Waterstones Project

Scratch and sniff gift tag and mailer

I have completed my designs for mailers and gift tags, shown below. The mailer is folded in half vertically, to contain the gift tag (front and back shown). The scratch and sniff panel is contained on the largest icon on the front of the gift tag, and the aroma relates to a recipe typical of the author. The photo texture on the gift tag infers the author's style of cookery.

They will be circulated in magazines, and sent to potential customers. In addition, they will be hung from a Christmas tree in the store window display, and a larger tree outside the store will have them displayed as decorations, so people can remove them to use. They can be exchanged for £1 discount from the author's book, and free gift wrapping.

I still have to create the gift wrap, and do a mock up of the Christmas tree, with additional decorations relating to Waterstones.

Finally, I moved the address and stamp to the back, and changed the brown (chocolate) which looks a bit dull, to purple, which still infers luxury and links to chocolate with Cadbury's.

House style

It is important to consider the audience when creating designs, and be able to appeal to a broad demographic, or a smaller-subset of your target audience, but still adhere to your house style. For instance, at Christmas, the following audiences need to be considered: families, religious people, children, secular audiences, those without children, etc. Different imagery and styles can be used to infer thoughts of food, gifts, religion, parties, homeless, elderly, etc. The style and colours of an image can infer expensive, friendly, trashy, loud, stylish, etc.

Below are screen shots of pages from my Waterstones book showing how I created 4 posters and an invitation.

Character-based posters

Celebrity chefs

We were asked to design 4 posters representing 4 authors or books, where the focus is on the character, not the story or the subject. We look at Stylorouge's work and how they achieved this with the iconic poster they designed for Trainspotting. It was ground-breaking at the time (in the 1980's) as previously all film posters had a visual hierarchy of characters, with full colour, overlapping images. It spawned a million immitations. It worked so well because nothing like it had been done before with most films having stereotypical charcter shots, overlapping and arranged in hierarchical fashion. It shows all the charcters at an equal level of importance and focusses on them as people and characters.

I created posters for 4 celebrity chefs. I used high resolution photos from the internet, removed the backgrounds with a combination of Photoshop tools, and used threshold to achieve the look I wanted. I then used InDesign to layout the designs. I used American Typewriter for their names, and Antique Olive for the body copy. I felt these typesfaces complmented each other well. I chose orange as it contrasts well on the black and white areas of the images. The taupe sidebar was chosen to bring some warmth and contrast to the design. There is a clear hierarchy in the typography. The Jamie Oliver poster is the least successful as I could not find picture of him with suitably dark shoulders, with his head at the right angle.

My final design was changed by removing the sidebar, creating a box around the body copy and adding a visual full stop (the orange rectangle) which also acts as repitition. I think the designs now look more striking with improved contrast. The black box under the text makes the type legible now.

Marketing brochures

Hampshire County Council brochures

I recently created the branding for Hampshire County Council's children's homes. There are soon to be 8 children's homes owned by HCC and I was tasked with creating a brand for them. I created logos for all the homes, and 40-page brochures for each of the homes (see below). For the remaining children's homes, I will endeavour to take the internal and external photographs of the building myself, as the styling of the photos needs to be improved. The brochures were printed by our in-house print shop. I was really pleased with the results, and the Service Manager and children's homes managers gave me positive feedback. I have also designed flyers, certificates and leaflets.

HCC children's homes handbooks, designed by myself

Book layout

Waterstones book

We were tasked with designing 3 layouts for a double and single page spread, considering all the levels of type hierarchy that would be needed.

I used many of my design books for inspiration, with particular reference to Fifty Typefaces that Change the World (Walters 2013), and Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton (2010). I have also looked at the styles used in my cookery books and magazines such as Kinfolk.

Below are two pages from Kinfolk Volume 12 (Ash and Verdugo 2014). I love the calmness created by their centre aligned type and font combinations. Although the typeface is very small (6-7pt?) is still still legible. The passe partout border compliments the type very well, fitting with the slow paced aesthetic of the magazine. They also use full bleed colour background for some pages of text which is very effective and helps with the pace of the magazine.

I considered the benefits of using columns or a grid. I then looked at fonts which I thought worked well together, which were different enough to create contrast, along with the sizes of the typeface. I then thought about how I would lay out a standard set of pages, and what colours to use. I decided to use grey as it goes with any colour of imagery, but I may introduce colours on some pages. I chose to use rules for some added interest.

I chose to work with a 6 column layout to give flexibility across the pages for different layouts, depending on the number of images and the length of the body copy. I experimented with layouts based on the gold section and have decided to go with a symmetrical layout, but to combine this with left and right aligned text (not centred).

Colour will be monochrome, initially, with perhaps some subtle colours added depending on the image colours.

Layout one

This is my first design. It was inspired by the layouts in Basics Design 07:Grids (Ambrose and Harris 2012), although the font choices are my own. I chose Droid Serif for the heading and subheading, Antique Olive for the large body copy, and Franklin Gothic Book for the body copy. I wanted to use 3 fonts which complimented each other, by combining a serif and sans serif. I decided 10% black border as a graphic device  and a 3 column layout for ease of reading.

Layout two

This layout looks more contemporary, and is inspired by layouts in 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design (Heller and Vienne 2012). The bold rule really draws the eye to the title, and allows the heading typeface to be smaller than without it. The combination of users of two different serifs for large and main body copy and and sans serif heading compliment each other well. I'm not so keen on the italic type used for the running head.

My version below, uses the Antique Olive family for all text except the running head and the picture captions, which are in Droid Serif Roman and Italic. I like this bold layout, again using 3 columns, and with the use of rules rather than the border (layout one).

Layout three

This is my preferred layout, in part because it uses only serifs. Bree, a slab serif, is used for the heading and subheading, and Droid Serif for the remaining type. Droid is an easy to read typeface, its serifs leading the eye gently across the page.

Further development

I am considering creating a square book but will apply the above template for layout three to the new format, with some slight changes. I will work out the margins based on the golden section. Some images will be full bleed and others with a passe partout. The reason for choosing a larger book is to be able to use plenty of white space and give the images (particularly the featured images) room to breathe.

References
AMBROSE, G and HARRIS, P (2012) Basics Design 07: Grids. 2nd ed Lausanne, AVA Publishing SA
ASH, R (2014) The Case for Crying. Kinfolk Volume 12 p123
HELLER and VIENNE (2012) 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design. London, Laurence King Publishing Ltd
LUPTON, E (2010) Thinking with Type. 2nd ed New York, Princetown Architectural Press
VERDUGO, A (2014) The Case for Crying. Kinfolk Volume 12 p122
WALTERS, J L (2013) Fifty Typeaces that Change the World. London, Conran Octopus Ltd

Logo design

At the start of the branding and promotion module we were tasked with re-desiging a logo for a high street clothing store of our choice, preferably one in need of the job.

We picked Store Twenty One. Our research told us that the company had approximately 200 stores in the UK. They appeared to stock mostly women's clothing (but some men's and homewares), with no particular fashion appeal. Prices were at the lower end, but not as cheap as Primark. The stores appeared to be in less prestigious areas of towns, and were fairly small. We hypothesised that the customers consisted mostly of 40+ women, not interested in fashion, wanting cheap clothing, at convenient shops (not wanting to travel to larger towns or cities were Primark would be). We guessed that competition would be Primark, Peacocks, George at Asda.

The stores had totally uninspiring signage (akin to newsagents), and not much in the way of display posters inside. It looked like they had recently tried to re-design their logo (the three line logo).

Store Twenty One had originally started as an M&S clothing manufacturer 90 years ago, with a long heritage. We thought this might be something to capitalise on.

The key feelings we wanted to communicate were:

Value, trust, convenience, accessible, British

I drew some ideas as thumbnails

The following are my initial ideas. The top four I rejected, and the bottom two rows show my two preferred logos. I will develop these further by adding colour. I think the bottom one may be too feminine. The type was chosen to look more feminine and welcoming, with more traditional styles harking back to their heritage. I wanted to update their image by experimenting with vertical text.

The logos above are my final ideas.

The top row look distinctly more modern than their current one. The first logo lacks character, but the other three look feminine perhaps too much so, bearing in mind the store's customer base.

The bottom row conveys more of the feeling of history I wanted to associate with the brand, whilst the main typefaces on the final one (bottom right) look solid but friendly. Using 3 typefaces adds more interest. The type was centered to give a traditional feel. Reference to their year of founding was made to highlight their reliability and inferred good standards of workmanship. My reservation is that the layout is rather popular at the moment so may look dated soon. In addition, the bottm scripe font is not that legible.

The final iterations are below, in colour. The colours were chosen to appeal to the client base.

Stencils

Stencils in advertising

I really like this method of advertising - the stencil is applied to the pavement with a chalk spray which can be completely removed. The simply typography works well for a stencilled design on a rough surface like paving. Anything complicated would be lost, unless it were huge, which would be impractical.

Waitrose Fairtrade Tea

We were tasked with creating a stencil for a poster to promote a fair-trade tea brand of our choice. Below is one of Waitrose's adverts (http://www.waitrose.com/shop/ProductView-10317-10001-145696-Waitrose+fairtrade+green+tea+bags). I also wanted to try another style so I selected Clipper who also make fairtrade tea products. I looked at their websites and chose a slogan which fitted in with their advertising.

I mind-mapped a few word associations with tea, and sketched some thumbnails, below.

I decided I wanted to incorporate the texture of the tea bag, and couldn't find a suitable photo online, so I scanned a tea bag and used that image.  For my other poster, I chose to use a tea stained background. For both posters, I cut my stencils from stencil film and experimented with sponging tea coloured ink, and white opaque ink. 

I produced 4 posters in Indesign, which I stencilled over, producing the 4 designs below. I think the tea coloured stencils work best, and I prefer the single tones of the Clipper poster, bottom left, as it looks warm and comforting, just like tea. The Waitrose poster works well without the stencil.

Children's Homes resident's guide

As part of rebranding the Hampshire County Council children's homes, I have been asked to create the new resident's guide, for children who come to live in the homes. This is this first few pages of the guide for The Mead.  I have guides for 6 other homes to create. As part of my Valuing Performance goals, I will be spending 3 days in the HCC graphic design studio which I am currently organising.

Career map

This ABC of graphic design careers was created for the Professional Practice module and was designed in the style of Uppercase Magazine's editorial layout.

Professional practice - interview with a designer

This article was created for the Professional Practice module - an interview with a designer.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition, in this context, is the idea of creating an image which challenges the word being represented. The imagery and text must have opposing and supporting connotations, depending on your viewpoint.

For the first poster, for the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition on beauty, entitled Ugly, I chose to use a picture of a beautiful woman, with underarm hair, as many people in western society would find this unattractive and even repulsive. However, in some cultures, and certainly in recent British history, it was considered attractive. The image represents the ambiguous nature of beauty and ugliness.

The image below is of artist and sculpturer, Alison Lapper. She stands out because she was not afraid to portray her disability, and an installation piece of her was exhibited in Trafalgar Square. To some people a naked person with a disability might not be typically beautiful, however, the poster tries to illustrate that beauty means different things to different people, through a controversial piece.

Typography insertion

I cropped an image of a hurricane to roughly golden spiral proportions on the page. In Illustrator I created a spiral which I inverted and then edited the proportions and the position to line up correctly. I chose a font that looked in harmony with could, rounded and fluffy, but still authoritative, like the weather agencies. The text I added was hold onto your hats, in an overlay layer so that some of the shading from the image showed though. I would have liked to make the text into a wedge shape, to narrow as it approached the centre, but I couldn't work out how.

For the dog's image, I decided to use a font that reminded me of the dog food brand Pedigree Chum. I used Photoshop and aligned the baselines along the layers of dust that the dogs were running along, except for the word "only" which fitted nicely between the P and d, and leads the eye into the main text, and from one dog to the next. I used an eraser to remove the text from the main dog, to make it look like the dog was running on top of it. The word "fast" is in red for emphasis. I quite like the simplicity and the rawness of this piece.

In InDesign I added three lines of text in the same font, each one progressively lighter and smaller. The object style for text was set to colour burn to make it appear to blend in with the textures and shades of the buildings. I wanted to make it look like the text was floating off into the sky. The angle of the text reflects the diagonals of the buildings, and I placed the words "not down", upside down to reflect the message, and chose a bulbous font to look like the text had been squashed and to contrast strongly with the angular buildings and other typeface.

Appropriation inspired by The Humument

We created 3 posters for ITV dramas of our choice, using appropriation inspired by The Humument. I printed out some text from Wiki about the programs, and drew a scribbly image over the text with a black fineliner. I opened the scanned image in InDesign and added program information and the ITV logo at 60% opacity. I used the colours of the logo for the banners.

Book cover series

For our digital image techniques class, we needed to create 4 book covers of our choice from a list of 6 authors. I chose Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.