some errors made in my design that I will look out for in future work, including correct hyphenation, and being aware of separating info on line breaks.  Overall I am quite happy with my outcome and maybe next time would focus on adding more visual identity to the leaflet.

cinema listing v04

 

My cinema brochure. I experiment a bit with different layouts when it came to making my brochure, however will admit to going a bit off the brief as I wanted to explore looking at a design with the days at headings, as I noted that Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday were the days of film showings. I actually was quite happy with the final outcome, using black, red, and white for the whole colour scheme, as we were told we could add in just one more colour. I chose red of course, as it matches with the feel of a cinema and the red carpet. I do wish I’d perhaps used a bit more red, or had the time to create some kind of logo that linked with the key colours to link my brochure together a bit neater, and a logo always helps to look more professional or branded.

I used different fonts to help separate text, and messed around with using bold as well, as way of highlighting which films had subtitles and audio description, I didn’t want to make this detail too over powering, but enough that it clearly stands out for the reader. I used the red to highlight dates and times, including the ‘Autumn Term 2017’ at the top. As in my opinion, making sure the dates and times are clear, is one of the most important aspects, because if the audience can’t even tell when a film is showing, there is no way they’ll bother to book a ticket.

I definitely could have improved on my design in a could ways, such as at second glace I note there is spacing on the top row, and could have been made to be a lot more even. I did actually enjoy this task more than I thought I would, but to improve would next time want to add some small graphics or illustration.