Final Brochure

Today I went and got my final brochure printed out, and folded it all up into a booklet. Unfortunately, something went slightly wrong while folding up the booklet and one of the pages seems to stick out a bit too much when it's all folded up. However, I am really happy with the final design, and feel that it even came a long way in the past week! Following the critiques last week, I made quite a few big changes to my brochure, although I strongly feel they were all for the better. I have attached the final spreads below, as well as some snips of the grids I was using:

Below are the snippets of the poster and one of the spreads to show the grids:

Overall I have really enjoyed this paper, and am going to look into doing the 300 level progression of this paper, as I enjoy trying to make text very clear and visually appealing, without overdoing it with imagery etc. I quite like the simplistic approach, especially since it's actually a lot harder to make a simple design look good, which makes it more enjoyable! 

Test Print

On Friday I went and got my brochure printed our professionally at Ink Digital, just so I could get my head around both the InDesign document setup, and the folding and sticking together of the actual booklet. Once it was printed, I found a few small micro details that I wanted to change, so I had the intention of reprinting. However, I used this test print to practice the folding so I was prepared for the final output. It was a lot tougher than I had originally thought to fold it all up properly, and had a few problems with this. Once I make te few slight adjustments to my brochure I will get it reprinted for my final.

Week Five Critique

Today's class was the final class in which we could get a critique before printing for next week's hand-in on Tuesday. I came in to the class with a much more refined poster this week, having changed the background colour to grey, and began looking at the composition and scaling variation in more depth. However, during today's class, there were still quite a few things that needed changing, even within my brochure. Last week I didn't get too much feedback given to me on my brochure itself, only really the poster. However, it was good to get a whole bunch of feedback to work on over the next few days before printing. The annotations and feedback can be seen in my physical workbook, with annotations on each of my physical printouts. I have also attached some images of my current brochure and poster below.

Overall, I am really pleased with how my designs are coming along. Over the past week my poster has made extremely good process, and definitely looks much more refined. At the same time, there wasn't a lot of development on my brochure. Following today's critiques, I am very clear on what I need to change over the course of the next week before printing out and taking my final output to class on Tuesday. I feel like the extra changes I make from the critique will benefit my work nicely, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the final output turns out.

Week Four Critique

As per usual, we spent most of the class doing group critiques and getting feedback on our work. This week, I presented a brochure which has been refined quite a lot, and my first poster concept. As expected, there are only a few changes to make on the brochure, but a lot to make on the poster, since it was my first effort. I have attached the spreads and poster below:

Above, I decided to attach all of the spreads to the blog post as one big sheet, to give a fair idea of how it looks folded out and printed/stuck together at the full A2 scale. I have included most of the feedback of what I need to change in my physical workbook, on each printed spread/poster. By next week, I am hoping to have my brochure pretty much finished, to a point where there are only the most minor of tweaks to be made. With my poster, I would like to get it to a point where there are a few suggestions on what to change, although these also being pretty minor. Therefore for the next week I will work on these steadily to that I can have a much more refined output for our final critique before hand-in.

Week Three Critique

As per usual, today's classed was based around group critiques, and collecting feedback from both peers and teachers. Over the past week I had worked on my brochure a lot, and made quite a lot of improvements, nonetheless, I was hoping to get a lot of feedback to continue developing this brochure. I had Belinda come around and give me some feedback, all of which was very helpful (feedback can be seen in my physical workbook). 

I have attached my developed spreads below, along with my initial cover concept:

Next week we are having another class critique, although we are required to have a further refined brochure, along with an initial poster. This will give us two lessons of having our posters critiqued before our final hand-in. I'm looking forward to how the overall brochure/poster turn out, so am keen to get started on the poster nice and early over the next few days. I will aim to get a quite refined and well structured poster made up by next week's critique, since we only have two weeks of poster critiques, and it will allow me to have a refined version critiqued rather than an average quality mock up poster.

Initial Mock Ups and Critique

In today's class, we began with more discussion around grids, and the main dos and don'ts of design. We also revisited last semesters example booklets for some more inspiration. The class was again based around critiques of our first mock up concepts, where we gathered into small groups to give feedback to our peers. I am looking to keep the appearance and aesthetics of my brochure similar to my posters from assignment one, so they almost work with one another, and can be a collective group rather than individual forms of design.

I have attached my presented concepts below. The below concepts don't follow the same horizontal alignments, as I was looking to play around with a few different options so I could decide which style I liked best and continue to develop that. Each of the images below have been attached as JPEGs in the form of spreads, so each is actually two pages side by side:

After receiving feedback and critiques from peers, teachers, and individually critiquing my own work, found out what was working and what wasn't working in each concept. The first one has quite a nice set up, which would be good for continuing and creating horizontal relationships across all of the pages, there are some changes as well such as moving everything on the right hand page across to the right hand margin, so it's a similar layout to page one's layout. The second spread has too much negative space at the top. Apart from that, I really like how the text has been lay out, along with the inclusion of a graph/statistics alongside some body copy. The third spread is quite busy, although with a few adjustments such as making the circles/symbols smaller, it would help to create more negative space in between themselves and the body copy. I have analysed what needs changing on each spread in more depth in my physical workbook, with annotations highlighting what needs to be changed or considered in a different way.

Overall, there are aspects of each design which I like, and I'm glad I've come up with a few different ideas early on in the project, so I can straight away get onto the development process over the next 5 weeks. I'm looking forward to the development of this project, and seeing how I can continue to refine it over the course of the term. By next week, I will look at developing all three of these spreads, and making sure each of them share horizontal relationships, while also looking at creating the cover and back page of my brochure. The cover and back page will also share horizontal alignments with the inside spreads. 

Introduction to Assignment Two

Today in class we were introduced to our next assignment, following the two week study break. Our next assignment deals with more of a three dimensional form, which will be interesting in terms of creating all of the horizontal and vertical alignments and relationships across all of the pages. We are required to create a brochure, which can fold out into a large A2 poster. I am really excited about this project, particularly because it is dealing with a lot more type, and will require very careful placement of type and icons etc., as well as the fact that it will be more of a challenge creating a consistent hierarchy throughout.

During class we made a mini mock-up so we could get our head around how to fold the brochure and expand it into a poster. We also analysed the information, and began working out how we would like to ideally group certain lots of information with one another, and deciding roughly what pages we were likely to do so. By next week, we have been asked to bring along a mock-up with all of the type etc placed into the booklet as a basic initial concept/layout.