OUGD 406 - Studio Brief 4

Speaking from Experience

- For this brief I will be working alongside Priyesh Desai.

This brief is asking us to create a graphic response of some sort that makes a comment, statement, observation or gives advice about our first year on this course. Being a live brief, the work that we produce will actually be given and presented by ourselves to the new first year students on graphic design in September. With this being our longest brief of this module, it holds a much greater weighting which means that this needs to be good.

We initially started this by thinking about things that we need to consider such as:

• new experiences
• difficulties
• new people you've met
• skills you have acquired
• emotions

We had to think about what we wanted to give to the next years students, something that we would have wanted to be given at the start of our first year.

We have been asked to create three boards; concept, method of delivery and production. This allows us to present our ideas in a clear and concise way that has made us think about the various stages of our project. Here are our boards: 

Our Ideas:

Polaroid’s – leaving messages, quotes, advice

Information Guide – what to expect

Individuality and Creativity – PPP, design blogs and resources

Mainly image based to keep interest

Aesthetics are KEY

Not too serious, informal language and tone of voice

What we've learnt:

Context – art movements, artists, theories, key dates

Type

Colour

Layouts and Grids

Blogs

Software Workshops – keyboard shortcuts

Printing techniques

Inspirational and Motivational – quotes, images

Pinterest and resources

The progress we have made

Features of other students work– past students, artists in Leeds

Tips and tricks we’ve learnt along the way

Re-use the hand outs we’ve been given

Design process – research, thumbnails, visual development

Primary research and Secondary

Other useful information:

Places to go – Nights out, pubs and restaurants
Events that are on - Calendar

Lunch

Galleries

Cooking

Time management

- This is basically everything that we want to include within our publication. With all of this information it means that the publication should become a guide that the receiver can refer to throughout the whole year, not just the first few weeks. It will help greatly with the course and their work as well as with more everyday things like cooking and places to go; hopefully becoming a 'bible' for them to have as a reference whenever they need it.

Method of Delivery:

Magazine or book

Newspaper

Production:

Screen prints

Photographs

Going to pubs and shops

How it’s printed and bound – Blurb, Independent or ourselves

Stock

Colour

Paper Size

Font(s)

Lay-out

Concept:

We plan to create a publication that contains all of the information that a new student could possibly need. This would include all of the things that we have learnt this year, information on useful websites and resources, advice from current students and handy tips about more everyday things such as cooking and where to eat at lunch. It would be a magazine format that is mainly image based in order to keep interest, with text where needed. We will use a very informal tone of voice, as though we were just talking to them as opposed to writing.

Within this project we have many ideas that we have brought together in order to create one big idea. This means that our final publication will have a lot of content that is very broad, covering a wide range of topics. These are our ideas that will shall incorporate into our final outcome:

• We want to keep our publication mainly image, with text running through out to explain, in order to keep interest. Being new students, they aren't going to want to get a big publication filled with writing because they just wouldn't read it. Whereas, if it was mainly image, this would engage them a lot more and encourage them to actually look through it.
• Polaroids - We are going to go around the college and take photographs, hopefully using an actual Polaroid camera, and get them to leave a little message to the new student. This will be based around a question, something along the lines of 'If you could re-do your first year again, what would you do differently?' This idea is based around learning from mistakes and by advising the new student on what they would do differently, hopefully this will give them some sort of understanding of what not to do or what they should do.
• Information Guide - This information is going to be on a whole range of topics in order to put across as much information as we can. We will have different sections so that the information that they're trying to get is easily accessible.
• There will be something within the publication talking about individuality and creativity. This is a big part of our PPP module and will be something they need to think about in the coming year. Making them aware of this now will give them a head start and help them keep up within their first year.
• A lot of the publication is going to be made up from the things that we have learnt throughout our first years; this first hand experience is going to be the most informed and relevant information they are likely to receive. This will include design context, type, colour, lay-outs and grid, blogs and useful resources, various software's, printing techniques, tips and tricks, design process and the different types of research. We would also like to add things that they will find very helpful but wouldn't normally find out until they had actually come here; these kinds of things are places to go, galleries, where to eat at lunch, events that are on, time management and perhaps even something about real student cooking.
• We are thinking about incorporating various examples of students work that currently attend LCA as well as first year students on this course. This would mean that we could showcase the talent that is currently at LCA whilst indicating to the student that they could be that good. By also showing some of our work from the start of the year, which looking back is mainly awful, we can motivate them even more; showing the difference between start of the year and end of the year they will realise how much we have progressed and thus they will progress.
• We are going to explain the different blogs and how they are used properly. This should allow them to instantly understand how to organise their work meaning they can manage their projects correctly from the very start. In order to help them further we are going to re-use old handouts that we have been given and include these. We are also going to give them good links to websites and design blogs, as well as recommend useful books, that will help them throughout the year and possibly even longer.
• We are going to go to various places near the college where people eat lunch and take photographs and possibly do interviews in order to give the new student some sort of idea of what is available. This is something that will be very handy within the first few weeks of starting.

Delivery:

We are going to produce a magazine/book that contains all of this information. Due to the sheer amount of information that we want to get into our publication, these are our only real options. We would also like to produce some screen prints, these being scanned and digitally put into our publication.

We have also considered creating a newspaper style variation of our final outcome. This would help a lot with the cost of printing as the paper is much less expensive and we wouldn't need to worry about binding. This is something we shall consider closer to the time of final printing and we shall make a decision after much consideration and testing has been done.

Production:

When actually producing our publication there are many variables that we need to consider. They are:

• Screen printing - This is something that we would like to do as it would visually demonstrate our understanding of the subject
• Photography - Throughout the publication there will be many photographs used, all of which shall be our own
• How its printed and bound - We have briefly looked into sending our final outcome to a company called Blurb but think this may be more expensive. We are going to look into more independent printing companies or possibly print and bind ourselves
• Stock - If we print and bind ourselves we will need to seriously consider our stock
• Colour - Although we are not limiting ourselves on colour choices, in order to keep the publication consistent we will need to agree on a colour scheme
• Paper size - In order to utilise and demonstrate what we have learnt, we are going to make our own paper size. However, we need to ensure that we can use our own paper size if we are to send our work off to a printing company as they may not print on custom paper sizes
• Font(s) - Again looking at consistency a font or set of fonts needs to be agreed prior to any design work
• Lay-out - This is something that will be a big part of our publication and could make or break the whole project. This is something that shall be greatly considered and thought about throughout the design process

Boards:

We then set about starting our publication. Initially we made sure that we covered all of the basics that we would need to cover in order for us to be able to just get on with the actual design work. Much of the content that we need is very standard information or something that we already know, as we are only trying to include a brief overview of our year. We then thought about elements such as paper size, page numbering, margins, point sizes and font choice. We created many digital thumbnails and mock-ups of all of these to ensure that we liked the way in which it looked when printed and cut down, giving us a sense of how it would actually look. 

Once we had the basics covered we could then start working on design work. We printed off sheets with small scaled version of our paper size on, with indication of our margins, in order to produce some thumbnails. In order to ensure that our thumbnails were relevant and served an actual purpose, we made them specific to sections of the book. We could do this because we already know what the content of the book is going to be, so we know what we are designing for. Once having produced thumbnails for various sections of the book we reproduced them digitally, inserting dummy images and placeholder text, we printed them again to see how they look on paper. We also had some ideas that involved the use of tracing paper and acetate and in order to see how this would work we produced to scale mock-ups using out stocks etc. This gave us an idea of how it would look and if it was possible for us to do. This was all taken into our crit and shown to our two tutors and numerous peers. The feedback was got was just to carry on with what we were doing as we had covered all areas that we needed to and were progressing with the whole project very well.

After the crit we continued working in this way, producing thumbnails and reproducing them digitally in order to explore as many different lay-outs as we could and ensure that we were creating the most coherent and consistent publication that we could. We also attended two book binding sessions in order to make sure we understood the process and were capable of doing it. The first session was just to make sure that we could actually do the process and we just used plain paper. This turned out very well and so we decided to repeat the process using our actual stock, cut down to size with the amount of pages that we aimed to bind. We also stuck on the cover how we had planned out, using the mock up we made of it as a rough guide. This book turned out very well, being very sturdy and looking very professional. I then went through the book and wrote on the pages what we planned to put on each one so that when we were designing we knew exactly where things went and how many pages we had allocated to them.

We continued to design pages and create mock-ups. We also gathered any content that we didn't already have, such as photographs and primary research.

Crit:

We laid out all of our design work and mock-ups and got feedback from a group of our peers. This is what they said:

• "Stick to the off white paper stock as it looks professional and clear. Looks nicer than the whiter stock. Try adjusting the alignment of the text within the columns - might look better justified?"
• "Creative elements are excellent, see use of tracing paper and acetate as well as page numbers. With some elements, specifically the type pages with the acetate, stands out better on white stock."
• " ambitious and exciting, don't give yourself too much work"
• "A lot of content, perhaps too much?"
•  "Off white stock better, clean, consistent, easy to follow even though huge content. Perfect binding fit for purpose - clean, simple, easy to hold/read and will show first years what they can do."
• "Very ambitious, I hope you can do it all"

 From this feedback we haven't really taken much. We still aren't sure which colour stock is better and we are both still split. The thing with using bulky newsprint is every time a new batch is ordered it looks different so I think that when it comes to printing, we will just get whatever colour stock is available. In terms of being too ambitious, we are both confident that we will put the time in required to finish everything that we need to do. We are already well on our way so aren't too worried about that. 

We also finally decided on a name. We started by thinking of a range of names so that we could choose the best one, here are the names that we both came up with: 

1. 'heads-up'
2. 'preview'
3. 'sneak peek'
4. 'looking forward'
5. 'one year on'
6. 'a year later'
7. 'looking back'
8. 'review'
9. 'summary'
10. 'overview'
11. 'recall'
12. 'retrospect'
13. 'afterwards'
14. 'inherit'
15. 'passed on'
16. 'vista'
17. 'pre-vista'               

We chose the name preview as we felt this was a good description of what we were trying to achieve through our publication; giving the new first years a 'preview' of what they're going to experience. 

Final designs and lay-outs for the map and type anatomy pages. These will be printed onto acetate and placed between the pages as in the mock-ups that we have created:

This is the cover of our final book, how it would look:

This is our final book:

We had so many problems with printing and binding on our final book. We had previously booked our print slot in advance in order to ensure that we could get in to print our book with no problems. However, when it came to the day and we went down to print we were told that we couldn't print. This was because even though he was already back logged by about 45 minutes, to print all of our publication would take hours, which we just didn't have. This could've been easily prevented if we had been asked in advance how many pages our publication was going to be. However, we then decided to print our document in the studio for around the same price. As we were doing it in the studio, double-sided, it meant that the alignment wasn't very good at all, some pages were completely off. However, we didn't have the time to get them reprinted and decided that it would make more sense to just bind as best we could and have it reprinted for when we actually hand over the outcomes to the students in September.

Because of the bad alignment, we decided that it would be best to cut each sheet down by hand to ensure that we weren't chopping off too much of the page so that it would be obvious. Once we completed this long, laborious job we had to trim all of the pages together and clamp it. However as we wanted to include acetate that had to align correctly in order to work, it meant that we needed to trim all of the pages and then insert the acetate (this being the part that meant the whole process didn't work properly) When we had tried this previously, we left the acetate in when trimming to prevent disturbing the pages too much after it had been trimmed. But when we put the acetate sheets in the publication all of the pages were disturbed meaning that they didn't all align properly. This meant that once we tried binding all of the sheets, some didn't get enough glue to them and didn't stay in. It also meant that once we cut all of the pages down, this time after they had been bound, that big chunks of pages came out that weren't meant to.

All in all, we decided to just hand in what we had as there wasn't enough time to get it re done. We will, however, be getting it reprinted before September so that we can give the new students something worth showing.