Category: Uncategorised

User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests: guidance and tools

Sue Walker and Josefina Bravo have produced guidance in the form of a toolkit and a dataset for the design of instructions to support home and community diagnostic testing. This derived from the AHRC-funded Covid Rapid Response project ‘Information Design for Diagnostics: Ensuring Confidence and Accuracy for Home Sampling and Home Testing’. The work was also support by funding from the University of Reading’s Rapid Response Policy Engagement funding from Research England, which enabled consultation with research users and implementors of the toolkit.

The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users.

User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests provides evidence-based guidance and tools for manufacturers of tests, service providers and content and design specialists who produce instructions to accompany diagnostic tests for home and community use.

The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users. A related data set includes templates and illustrations for download and use.

The resource includes templates and illustrations for download and use

An open-access account of the project is in Information Design Journal doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.22011.wal

Looking at women looking at themselves being looked at

9 June – 9 September 2022

This exhibition, now open in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, explores the concept of the male gaze in twentieth-century British illustration, and is curated by Cătălina Zlotea.

The exhibition analyses the work of the British illustrator, Charles Mozley (1914–1991), through a contemporary lens. It does so by foregrounding two female stereotypes depicted in advertisements, ephemera, and fine art lithographs made by Mozley between the late 1940s and the early 1980s. The exhibition arrangement creates contrast and conflict between the image of the middle-class “virtuous” woman – a virgin goddess placed on a pedestal – and the “loose” woman – an anonymous sex object signalled through hair colour and scanty clothing. This female presence, recurrent in Mozley’s work, demonstrates the quality of the artist’s draughtsmanship while connoting middle-class masculine virtues, follies, and sexual desires. 

The exhibition is open weekdays, 10 am to 5 pm. Closed bank holidays.

About Charles Mozley

Charles Mozley was born in Sheffield where he studied painting and drawing at the Sheffield College of Arts and Crafts. In 1933 he won a scholarship from the Royal College of Art and moved to London to study painting. After graduating, he taught life drawing, anatomy, and lithography at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Following the Second World War and for the rest of his career, he worked as a freelance artist. 

Prolific and versatile, Mozley was among the artists commissioned by Frank Pick and Jack Beddington for prestigious London Transport and Shell-Mex advertising campaigns. He also created designs for the advertising agency Colman, Prentis & Varley, for theatre and film production companies, and for many British publishers. He painted a mural for the Festival of Britain, contributed to the popular “School Prints” and “Lyons Lithographs” series, and produced ephemera for restaurants and the wine trade. Alongside commercial work, Mozley continuously painted, made prints, and exhibited in solo and group shows. 

The long list of commissions, as well as the works held by the Charles Mozley Trust, provide evidence that Mozley’s pictures were widely seen in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. As Nicolas Barker has remarked, Mozley’s work is “a graphic-mirror of the post-war era”, making it a valuable resource for the study of visual culture.

Credits

Curator: Cătălina Zlotea
Exhibition design: Cătălina Zlotea, Hannah Smith
Exhibition consultant: Eric Kindel
Archive consultant: Sallie Morris
Production: Geoff Wyeth

Thanks to the Charles Mozley Trust, which has supported this exhibition and the doctoral research by Cătălina Zlotea that informs it.

Installation

Selected works by Charles Mozley highlighting key projects.
Overview of the exhibition space contrasting the “loose” woman and the “virtuous” woman, as subjected to the male gaze.
Illustrations by Mozley depicting the “loose” woman.
Illustrations by Mozley depicting the “virtuous” woman.

Designing my stickers

Initial Ideas

Whenever I start a new project I like to look at ways that other people have gone about similar projects so i started off by looking on sites like pinterest to see how other people had designed stickers. However when I looked there wasn’t any stickers that were advertising anything similar to what i wanted so i had to experiment quite a bit by myself. I brainstormed a few ideas and the ones that I ended up going with follow,

Idea One

This was my initial idea for the sticker design. I’m not too sure what gave me the idea to make a sticker of a sunset at the beach for a typography and graphic design podcast but i dont think that it works as well as a sticker as either of the other designs do. I think there is too much going on in this design to be at such a small scale too. these are both things that i keep in mind for my future designs and I think that those ones the mistakes that I made in this designs are less apparent.

Idea Two

For this design I decided to go with a very generic image for the middle with circular text going around the outside. I think that this design looks a lot more like a sticker than the original design does and it is a lot better scaled for its use. I also used a lot less colours in this design, limiting myself to just two colours. I also decided to use a very boring sans serif font to make sure that it was legible because I knew that I was going to be putting it along a circular path.

Idea Three

For this design I decided to use a more abstract shape for the outline that I think would work well as a sticker as it is all composed of smooth curves. I was initially going to put the text filling out the whole sticker but I then decided on having a few more layers around the outside that I used a gradient to colour. For this design I decided to use a few more colours than i did for the last design but they all look quite similar because they are all different brightness of the same colour.

 

Software tutorials

I am going to explain the process to making the wavy text effect i used for my last sticker design idea. To begin i make a curvy shape using the pen tool that vaguely resembles the words that i want to fit into it. In this case i had a smaller word between two much longer words so i was going to end up with white space anyway. Once you have created your shape you then need to write out your text. I find the effect to look better when you use text that is too big for the space that you are trying to fill, like in this image.

This means that when you use the effect the space will be filled in much better. You then need to make sure that the shape is above the text so that the effect works. Finally to make your text fit into the shape that you want it to you need to select all of your text layers and the shape that you are trying to put the text in and then select Object > Envelope Distort > Make With Top Object. Then your text should fit itself into whatever shape you had selected. You can then edit the shape using the Direct Selection tool if there are any changes that you want to make to the shape.

TY1SK – Submission A Blog post

TY1SK – Submission A Blog post

This is my photoshop work where I completed the task as per the brief in making 3 Podcast Covers.

Design Ideas and Design Process

Idea 3

This was my first design where I wanted to highlight the use of books because of their importance to typography and graphic communication, and what better way to represent this is using an image of bookshelves. From viewing covers a black and white background with text over the top is an extremely common trend. However, this looked rather busy so I decided to blur the background to put more emphasis on the text but still can tell what the image is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Idea 2

This is my second design where I wanted to link the topic of the podcast to something that people always look at and relate to. So just like the book idea above, I created this idea using road signs. However, with this design I feel like the sign I created does not look weathered enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Idea 3 – Final Idea

This is my last and final idea and by far my favourite one. Just like the covers above I wanted to make a cover that could relate to a lot of people but because this podcast is of a specific topic, I wanted to really filter down on Designers themselves. So, I decided to take a picture of my desk space because this is where a lot of designers will be sitting to complete their work, even including a MacBook as this is pretty much industry standard. I think by doing this makes listeners more comfortable because it is something they are used to seeing.

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Working in layers to create suitable Hierarchy
  2. Cropping & Dragging image across using lasso tool
  3. Choosing a font to match the same thickness illustration
  4. Cropping and colour correcting image

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Software Tutorials

Because I have some experience in using photoshop, when completing the task, I used existing knowledge of the software and where my knowledge lacked, I would look into alternative means in filling those gaps. I did this mainly by looking at tutorials provided on Blackboard but also venturing through YouTube videos.

The one tutorial I heavily used in one of my podcast covers was because I wanted a desired effect of a weathered or distressed road sign. This was because the text and the boxes used to create the overall cover looked very unnatural to me, so I looked at means to make this more realistic. A lot of the road signs I have seen look weathered, rusty and warn down. This tutorial helped me develop my skills further as it is something used a lot in projects, and it also opened me up to seeing and playing around with filters to change images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rGFkOvpPrE

I’d like to improve on cropping and using the likes of the lasso tool to make sections look sharper and crisper. This is because I kept finding additional tags when cropping out images which made the image look blurry and messy. It took multiple attempts for me to be happy with some of my cropping.

 

 

 

Design Resources and Articles

When it came to looking at additional resources around the podcast covers, I mainly looked at various different websites and podcast services/ apps to find what common conventions each cover had. As an avid podcast listener and knowing how to navigate these I found this extremely beneficial as I created a list on what covers had in common. This is the list I created and used throughout my covers:

  • Minimal/ simple
  • Use of white (either for background or text)
  • More illustration than photography or combination of the two
  • If photography is used it is very specific
  • Mainly use 3 colours
  • Square

These really helped me and inspired my designs for my covers.

 

 

 

 

Skill For Design Blog Post

Design Ideas and Process

When previously using Photoshop/Indesign/Illustrator I tended to stick to what I knew producing simple and sometimes boring outcomes. I found these tasks challenging as I knew I wanted to push myself to learn new tools in the software however it was sometimes hard to not give up when something was going wrong.

Postcard 1
Screenshot 2

My first design I wanted to try using the clipping mask to create this see through text effect. I layered this onto of lots of images of newspapers as I thought this would show the themes of printing and typography talked about on the podcast (see screenshot 2). It took bit of playing around with to get the perfect balance between the background and the text so that it would still be eligible to read and meant I had to transform and crop the original photoshopped background to make this work.

 

Postcard 2

Before starting my second design I knew I wanted to try cutting out from different photos on photoshop.

Screenshot 1

By composing this idea with different typography and graphic design elements coming out of a head (as if this is what he is thinking about) would allow me to practice this skill multiple times. I found the smoke in this podcast cover the most challenging. I originally
started by trying to draw the smoke with different colours and blurring this together however after watching some tutorials, I found the most realistic way was to use images of clouds placed into the file (shown in screenshot 1).

 

postcard 3

My final design started on the inspiration of using an old computer. Originally I wanted things to be coming out of the computer almost as new tabs opening before I chose to incorporate the speech bubbles. I believe this was my least affective design as they are only basic components and mainly used skills that I had developed on my last two covers

 

 

Software Tutorials

A helpful tutorial I watched on YouTube explained how to create smoke on photoshop. I found this particular video useful as it talked through three different ways to do this, all of which I tried before deciding which one worked best for me. I chose to import an image of a cloud and use the lasso tool to clip this. I didn’t think about this way before as I wouldn’t have thought to change the levels of the image to create white smoke on a black back compared to a cloud on a blue sky. The tutorial can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIBXXglbYtQ&t=361s

I knew before starting the sticker tasks that illustrator was the one software that I felt the least confident in so before I began I watched different videos on the basics of illustrator, this also helped me understand the terminology such as anchor points for when I watched more specific tutorials. When I first started drawing the microphone on the postcard cover 1, I was struggling with getting the curve of the line smooth so I watched this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViKQgIDblr8) which allowed me to realise I was using the wrong anchor points for what I wanted to achieve and I could easily fix this by using the covert tool.

Design Resources and Articles

Before all of my tasks, I would start by looking on Pinterest at other podcast covers or stickers etc to give me a general starting point. This is where I first saw the concept of objects flying out of someones head like in my second podcast cover.

The website https://dribbble.com/stories/2019/08/06/30-creative-examples-of-podcast-cover-art-and-branding was also interesting to me as I could see how the use of colour affected the design. Most of the covers on here were very colourful and eye-catching which inspired me to use more varied colours when design my own such as the use of purple and yellow in my third sticker.

For my first podcast cover, the idea included a lot of emphasis on the typography of the design. I used skills I had already developed from other modules on the course as to how to efficiently alter a type face to produce the best outcome. However designing this cover showed me that there were gaps in my knowledge such as the kerning of the writing which is why I found this article useful to read. https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/11-kerning-tips/

 

 

Zee Graphics

For this mini-project we had to brand ourselves and create a logo, with research from a particular theme. I was struggling with my own theme at first as I chose 90’s. It was a lot harder than it looked. There were so many different themes and colours, styles and fashion so I decided to choose something a little more simple.

I was going for a “groovy” or “hippie” kind of aesthetic where the fonts are  a little loose and wavy. The theme, as a whole, is very colourful and I loved how the words are distorted to fit into or create different shapes.

I found these movie tickets while researching my theme, and I thought I could use them as part of my final outcome for my logo. They matched the theme in my opinion as they shared similar aesthetics, colours and typefaces.

What’s on in Autumn 2017? – RFT flyer

Initial Process

My first quick mock-ups of the cinema listing were all different however we can see that the first for examples very much focused on the title of the the movie (shown with the pink block). This was because my initial thought was that this is what was most important when designing the cinema listings and therefore was at the top of the hierarchy.

As my ideas developed we notice that this becomes the less prominent feature as I wanted to play around with putting the film title in different type fonts and sizes.

Cinema Listings design 1

I carried this forward when designing my final two listings as I focused on the type of user which would therefor change the hierarchy in the text. I based my designs on the premise that the user would be university students visiting the Reading Film Theatre. Because of this, I believed the date would be the most important aspect following the film title as they would plan going to see a film around their schedule. Furthermore, with there being only 1 film showing a day, I did not want to follow the usual conventions, for example a popular cinema website, whereby they would first list the film title and then the dates and times of the showings and this would not have been practical with only one showing.

Cinema listing design 2

My second design shown above, I wanted to play around with the typeface sizing of the dates to make it more eye-catching. At first I just included the large numbers however after receiving feedback from my peers that this was hard to understand, I chose to do this alongside the large months shown above to indicate that these were in fact dates. The use of putting these in the same colour also helped me achieve this idea.

 

 

Techniques learnt from Indesign

Reading film theatre (red and black-final)

Shown here is my cinema listing I created on Indesign. I chose to use this specific title as it reflects on my learning from this task. The reason it reflects so well is because from creating my two listings (one is showed here) I learnt new things and enhanced my knowledge on some of the techniques.

Before doing this task I struggled with using paragraph styles and characters and now I feel a lot more confident with using them for future tasks/projects. When I did stuggle to create some things or find some things I used the internet and researched how to overcome the issue.

Some issues I did overcome while creating my two listings were having to stop forcing line breaks, instead i used paragraph styles to help me. Overall I feel I have learnt a lot from this, one being to ask for feedback to improve my work and ideas as the feedback I recieved helped me to make my final outcome better.