Team Meeting

Team Assembled
I didn't really have anyone in mind who I wanted to work with on this, from past experience I felt that a pair or a 3 worked the best for my design practice, so really wanted no more than 3 people to collaborate with. I'm fairly confident with working as a team as past collaborations were quite successful and didn't really have a particular 'style' to go with for the year book, so when choosing design partners/team I didn't really pick  people for their design attributes, but rather how well we would work together as a team.

Luckily I was asked by Liam to collaborate and I was more than happy to accept the offer, we ended up joining forces with Vickie & Ed who were in a pair already, although this did go against my previous opinion on working with no more than a group of 3, I felt that we all had something to contribute and all wanted to work on the Graphic Design year book, yet no one had a particular style that they wanted to work on, so it was perfect for developing a fresh concept for this, which is what's going to win us the pitch.

Problem analysis
We had a brief meeting today to discuss initial thoughts on what we wanted to achieve and produce for this yearbook. My idea was that I really wanted to move away from the whole Yearbook 'look' and produce something that's a lot more professional with high production quality while pushing the design boundaries of what a yearbook could/should be. Considering the budget of £2500 for the production, one of my ideas was to keep the spreads single colour, everyone was against the idea really as it wouldn't be be justified reason as it was to displayed student's work, however I felt that the yearbook would be used to showcase and offer a taster of people's work rather than providing the whole portfolio work. Therefore felt that it could be a possibility. In the end, we decided that we wouldn't be going forward with the black & white idea because it would be too risky and possibly won't be picked for this reason. Other than this, we all shared some pretty exciting ideas for format, folding techniques, binding formats, stock considerations and finishes, but it eventually dawned on us that the budget would be the major issue for these ideas so needed to really focus on the concept first before we start making decisions on the design aspect.

We struggled for a while to get a solid concept, we all shared several key aspects that we wanted however, these were: it needed to look professional and not as a student year book, representing reach student as designers and not graduates aswell as individuals.We didn't really want to have a particular theme to cover the whole yearbook such as: nostalgia, the beginning etc as we found that these were quite obvious and way too boring, which don't even represent the course and the indvidual students. This lead discovering the fact that we had 44 students, therefore wanted to use this as the concept. Rather than having a yearbook to showcase graduate work, we wanted to produce a publication that celebrates 44 individual designers from the college. We didn't want to produce something that would only function from the exhibition and a few months after, but something that would almost become a creative directory for designers, that would be used for several years to come. 

For the design element, we started by dissecting and analysing the previous yearbooks and picked out elements we liked and didn't like to help inform out decisions towards the design direction. We felt that both designs were relatively safe and at times made it quite boring to flick through, therefore for this we wanted to experiment with a more diverse layout specification. We wanted an interesting contemporary design direction for our yearbook which didn't shout yearbook, but a creative directory of 44 fresh designers.