OUGD505 - Studio Brief 1: An Introduction To Air Jordan (2)

The first thing I did today was experiment with how I wanted the photographs to be displayed in my research publication. I previously decided that I didn't want full colour, but a monotone colour. At the minute my initial thoughts are monotone red, and perhaps using halftone on them.

As I haven't collected any images that I will definitely use, I decided on using the original image that was used for the jumpman logo. This image will definitely feature in the publication and has a wide range of colours in it so it will give me an opportunity to see how these colours change through the use of monotone colouring.

Chosen image

The first effect I tried was just doing a simple monotone red by using the Duotone option in Photoshop.

My initial thoughts are that the colour is quite bright. I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing for my publication and will know when it is in the layout, but for now as I haven't chosen a specific red yet, I will continue with it.

The next thing I tried was the halftone effect on top of the red monotone.

This doesn't look as good as I thought it would. The image isn't as clear as I thought it would be, and I think that's to do with the angles/directions of all the dots. I then changed the angles so all the dots would be straight and in line.

However I still don't think this looks that much better at all so I decided to scrap the idea and move onto using just a monotone.
Instead of using the duotone effect I tried using just a coloured layer and the different filters I could use to see how the colour affected the image and try get something I was happy with.

The first one I tried was 'multiply'. This made the image much darker than the duotone option did and makes the image look a lot better because it's given it a lot more tones than the duotone one seemed to give.

I then tried 'overlay'. This made the colour much brighter than multiply but not as bright as the duotone effect. I thought it was a bit garish so decided that this is definitely not the effect to use.

I then tried 'soft light'. This one was interesting because it made it a much browner and darker image. I do like the look of it, however it isn't really a solid red, it is much darker than I want.

The fins effect I tried was 'linear burn'. Once again this came off as a much browner colour. However it is darker than the one above and shows the shadows off much better.

After doing these effects I decided that I was probably going to use the duotone effect, but use a darker red so it wouldn't be as light. It is the effect which will best get the tones and shadows of the images, and with some editing the images should turn out well.

Once I finished experimenting with the images I went back to the publication itself and worked on the content that I was going to include and decide on the spreads I was going to need.

The first thing I did was write down the main points that I wanted to focus my research down to.

I found that it was very hard to fit these subjects onto just sixteen pages so joined a few together to make the content small enough to fit.

Once I did this I then drew out a quick plan of the pages and figured out an order for the pages to go in.

When I finished this I went back to the designed layouts on InDesign and went through to choose the ones I wanted to use. In total I needed six double page spreads and three single pages, with one page spare for a contents page.

I then went about choosing the layouts I was going to use for the book. This was a long process because I had to think about which subject area they would best suit if any, and then estimate an amount of written content for these areas, and also have room to develop the layout if necessary depending on the amount of content I do end up having.

Chosen layouts:

Previously when I designed the layouts I intentionally had it so they wouldn't go off the top or bottom of the page, just the sides, so there was a white header/footer throughout. However this has caused me to think about it for a couple of days and become quite annoyed at it so I decided that going off the top and bottom didn't matter and would probably make the layouts look better. From this decision I went to the layouts and changed the image frames so they worked better on the page.

After I did this I started collecting images for each page of the publication. I had a pretty specific idea as to what I want in the images for each page so managed to do this task very quickly. Once I had the images I took them all into photoshop and edited them to the correct sizes and put the duotone effect over them all.

After this I then input them all into the layouts.

There are some very obvious immediately issues which arose after I put the images in. I knew that it wouldn't go so smoothly for some of the pages so expected these issues. I decided that this would be a good point to start developing the layouts around the images as I had these all for definite now. I wanted to go page by page and fix the issues and slowly develop the publication as a whole to make it consistent and more interesting. Although I like the layout at the minute, I do think that overall it is quite basic and isn't particularly interesting. Also now I have chosen my images I do think that some of the layouts don't best show these off so will need to be changed.

I started on the first page. The main issue is the 'brand' written in red over a red image. That wasn't a particularly smart move on my part so will need to be changed.

I changed it to white but found there wasn't much of an improvement because of where the text happened to be.

I tried it in black, and it obviously worked much better.

Another issue I have with the image is the text on the image is a bit disrupting to the title text.

I made the image larger so there text wouldn't be included. When doing this I found it created another issue in the fact that there seemed to be quite a lot of white space just left in it's place now.

I moved the title across, and already it looked better.

I change the words on the top part of the title to make a bit more sense as to the content. I didn't think 'brand' really apply as much as 'the history of' does.
Another issue I have is a very minor one but one that was nagging at me. I don't like the way the black text in the box sits right on the line of the image.

I changed the height of the image, moving it up to the next grid line up. At this point I wanted to make the layout a bit more exciting and have a bit more personality. I also think the text over the image doesn't stand out as much as it could do, so I wanted to start here.

The first thing I tried was adding white boxes so it contrasted completely against the white. I found that this worked quite well, but looked pretty clinical still.

I tried slanting the boxes a little. I think this works a bit better because it makes it a little more casual in the overall tone of the layout. I then took this as a starting point to start developing the layout using this casual tone.

After going through these few choices, I decided that the red on white boxes was the best match.

While doing this work I did a bit of primary research into layouts.

Research

Seeing these layouts influenced me and my designing of the publication at this point. I wanted to use this research to make my designs a bit more exciting. I went back to the first page of my publication and worked on this.

I made it so it was a red page. I think that this printed out would look quite good. However I do think that it might look a bit strange when bound together so made it so it was across both the pages.

At this point I have decided that the image chosen doesn't really best represent Nike. I decided on changing it to an image from another Nike advert.

Also with a red page I didn't think the red image worked well at all. So I took the image back into photoshop to edit it to try make it fit better.

I first tried it in monochrome, but found that this initial image was much darker than I expected.

Once I lightened it I think it looked much better.

I also tried the image in full colour, editing it until the saturation and vibrance were bright enough to be quite bold on the page.

I decided that think was the way that I was going to go with the images. Initially I didn't want to have full colour, however I do think that this works well on the page and could work well throughout the publication. To make sure this page printed well before starting on the other pages I printed it out.

Printed pages

I found that these print outs did work pretty well and looked much better than on-screen. I was a bit skeptical when I started designing in this way but I am a lot more confident in the idea now.

After this I moved onto changing all the images to full coloured ones to see how the layout worked now.

The main issue throughout all these pages is that the overlapping text isn't clear over the full-colour images anymore. This was the initial reason for wanting red images, so that the black text contrasted against it. So what I need to do now is change the layouts to accommodate the changes I have made to the images, but not change the general aesthetic much, just to make it fit in with the look that I have gone for in the first page.
I didn't want the pages to all be the same, but I wanted them to clearly be consistent and follow the same kind of styling throughout.
I started on the next spread, starting with the left hand page.

The obvious issue is the text at the top not being clear because of how dark the image is, so this is the first thing I changed. The first thing I did was change the size of the image in the frame so it was a bit larger. I also changed the body text to red and added a white background to the larger text.

Following the previous page design, I added a white box around the title to see how it would look. It contrasted well against the image but I don't think it looks brilliant because it just looks like the image has been cut in an awkward way.

I then tried it in black so it would look more of a box added than just blending into the background.

I also tried it where it went across the whole of the top. The main issue I have with this at the minute is that the picture is getting cut off a lot at the top and at the right.

To fix this I decided to try it without the larger text box so I could move the title down and not block off so much of the image. I moved the image to the top of the page and moved the title down, creating more space for the body copy.

I then developed the layout through minor changes to see what worked best.

Right now I have decided that the following image will be the final design. The colour on it is quite evenly spread and each part of the page is clear to see.

I then moved onto the next side of the spread.

Original spread

Overall I like the layout of this page but it is quite dark in the amount of black on it. There was no way that the body text would be able to overlap the image so I need to make the image thinner so the text has room on the white. I also need to change the larger text to a colour that can be seen over the image.

The image above is the final layout I chose. The changes made weren't huge, but have made a big difference in terms on how well everything is seen. I definitely prefer this layout to how it was previously, however I am not entirely happy with the title being split it white and black, so perhaps I will need to find another image later on.
Final spread: