OUGD406 - Speaking From Experience (1)

This brief is based upon our thoughts on the first year and what we feel we perhaps needed to have information on, which we will now be designing for & giving to the new first years in September.

Initial Research

From this research, I created a sheet which compiled it all and kept it all concise.

Initial Ideas:

The idea I have decided to go for is a collection of designers, design studios & design blogs in a publication format. This is what I am most interested in and I think overall my design skills will be put to better use in this rather than the other ideas.

As someone who likes to look at designers for each brief and find appropriate ones, I still found it hard to do this over the first year because of getting used to the time restraints of each brief. A resource like this would have been very much appreciated, something which had designers in, old & new, their fields and information in a concise and quick to find manner.

From here, and further research, I created three sheets: Concept, Production & Method of Delivery.

The concept is to have an easy to read & navigate publication with the designers work in, all categorised into the five main areas of design, also perhaps which briefs they relate to the most, and what else their work consists of.

The method of delivery is simple for this, a magazine or book format. Looking through research I gathered, there is a difference between the two layout-wise. The magazines are a lot more free, whereas the books seem a lot more formal and proper. Combining the two formats to create a middle balance is what I intend to do. Depending on how thick it turns out, my choice of binding will change. For the minute I am going with a standard binding.

For production I intend to create the whole thing digitally, but may also incorporate the use of screen printing & hand rendered work. As I will be using the designers work & information as the content, there won't be much need for a huge amount of content designing. I will be mainly designing the layout and formatting of the book. Stock is something that I will definitely need to take into consideration, and I would like to use normal paper as well as coloured, translucent/tracing/layout paper as well as acetate, as these types of paper will variate the book and make it not so repetitive. These pages could be used as title pages/designer information pages which overlay the main images.

Design Sheets

Front Cover designs

Digital mock-ups