OUGD505 - Studio Brief 2: An Exhibition (4)

Today I worked on inputting all the written content into the player pages of the book and formatting it properly so it fit well.

After this I moved onto the other sections that are in the book, starting with the Top 10 NBA Moments.

For these pages I looked over the layouts I had done for the player pages and adapted a couple of these to fit the purpose. These pages are more photographic than the player sections, so I made the image spaces larger and the text spaces smaller.

The NBA has a section dedicated to what have been voted the Top NBA moments ever, so getting the content was very easy. Editing it down to fit into the text space was the hard job, as was finding a good enough image that was at the time of the moment. This was a very long process as a lot of the moments are over 30 years old, a couple are even from the first years of the NBA, so the picture quality isn't brilliant.

Something I found quite interesting was that for the majority of these moments, they involved one or more of the ten players I have based the exhibition on. This was a happy mistake as it really relates to these players and gives this section more context in the book.

Final pages:

With this section done, I then moved onto the other three sections of the book, and how I was going to do the cover images for these four sections. I wanted to keep them similar to the cover pages for the players, however I wanted them to be obviously different because I wanted these sections to all be different and make it very clear they are more about basketball in general and not directly related to the ten players.

I started with the first section of 'An Introduction to Basketball'.

I started by deciding on the written content that I needed for this. I decided that I wanted to focus it around Dr Naismith and his invention of the sport rather than the rules. I wanted to keep it away from relating to the NBA at this point and just keep it in it's basic form of the invention and general history behind it. Finding this information was very easy as there were a lot of sites, including the NBA website, which had very detailed histories of how the sport came about.

With this content found, I decided on the display that I wanted. As it is the introduction of basketball, there isn't really any images which are of good enough quality to display in the book, so I decided that these pages would be mostly text based with a large space for the text.

When it came to the images, I decided that I wanted them to be in a different colour to the players pages, which are in blue. I tried them in both greyscale and in red, and while neither are particularly great, I felt the red looks better and fits in with the rest of the book. With the images in red, I changed the red boxes to blue to be a contrast and so the text in these could still be white.

I decided on one image of Dr Naismith, and then created a vector image of a basketball court. I decided that these should both be full page images as this still leaves more than enough room for the written content.

Final Spreads:

These pages are much simpler than the other pages in the book, so I think that this is a good contrast to that and shows that this is more about the written content than the images. I do think the red images work well and while I prefer the text box being in red, the blue works well over the red image.

Happy with these, I moved onto the other two front sections - 'An Introduction To The NBA' & 'The Naismith'. Given the amount of content that there is to talk about these two subjects,  I decided that the NBA needed at least three double spreads, while The Naismith only needed one or two spreads as it isn't a particularly big subject.

I started with the NBA pages and stuck with the layout designs I had previously done for the players, taking a couple of those and editing them to be slightly different.

I decided again that the images should be in red as it isn't in the players section. It also means that there is consistency in the book instead of just having the first section with red images.

I got the written content and read through carefully to see if there were some images that could be related to this. Some of the images that did relate weren't of a good enough quality, but I did get the main picture in a high enough quality as I previously collected it for the Top 10 Moments section. This is the image of Jerry West 'Mr Clutch', who's image is essentially what the NBA logo is designed from. For the other two pictures, I got one which was very recent with recent NBA players in, and another which is of Michael Jordan from 20 years ago. I think that this shows how the NBA has stayed as fundamental as it has to American Culture and that it is still as big as it is today.

Final Spreads:

For the Naismith pages I gathered the written content together and found that there wasn't such a huge amount that was appropriate to use, so only really had enough to fill one full page of text, so one spread would definitely be enough.

For the image I tried to find a high quality image of the centre court of the building as this is the main focus point of the building, however there aren't many of the inside of a large format so this became quite a tricky task. I did however find an image which was of the Memorial section of the building, and not the centre court. While it isn't the image I wanted, I think it is still definitely relatable to the content and works well.

Final spread: