OUGD504 Studio Brief 04 - Aesthetic Styling

Before starting the design stages of my website and smaller format alternative the decision was made to create a few different almost mood boards for the aesthetic style that would help me in the designing stage as I would have my fonts, colour schemes and alternative illustrations and key features already outline, the final take would be to just organise these aspects in to my final design this helping to ensure consistency and therefore fluidity and professionalism throughout the designing stage.

The first aspect prepared in advance was a big document full of different vectorised brush stroked that I had developed from a scan and made in to fully working vectors. The idea for these vectors comes from multiple different things, the first of these is an inspiration that I took from the traditional calligraphy of Chinese characters and I wanted to recreate this is a modern sense to use in my designs. The next of these are the obvious and frequent links between Wu Tang Clan and snakes such as under their music label they co-run an all female Hip-Hop collective names "The Deadly Venoms", the fact that in their songs that often sample the film "The Five Deadly Venoms" an old Chinese Kung Fu movie, the amount of snake related references used in the lyricism that put in to their songs and finally the fact that The Deadly Venoms directly translates to "Wŭ Dú". These reasons make it the perfect small vector inclusion for use in the designing stage of the website.

To go along side the vectors above I have also included a range of different phrases related to the album itself and have recreated these in ten different calligraphic Chinese style for use as background image aswell rather than actual text. The decision was made to use these throughout the designs as I though this would be a great way to represent the older side of the album when contrasted with the modern clean aesthetic being employed to represent the anniversary concept.

The final design decision made was centred around the two final main decisions that needed to be made before the designing coulee be started. The first of these two decisions was the font choice, due to the fact that I wanted to represent the more historical side to the album the obvious choice for type choice was to use a serif style font as these convey a feeling of history through their vintage aesthetic. The decision was made to use GT Sectra as it was a serif style font but also the very thick nature of it made and then the pointed serifs meant that the font was also visually similar to the calligraphic Chinese writing which will create great consistency throughout the designing stage.

The final decision to be made was the colour scheme that would be kept the same though all the designs for all different formats to create consistency and professionalism throughout. The main background colour would be white as this enforces the modern clean and swiss style aesthetic I ensued in the designs. Instead of sticking with the shade of yellow used mainly by the majority of collateral for the existing branding of Wu Tang Clan products I decided as this was a redesign in order to attract more followers to the group I decided to revitalise the colour scheme. Instead for the focal colour of the designs I decided to use a very saturated red colour that can be found on the Chinese flag keeping it similar with the aesthetic of the other design decisions. This red colour was hen accompanied with a minor use of the original yellow colour to ensure some sort of brand consistency in ensured.