OUGD503 SB1 - Secret 7" - Brief & Initial Thoughts

Two of the smaller live brief projects that I will participate in for this responsive module are Secret 7" briefs. Secret 7" are an organisation that put on a live brief competition every year in which they collaborate with seven different artist and more specifically a certain single by that artist. The content of the brief is to choose one of the seven staple songs allocated by Secret 7" and then for the song we are to design the album cover in which would be used for 7" vinyl release of the single. The Secret 7" organisation brief is then chosen by a panel of judges and the selected winning designs will be printed on to an actual 7" vinyl and these will be then sold for £50 each will all donations and money made going to charity causes, and this year the chosen charity is Amnesty International. This charitable side to the brief is something of which may be important to take in to context during the design stage.

The main conceptual idea that surrounds this whole brief and its links to the organisation itself "Secret 7" is that the prospective designs that we are submitting ad a digital answer of the brief must not include the artist or song name and this will all be kept as a secret. This opens up a major consideration during the brief as without the ability to use the artists name or the name of the song on the actual album cover it means that the message and context that surrounds the meanings of the song must be displayed through imagery alone and so this gives me the chance to develop my skills in how I convey messages through image and the whole contextual side to my practice as a graphic designer.

The first time that I tackled this brief was a year ago while in Level Four, even though I really enjoyed completing the brief due to the fact that I am massively interested in the world of music industry related graphic design I didn't really enjoy the module too much as the outcome that I produced wasn't up to the standard that I thought it could be at but I understand that this was early on in my learning curve as a designers and I have come on leaps and bounds with my design since that point and so to see how I can attempt the brief now after everything I have learnt since I last attempted it can make a change in how the quality of the outcomes can develop as well.

Finally due to the fact that I know how long this brief took to answer last year and that it wasn't actually very long I wanted to experiment with the briefs this year in relation to my time management process and how it is linked to a brief and so therefore I will be doing this by answering the Secret 7" brief for two of the possible artist and song choices, completing one in a two day timescale and the second in a one week timescale. I would like to experiment with this as I believe that it will give me an insight in to my process as a designer and the difference that come out of two identical briefs when set to two different time limitations and to help me with my time-management skills.

The seven possibilities of songs that can be design for are;

Chvrches - Clearest Blue
Etta James - At Last
Jack Garratt - Worry
The Jam - Art School
John Lennon - Imagine
Max Richter - Dream 3
Tame Impala - The Less I Know The Better

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Photography Editing

During the designing stage of the publication I encountered the problem of some of the photography that I had take to use as the main focus of my publication being dissimilar to each other and showing no overall consistency throughout the photography due to some being taken inside where there were too many light on and the image been overall too bright for the desired aesthetic, and some images being taken in bad locations outside making the images too dark and therefore these images need the highlights lightning to make them visually consistent.

By using the image levelling function that can be found in photoshop I manipulated the light levels throughout the colour level channels where needed boosting the highlights of the most white areas and making the rest of the image around the neon lights somewhat dark to match the design decision choice in the earlier stage to have bright coloured saturated colour against a black image background to create a contrast against the perfect white page.

OUGD504 Module Evaluation

As I look at this module that includes four units I would say that overall the unit has massively helped my develop a designer and even though it didn’t span over an excessive amount of time I can see a difference between my designing before and after the module.

The first very crucial aspect that the module delivered and developed in me was how it has improved my designing skills across the board as it has allowed me to practice more with a wide range of design solutions and experience more practice in to many different medias whether this be through a physical leaflet or publication, a branding exercise or finally some experience with web design.

As I have already had experience with all of these avenues of design it was a chance to rather than to complete briefs the way I usually would It would give me a chance to attack a brief in a much more detailed way by filling in the small gaps in the unit that I would usually miss out on and furthermore this more detailed approach will have an added emphasis on the production choices that the unit will go through to achieve a professional finish. This is vital in my development as in the past with previous units I have been really happy with the final design outcome but during the design stage I haven’t considered the pre-production, production and post-production considerations meaning my designs that I believed had gone really well ended up looking unprofessional as the production lacked finesse.

The major set back that I encountered throughout this module wasn’t anything to do with the design, as I believe that the designing stages went quite well. The problem came with my time management and how I went around tackling the brief, I spent too much time on the designing stages of the final product that I didn’t plan my time well enough that I ran over with the designing stage of the module and fell behind with the blogging tied to the module as well. This meant that when it came to the end of the brief I was too far behind where I should have been and needed more time to catch up than I had and due to this wasn’t able to submit on the deadline day. Due to this fact I had missed the deadline I would then be deducted by 5% from my final grade and this is something that I cant afford to lose from my grade and so therefore I will go in to the next unit ensuring that I would plan my design stages properly and stick to the plan so that I would stay on track.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Evaluation

This was the third brief of the module and therefore we were well back in o the wing of working and so it was time for a brief of which was somewhat more substantial in the amount of work that they entailed and so the main consideration during the unit would be making sure our time on the project was planned and used efficiently.

The brief led on from the project that we were set of summer in which we took photographs of some examples of typography in a certain location that has some sort of relevance to the location itself. After a minor setback with my original plan after loosing my images I finally decided on turning my examples of neon signage typography into a hand-bound professional publication and as this editorial avenue of design is something I can see ­­­­­­­myself doing in the future it is important that my skills in the subject develop. Even though I had to change my whole concept last minute it actually benefited my project in some ways as the original image that I took on my phone in Amsterdam weren’t a very good quality and so being able to retake them in Leeds with a professional camera helped my publication look a bit more professional.

The research stage of the unit was quite beneficial as rather than researching in to modern applications, trends and competitors like some other units I complete the emphasis on research lay in more theoretical and historic means as I looked back through the uses of canons of construction and application of editorial design that stretch back in excess of hundreds of years and allowed me to look at theoretical principles suck as the golden ration. This side of research isn’t something that I’ve had masses of experience with and so therefore is great to learn about.

The design stage of the unit was something that I had massive interest in as Instead of going for the obvious in your face approach to design that is often conveyed through neon that can easily become tacky instead I decided to convey a different more historical side to neon signage and its links to Leeds the city it is based in. This created extra problems in the designing stage as I had to stray from the norm of designing and try something a little more risky but I believe this paid off.

This unit was also the opportunity to fully develop my skills in which the whole module was based around and this was the considerations that must be in place in the production stage of any brief, everything from post digital stages, printing methods, stocks etc. This is a crucial stage to any design because no matter how professional the design is if the production stage isn’t properly considered it can hinder the professionalism of the project. We finally bound the book by any method that we thought appropriate. I was overall quite impressed by how professional the publication came out.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Production Considerations

Through the production of the finished publication due to the nature of the size and format of it multiple digital softwares have been needed to complete the finished product including photoshop used to edit the images taken for the unit, illustrator used to create the accompanying vectors for the publication and finally indesign for the final layout of the publication.
As the audience is two very different target markets the first of these information displaying functional design and furthermore the aesthetic stylised part of the design means that the final product appeals to two very different target markets.
To keep the costs of the production down the decision was made to print the stock on a low gsm paper so that the stock costs were minimised but also due to the fact that the publication was made up a a high amount of pages the low weight paper enabled it to fold neatly without struggle meaning that it remained at a professional standard.
I didn't manage my time very well and really only just managed to get the, book bound to the standard that I wanted it at meaning I didn't get any chance to experiment with any print finishes. Print finishes are a method in which I believe you can make a final product look a lot more professional for minimal costs and so next time I will ensure I have enough time to experiment with these.
As there was three different colours use in the final design for the book it wasn't viable to use spot colours i the process as this is only really beneficial when used with a limited colour scheme and to try and employ it with the colour scheme I had would have only made it a more expensive method in the end and so it was decided that CMYK ink printing was the best method to use for this project.
If this product was up for production in the real world graphic design industry and I was going to produce >100 copies I would be tempted to opt for a lithographic process and enable this by making the design duotone in colour and therefore prepare it for lithographic 2 plate printing. This is a much more efficient and cheap method of printing products with a simple colour spectrum but is only really applicable for a high amount of copies is needed.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Final Feedback Session

The next stage was to take my finalised design to a feedback session and have people comment on how they believe I have tackled the brief and whether they believe that I have achieved what I set out to. Overall the feedback that I received form the group was amazing, they commented on how they thought the balance between the fun and exciting sense that neon conveys naturally and the professional, simple and elegant historic sense I tried to display thought my other design decisions such as the serif style fonts and simple yet effective colour scheme.
They thought that the format that the publication took in which it positioned itself in the middle of an art directed photography book and also an informative all inclusive guide to Leeds and they said that this was an interest combination of the two. 
Finally they said that the colour scheme choice was ideal as the black and white colour scheme accented by the iconic pink/red colour synonymous with neon signage included the right level of vibrance to catch the eye thought the use of colour while still maintaining to not overcomplicate the colour choices keeping the design looking professional.

The only negative feedback that I received was that was the book was so large the use of only two different grid structures has slightly limited the publication and suggested that it may benefit from more alternative layout options for the text and image.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Final Designs

Now that I had developed the two different versions of grid systems that the alternative page spreads would be based around and had made the final decision on all the design decisions such and the typography, colour, aesthetic style and image style it was time to combine all of the design decisions int he final design of the whole completed publication, below you can screen page by page double speeds of said finalised publication;

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Colour Decision

The next design decision that was necessary to complete in order to be able to complete the designing stage was the colour schemes that would be used throughout the book and how this will relate to my concept and theories of the publication.

The two main decisions for colour scheme were immediately apparent to me as it was certain that these were going to have to be jet black and perfect white. I cam to this decision as these colours would be necessary for the design stage to ensure that the sense of professionalism through a clean simple and modern aesthetic and this black and while combination is synonymous of this style of design and so the final decision came down to what if any colour should be included along side the black and white to complete the colour scheme of the publication.

The nature of the images being of very bright colours meant that with just black and white alone the rest of the publication begin to look lost along side the images and therefore I have decided that the publication will need another additional colour throughout to pull the colour scheme together.

As it was one solo colour decision needed to finish the project as a whole it was important to choose the right colour to accompany the design. After looking deeply at the images that I had taken and looking in to my research in to neon gas and how it works I decided to use the very saturated pinky red colour that could be seen in the majority of my photography due to the fact that this is the base colour that is produced by putting an electric current through the neon gas and creating the iconic coloured light and so my colour scheme decision was finalised! 

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Hierarchies Of Type/Golden Ratio

As a continuation of some of the theoretical research I partook in for the unit, I decided to have a further more concise look at hierarchies of type and their relations to the golden ratio to see if this ratio can be used to create a hierarchy of type that is aesthetically pleasing in its proportions;

Below you can see an example of place holder text in which I have set the body cop at 12pt size as this is the optimum size for the majority of body copy and then using the golden ratio starting from the 12pt body copy as my starting point; which outputs sub-heading type at 19.416pt and heading type at 31.425pt and this can be seen below;

This was only really a trial and error exercise to see if these principle start I had earlier outlined could actually be used in the designing stage and form this I have seen really positive outcomes, the type hierarchy created by the golden ration from a standard body copy size of 12pt has created what I believe to be a really goof balance and proportionality between they type sizes.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Typeface Decisions

As I had originally outlined that in the publication I wanted to convey both a sense of a modern aesthetic but also this combined with the historical aesthetic style to neon signage that isn't well enough represented. In order to create this contrast and combination between the two different aesthetics through the text in the pub locations I decided to choose two very contrasting type face styles, this first of these was a big bold modern neon stylised font and this was to be combined with a more simple, classy and elegant font called Kefa and here are the two different typefaces below;

Even though these two fonts are so drastically distant and different they worked very well together as the balance of the contrast between modern and old created a aesthetic style that represented both side to the publication and here it what it looked like below;

After a feedback session it was outlined to me that the inclusion of the neon lights font throughout the book with quite a heavy use actually hindered the development of the book itself as this made the aesthetics of the book start to look very unprofessional and this hindered the modern clean aesthetic I wanted from the book and so it was suggest that the use of the font be kept to a minimum as they believe that the book should include this font in minimal places do to its obvious links to the content of the book but the use of it should be limited to ensure that the publication remains professional in aesthetic and so after replacing the majority of the uses of the neon font with the other font Kefa on which my classmates agreed was formal and elegant enough that it displayed the historical side to the subject but also that the slightly curved nature ensures that it doesn't come over too formal and doesn't accurately represent the more fun side synonymous with neon signage.

This ended up being the design decision that I took forward in to the final stage of my unit.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 - Page Layout Construction

The next stage of the design process was to decide on and contract some page layouts that the book will it too as one this as has been made and all the other design decisions have been justified it will simply be a case of accessing and rearranging the pre-determined information and design decisions around the content grid I have made. I decided form the research that I partook in centred around various exampled of different photographic art books that each double page spread within the book ill include one page solely dominated by image and one page solely dominated by typography and finally due to nature of the length of the book I determined that the book would be too long to keep one solo grid layout and design the whole book around that and so instead I developed two different grid systems that would be alternated throughout the book.
The grid systems that I developed are loosely developed from Raul Rosarivo's 9x9 grid structure which was originally developed from the Van De Graaf canon I earlier identified in my research. This 9x9grid combined with lines that intersect the book from corner to corner of each page individually and of the double page spread as a whole combine top denote the area in each page in which the main text and type context will be displayed not he page, my grid structure is based mainly on this but doesn't fit to the structure strictly and here are my two grid scrtcutures;

Furthermore these are are toe different examples of how the bool designs can be created using the grid;

Now that I have developed this grid system it allows be to use these grids to create the majority of the rest of my layout designs very simply by just following the rules of the two different gris systems.