Election Time

I didnt really know who to vote for in the upcoming election. So i took a questionaire to tell me who to vote for



Take the Who Should You Vote For? UK General Election quiz

Liberal Democrat				21
Labour				12
Green				11
Conservative	-4
UK Independence	-19

You expected: LIB
Your recommendation: Liberal Democrat
Click here for more details about these results

TRACKING

Have been adusting the tracking in my bodytext for about an hour now..In this time my tracking has been 5pt, 10pt, 15pt, 15.5pt, 17pt, 18pt, 20pt, 21pt, 22.5pt, 25pt. I have settled at 25pt.

Teeny Adjustments

Today I had course leader check my work. She pointed me in the right direction on some minor tweaking adjustments that will improve the layouts. Things such as my point size needs to be smaller, which will inevitably affect the tracking, so that has also been reduced. She said that the imagery was strong but the colouring of the imagery bothered her slightly. She told me to try it in black and white. Doing this would mean changing the colour of my type/body text aswell as that is all done in black and white, however I will experiment.

Final Layout. Fully spec'd

So this is the first of my layout pages. I have used the font Walkway semibold for the body text. This is a text from www.dafont.com. And the title font is called Tiza. This is also a free font I have found on the internet with help from my tutors. I spent a long time adjusting the tracking and alignment. This is the part of the project I have enjoyed the most. The part where I am only making slight adjustments. It also relaxes me by knowing that I am at that stage and I do not have to panick about getting things finished. The title is influenced by a comment Crow makes about feeling like a wildcard in the typography world, as he feels he does not deserve to be connected with it.

This is this the second layout and one that I struggled with the most. The image of the stacked booksis also a reference to a comment Crow makes in the interview about his compulsive disorders. I chose a mix of relevant books and non relevant books to try and make it as interesting as possible.  I feel this works alot better than just a plane white background. Comments from my housemate help also, saying that the inclusion of a background makes the article more interesting.

Work in the sun

Today ive just been catching up on my sketchbook with annotations and research. This is the part of the project I always fall on, so next year I am going to make this part of my work a priority. Also been thinking alot today about the advice given to me from Luke Lobby, Art Director of Wonderland, about imagery to use in my layout. Photography of books and plane wallpaper was what he suggested so I have been playing around with this idea. oh and the weather has been tropical!

"Its a labour of love"

Never heard this saying before until today. now i have heard it twice in the same day on separate occasions.

Guest Speaker: Luke Lobbey

Luke Lobbey was the art director of magazine Wonderland and he spoke to us about his design career and how he has gone from step to step. I felt that i could relate to him in many ways, especially when he was describing his days as a student. He said that he was never that good at unversity and that didnt really produce any work that he was too proud of, but he aways had a love for design. He was doing graphics but he had interests in many different things so he said he was quite confused as a student, and there were always better students than him.
His career really started when he did a years worth of work placement at iD magazine and was offered a job as a junior designer. His reflection on his work placement was very helpful also. He just emphasises on keeping a positive and realistic attitude. It is not the best time to be breaking into the design industry due to cut backs and recessions so it is important to be very positive and treat every person as a future contact.
Wonderland was featured on the TV show Dragons Den where it successfully found investors and it has continued to succeed ever since. Luke was the art director right from the start of the magazine so he describes how daunting yet exciting it was, to be able to come up with a whole new image and brand. The target audience is both male and female, aged between 24 and 40. He emphasises that the magazine folows the rule that form comes first, then function. This is evident in many of the layouts that he showed us, as most of the text was challenging to read or pushing the boundaries of legibility. But all this is to compliment the type of customer they attract- the more visually aware demographic.

David Crow Typeradio interview

The designer assigned to me was David Crow and from listening to the interview I could notice he was very softly spoken and quiet. He seemed quite reserved and I got the sense that he was very intelligent but also very modest. He puts alot of thought into what he says, this is evident due to the fact that he stutters so much and restarts alot of his sentences. He does this quite often and sometimes on the recording there will be moments of silence where no one is talking and you canjust tell he is thinking over what he would like to say and how he will be portrayed for what heis saying. I thought I could illustrate these elements of his characteristics by using white space, enough for it to be noticeable anyway.

He's a very organised person and he talks about his compulsive disorders. The example he gives is if he see's books around the house, he has to stack them up from largest to smallest. This instantly started to generate illustration ideas to be included in my layouts. I also thought about Crow's dedication and love for typography and how I could use type as imagery due to its importance to him and his practice.

2nd Crit: Typeradio

The am of this crit was to show our finalised ideas of how we would solve to brief. I did not have my original idea to use a reference or starting point due to it corrupting. This meant starting over, and sometimes this can generate new, fresh ideas that you may have missed first time round so, this thought wasnt too daunting.

I showed off some new layout ideas with amendments from the first crit. The feedback was helpful and the main point I got back was to use Photography as apposed to my chosen illustrations. The rendered text is fine and using the idea of Crow's compulsive disorders to help organise my pages is also something my tutors appreciated.

using an illustrated drawing of some books, in reference to his compulsive disorder

This idea was deemed a bit irrelevant. It was linking to a quote from the interview where he says how he wishes he was a student again. Then with the stationary ordered into size illustrating his compulsive disorder. But we talked about he he would have probably been a very neat and organised student, so broken drawings with ink blots may not be the best way.

CORRUPT FILE

This hasnt happened the first time with InDesign. In fact it happens all the f**king time. Went to open my layout design only for InDesign to tell me it had to quit unexpectedly and cannot open the file. Brilliant.

Draft Layout

Ok, so this is my first sort of, rough layout idea that im going to progress with. I produced this in our first proper crit of the project and got some very helpful feedback. Wider margins was one of them due to where the readers thumbs and fingers would be located when they are reading it. I realised in a magazine, people flick pages as apposed to turning pages. The vast amount of white space is down to the interview and the vibe that i felt from listening to David Crow speak. He is very softly spoken and never speaks for too long. He always takes his time to answer questions so in some parts of the interview there are relatively long pauses and no one is speaking. I feel i can illustrate this by showing alot of whitespace. the Tutors seemed to agree.  Im going to change the right hand side page. soon.