so-journals-gde210-blog

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[22 10 21] FINISHING

So I went back into the studio to re-print the cover so that it fit the publication better, then ended by trimming the pages to size.

Ultimately, despite my shoddy bookbinding skills, I am really happy with the outcome. Next time I will seek the help of others who know how to do it properly - I can’t say I’m the best at working physically with something.

*UPDATE*

I have since been back and seen my publication and as people have been looking at it, the pages have fallen away from the cover, again!  

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[21 10 21] A Few Days On...

So it’s been a while since my last entry, and I can’t say I remember a lot of the details from it. I’ve spent the last week finalising and delivering my publication, and as I wait for the glue to dry, I am happy to say that I am super stoked by the final outcome!

The paper choices are solid, professional and feel super great to touch. The number of pages has meant the outcome is substantial - the typeface really shining through. 

I organised the pages correctly for print, separating the files that needed to be apart. There were issues with the printing (of course!), but with a cool head I was able to power through. 

During the time of thinking about printing I was able to find some lush papers that worked, and through the lack of the papers I “wanted”, new paper showed up that was perfect! Funny how things always work out, eh!

FINALLY... I am really happy with how it turned out today! I am concerned that the pages haven’t glued all that straight (despite my best efforts...) but hey ho! What can I do now. Tomorrow I am going to go back in, reprint my cover with a wider spine so that it has more flex and won’t look like shite. I’ll scrape the pages off the cover which shouldn’t be an issue, then glue it on and it’ll be all good! I canne wait to see it, but I am really happy with how it is already! Done is better than perfect... but done can be better! 

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[14 10 21] Type Setting

I decided I was going to create pieces of typographic artwork, like my ‘a typeface is not a tool’. - I ended up going through the whole document to typeset everything. It was tedious, frustrating and silly at times, but I found the therapeutic side of it, and I think I am happy with how it has turned out. There were, and maybe still are, some places that are either too spaced out or too cramped, but I think I got it. It would be interesting to see how others would be able to tweak/sort it, but for now, at least for today, I am happy with the progress I made. 

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[13 10 21] Delivering

I decided to clarify the design choices I have made, setting up my boards for assessment to help me pin down where I am at. I started to get a bit overwhelmed with where I needed to go from where I was. I feel that I managed to make huge progress - having something I would actually be happy with printing as is. But I was going to do more!

I started to play around with the article covers, playing around with the layout, juggling with whether to keep them uniform or create a piece of artwork for each one.

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[11 10 21] Cover and Contents

Today I spent the day going over some bits, solidifying the choices I’ve made so far such as type, layout, and my cover considerations so far. 

PARAGRAPH STYLES I set up all my paragraph styles: H1, H2, P1 and furniture. This has been really helpful when it’s come to maintaining constancy.

COVER I played around a bit more with my cover, getting much closer to what I want. I moved it from Illustrator to Indesign and started to consider the back cover too. I started to write up the summary/blurb of the publication.

CONTENTS I was looking at other contents pages, and started to play around with what would work with my publication. I wanted to make sure that it conformed with the rest of the publication, for example, the ‘by (authors name)’ is in the furniture style.

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[08 10 21] Cover & Name

Whilst working a shift at my job I was thinking about a name for the publication. St Bride’s 125th Anniversary was not a very interesting title for me, so I started thinking... I fairly quickly came up with ‘Leading’ playing on the typographic terminology, representing how far type handling as come from lead to digital, as well as St Brides being a leader in the education and archiving of typography. With that I started to think about a cover design. I wanted to keep it simple, just like the rest of the book, so played with ways of displaying the title. One main design feature I wanted to include was to have two lines wither side of the title to represent leading - these lines were going to be 125pts  long to represent 125 of history and 125 more!

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[07 10 21]

Spoke with Matt about where I am at with my publication - he seemed really confident that I knew what I was doing, which, for the first time in a while, I really do! I trust myself and my ability to make decisions that are clever and look great! As a result of our talk I decided to clarify my aims, and design decisions (or at least what I had so far).

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[05 10 21] Discover & Define

I spent a lot of the day in the library, looking at a lot of examples of layouts, type choices, publication sizes and the relationship between image and type. We also had our team meeting with Nick to discuss what we have done and how to progress. It was a really useful meeting where Nick shared a lot of resources for type considerations, history, and design news. When discussing what we have done, I mentioned my somewhat ambitious plans, namely to create a 125 page book with a degree of simplicity throughout. My rationale for the 125 pages is to represent the anniversary, and my idea for the simplistic layout is to act like more of a guide, a set of rules, that I can break article dependant. I got the impression Nick liked my ideas, but was hesitant. One of my lessons that I took away from last year, and decided this year, was to take more risks! I am starting to believe in myself as a designer and the worth I bring to the table, understanding that not all design works for everyone, however, I believe that if I justify my actions then I can’t really go wrong. I’m going to attempt the feat of 125 pages, but won’t be too upset if it doesn’t work out. I’ll just scale it back if it looks as though it won’t work out.

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[04 10 21] Discover & Define

DISCOVER & DEFINE I spent the day thinking about my publication: reading the articles so I could select which ones I wanted to include, the tone of voice, grids, typefaces and more. I am feeling confident about this publication, but I have started to think that although it may look great with the clean, beautiful and elegant style I’m going for, I am not pushing my boat out very far... This seems like a great opportunity to experiment and take some risks. I will speak to my Learning Team tomorrow about this and see what they think.

One thing I am really glad I did was hit the library to look at examples of other publications - there were some amazing examples that have influenced my design route, combining elements of others in order to start thinking about how mine will look.

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[01 10 21] Bits

Finishing the Posters I worked for a few hours on completing the poster activity - mainly working on Dr Suess’ quote. After spending a bit too long on it, considering I have a lot more on, I decided that “Done is better than perfect”, so left it where I was actually somewhat happy with the outcome for now.

*NOT SURE WHY THEY ARE BLACK AND WHITE*

Finishing the Spread I am really glad I put this task down for the evening and came back to it today. I am really happy with the outcome, or at least the concept (there’s always room for endless tweaking!). I had a few people’s opinions, including that of a lecturers who said that I don’t need to think too metaphorically about it. Now, I get that, but if I am designing, I am designing as deep as I can - there has to be a reason for my choices when it comes to design. I like to try and be clever, playing with words, ironies, metaphors and all - so here we are!

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[30 09 21] Craft Workshop

Really great day working on some interesting and engaging tasks. It was very fast paced, which I enjoyed, but it didn’t give me a lot of time to think deep (that may be a good thing... I can be more free instead...). 

I didn’t complete any of the tasks, so I planned to finish them the next day, allowing myself to step away and come back with a refreshed mindset.

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[29 09 21] Textworks & Bits

TEXTWORKS Really tricky to engage online, but we read a few articles on re-designs and answered provided questions. I can’t say I got much from it, but used the time to read a few other articles and acknowledged what each one was saying.

READABILITY SPREAD TASKS I have been  working on the extension task from yesterdays workshop. I spent a fair bit of time just tidying up the bad readability, thinking about the flow of the article and making sure I was a little more happy with the justification settings for my type - I found justified type is great for defining edges of shapes, but the rivers are almost unavoidable... I justified my decision to keep the rivers as ‘bad readability’ I continued working on my Good spread too, eventually ending up with one that I actually quite liked. It took a few turns, and took a fair bit of ‘coming back to it’, but that’s a lesson I’m learning - the act of knowing when to stop, breath and come back to it later. See pictures for justifications for some of the design directions.

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[28 09 21] Readability Workshop

This was a really productive day filled with activities and thought. Being sat with those on my table was really helpful to be able to compare and discuss our thoughts on each activity.

SPREAD ANNOTATION This task was interesting as Emily and I took a lot of time to analyse and consider all the design decisions for our selected spreads. Some of these observations then came into discussion when designing our ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spreads.

GOOD READABILITY SPREAD

I’m not sure if I was in the right mindset, but I struggled with this task - trying to make something unique but legible and not boring... obeying the grids. Grids and order is how I tend to work, so I was pretty comfortable with this task, but not necessarily happy with the outcome - but that’s my issue. The concept, of the ‘1′ I really liked, and the evolution of it was fun to do and worth the time. My main issue with this task is that there was a lot to consider and not enough time to invest in tweaking all the elements. When I come around to completing the spread I may have a total rethink and definitely consider the likes of tracking more, and play around.

BAD READABILITY SPREAD This was a challenge for both myself and Emily - turns out we are both a wee bit control/order orientated. We played with a few ideas at first, but then I wanted to step back and try to be clever with what we were doing rather than just making it ‘bad’ readability for the sake of it. When deciding point sizes for type I decided to set it at 63pt as a nod to the year the first FTF manifesto was published. Our penultimate design was a bit random, with the lack of time, but once we uploaded it I had the idea that we set on. Our spread allowed us to keep the order and style that we liked, especially considering there was no need for ‘mayhem’ due to the content - it didn’t sit right to do it for the sake of doing it - but with Emily’s suggestion of mixing up the orientation of the text, I justified it like so: We not only changed the orientation of the text in places, but moved the start of the type elsewhere, encouraging the reader to find the FIRST thing (text) first.  With our final submission however, Emily noted that the gaps in the paragraphs made them look like letters - so we made them intentionally letters, making the word FIRST. When I come to designing the spreads for the whole article, I will make the whole thing spell out FIRST THINGS FIRST. I’m looking forward to it

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[27 09 21] Readability & Craft

Today was a chill day that included watching the lectures on readability and craft as well as completing the relating tasks.

Readability: Whilst watching the lecture I learnt it is okay to trust my instinct - If I don’t my work will end up looking the same as others! I’m also looking forward to getting a bit messy with my readability and jumping out of my norm. As a result of it being a fairly light day for set work, I was able to make more time for looking at examples of good and bad readability examples. This meant searching Behance and other online searches to find a huge array of examples.

Craft: The quotes provided on the craft lecture reassured me that attention to detail is not being anal in a bad way, but essential as a graphic designer. I often get caught up in the detail and as  a result been pushed out of that habit - this is something I want and need to get back into! Coming up with new and original words to describe the typefaces was a bit more challenging than I thought it would be - my vocabulary lacking the range for it. This has motivated me to be more considerate of how certain types make me feel.

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[23 09 21] Typography Workshop 2

LAYOUT SHAPES I really enjoyed this task - allowing me to be free to do what I liked. I can imagine using this as a system to play with layouts (grey being text, blue being image, orange being graphic, black being rule/header). Seeing other’s work too was really exciting.

GRID GUESS Although we were pretty poor at guessing the numbers, I feel the group I was in had a good understanding of grids for when we design our own. 

MANIFESTO SPREAD As a team we worked really well and rapidly to get the task done! We split off and looked through the manifestos, quickly settling on An Incomplete Manifesto - this was one that resonated with us all. We came together to discuss routes that we would take which ultimately ended with us decided on the stair idea: The Stair idea leant itself to the building of oneself - taking note of all the points the manifesto makes, to build upon yourself. We then split off again, some making the title for the page, others working on the layout and others decided on the typeface we ended up using. We ended up using a typeface called Elsie which I think is beautiful and really befitting of the words of the manifesto. We finished our design and were ultimately really happy with the outcome!

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[21 09 21] Typography Workshop 1

A new day and I was feeling more confident about work! It was a full on day, working near others that I hadn’t had anything to do with before which was nice.

GUESS THE ‘G’ I was gutted I didn’t consider the style of ‘g’ in one of the exercises, instead analysing too much rather than stopping to think about other options - I jumped straight into the analysis of all the other letter forms, and think I came up with something that could have been “correct”, but was wrong.

The other tasks I did get on well with, cracking on with them and enjoying them. 

BIG G I’d like to say I have a decent eye for detail, so after having drawn our ‘g’ on A2, I was already annotating what I would change.

TRACING LETTERS I enjoyed this task, although finding the paragraph quite a tedious task as I knew I wouldn’t complete it in the time. I feel I was able to consider the kerning and tracking aspects of the task. I usually stick to my laptop so drawing like this was my biggest challenge here, but I persevered.

CREEP This was a great little task, and I’m happy with the process I went through to get to my outcome. I really liked the knife idea that was created with the shape from thh text being down the side. I want to spend more time blitzing out initial ideas first before getting hooked onto something - I feel there is this pressure to get millions of thumbnail ideas out, and I kick myself for not having enough.

FILM NIGHT POSTER This was a good task - I was able to isolate the information that we needed, developing a way to communicate the important information. I decided to keep all the details together as a side note that people can read if the poster has got their attention already. I really struggled with having to hand render it - knowing that whatever I did would not be how I imaged it. I needed to see it digitally so I could move the elements (that looked better) around to gain a better idea of how it would look. So I jumped on Illustrator. Having played on Illustrator I felt a lot better about a design direction for the poster - making the 94 the emphasis to draw people into the rest of the poster.  * I definitely found coming back to it the day or two after made it a lot easier to work on - that break to come back to a task is something I want to continue doing. See digital version for more refined poster

REVIEW OF THE DAY

It was a great day overall, but I did struggle with the fact we had to hand render everything - it would take me less time and get a better idea of what I want to do if I did a version of the poster digitally. Maybe that wasn’t the point, but I do agree I should practice working with my hands, on paper to start, and then go from there.

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[20 09 21] Activity 1 - Structure

Second task of the day required us to find a double-page spread and describe how we feel about it.

The horrible day I had was coming to an end so I looked at a few but knew which magazine I wanted to talk about - Wavelength. It’s a magazine that brings me great joy every time I look at one. The production is pure quality, from the page design to the feel of the publication.

I enjoyed writing about why I liked it, and probably could have said more, but I gave myself a break instead and called it a day.