Brogen Averill

Great collection of work of Brogen Averill -an New Zealand based graphic designer who has experience in several leading design studios in London and Paris. Some really well considered design for print materials, which is a great resource and inspiration towards my future projects within editorial and design for print, aswell as the the Garry Barker brief that I'm about to make a start on.

Something to think about for both PPD promotional material and for the Garry Barker brief; having pack containing separate postcards / pieces of printed material. Offers an interactive element, the content that vary in size and has a nice tactile quality to it. A format I've been considering for a while now for my promotional material to send out to potential design studios / designers, the idea would be to have a pack that contains various samples of work printed on different stock, size etc. This would allow me to insert a wider range of materials together without a fixed format, things like screen printed pieces, different stocks and sizes of pieces are possibilities.

Interestingly they use the same website format as Collate.
 http://thingwebsite.com/

Again for the Garry Barker brief, I've been a fan of newsprinted publications for a while now, the large format just makes it so much more interesting. It allows the images to be blown up to a much larger scale, showcasing the image details without the layout looking to busy. It's also quite a cost effective method of printing aswell, so something to consider!

Nice publication with a perforated seal. Something that we attempted to implement in our P&O Ferries brief, and an element that I'd like to consider using again if the appropriate projects requires it. 

Ports of Auckland annual report, beautiful piece of editorial design. Makes me want to do an annual report once again just after I've got over the obsession of wanting to do one! Really nice format, type consideration and overall layout. The size works really well, allowing an interesting variation of large and much smaller type, which compliments each other. What what can I say?

Joseph Johnson

Recently came across Australian graphic designer Joseph Johnson's travel book that documents his year travelling to San Francisco, London and New York. The concept is almost identical to what I wanted to achieve with my New York publication during 2nd year, but simply done better and including 3 locations rather than just one. This piece just reminded me of one of my core interests outside design, something that I really want to incorporate into my work a bit more.

Sundries

A nice selection of publications by France based Sundries who specialises in editorial design. Some really nice designs that are quite relevant to my research towards the Garry Barker publication.

Garry Barker Publication brief

Design Boards - Pitch

Design boards explaining our concept and mockups for design direction of the yearbook towards the pitch.

Day 03 Final Promotional Materials

Final website proposal for Forty4

 

Final developed poster. We rescaled the images so they're not so dominant, but instead taking a backseat on the design to compliment the negative space of the piece.

Day 03 Poster Development

Promotional posters for the end of year show developed by Vickie based on the general design direction of the other materials.

Open publication - Free publishing - More posters

Further developed ideas based on Vickie's original designs. We felt that for the scale of posters, they looked a bit bare so wanted to incorporate the images into them aswell. Here are the variations we experimented with.

Day 03 Website Development

To reinforce the Forty4 brand, we needed to develop a range of promotional materials carrying the identity and demonstrating that it can be used for a range of printed and digital outcomes. I mocked up a website design that could be used to showcase student work aswell as linking to their individual websites. This would be a great source of networking as it can be linked out to creative blogs, working professionals, potential clients and relevant individuals within the creative industry.

These were my initial developments for the proposed website:

Day 03 final spreads

Final developed spreads that we worked on as a group. After discussing with Joe, we did notice that design of the spreads didn't really flow as well with the front cover. In comparison the previous developments of the spreads were strong, but didn't demonstrate the more daring edge that we had incorporated in the front cover. So with that said, we played around with the layout of images, adjusted the type arrangement, made a few images larger and bleeding out the page. This were the final variations we developed.

Personally I really like these, they reflect the tone of the front cover very well and ultimately the tone and values of the course, it's very diverse, independent, innovative and creative. Hopefully these spreads would demonstrate the variations of layouts that can be achieved with the design direction and grid specification that we have developed. I definitely feel that it's an improvement from previous years' book as it's structured well but with the addition of a more spontaneous touch with the layout of images.

In terms of the images, instead of photographing them all the same, we wanted a mixture, especially to cater for motion graphics or digital based designers, therefore the images not only will they vary in size, but will include photographs, digital files, still frames from motion to type designs etc.

Day 02 - Mockup

First mockup of front & back cover just visualise what it looks & feels like in full scale. This has been printed on matte stock but I personally have thoughts on printing it on a coated to enhance the colours of the images in the front. The white box with the details on it has been proposed to be a sticker at it allows people to peel it off, revealing the complete set of 44 individual designer's work. 

Day 02

Further developed the design direction to communicate our concept effectively for the pitch. Our concept of showcasing 44 designers as opposed to graduates is mainly driven by the design direction of the publication, so this need to be strong and effective.

After much discussion of previous front cover ideas, we felt that the class photo idea might be a bit of a risk, in the fact that it might not communicate the course that very well. We wanted something bold and type driven but without looking too uninspired or safe.

My role for today was predominantly on developing some front cover ideas, we wanted it to communicate the 44 and having more than just type, so eventually developed some ideas that basically utilised 44 pieces of work taken from each individual and using that as the front cover design. We felt that this idea works really well, the design itself is quite well formatted without looking standardized and we can play with the layout of them a bit more aswell. This can incorporate a mix of photos of printed work, stills from motion graphics to a letter from a type design.

Open publication - Free publishing - More development

Further development of the spreads, we quite liked the initial layouts which merged the solid structure of mine with the flexible layout arrangement of Vickie's development, but still felt that we could be a bit more experimental, so worked on a range of different arrangements to full exploit the grid specification.
I forgot to mention, the specification for these spreads are:

Size 210mm x 210mm
12 column grid
3mm gutter
Outside, top, bottom margins 5mm
Inside margin 10mm

Open publication - Free publishing - More spreads

Xavier Encinas

Interesting layout for the Lab Magazine designed by Xavier Encinas - a Paris based design studio. A nice example laying out type with image in a more daring and experimental way without loosing the quality of readability. Something that I want to achieve with the yearbook really, I found the previous layouts quite standard which made it quite boring to flick through. The square format itself wasn't what we'd prefer to work on, but as it is a fixed specification we were going to have to find a concept to make it more dynamic without going over budget. This we hope to achieve through the layout and general design direction of the yearbook. Trying to make the most of the spreads, cover and the images that we'll have to experiment with.

Day 01

Today we really needed to make decisions on the design direction for the whole publication and actually get designing. With the concept of 44, we needed to develop several things including:

- Brand identity
- Cover
- Sample spreads
- Product range
- Direction for use of images etc


We spent quite a lot of time trying to pin down a solid concept so that we can actually start working on the design. Eventually we kept with the concept of 'A creative directory celebrating 44 designers.' This explains that it's a publication that showcases new designers, but not as graduates but as designers who are entering the design industry. We wanted this to be driven by the design direction, so utilising specific grid formats, typography and high print specifications. We found that the previous yearbooks' layout wasn't as inspiring as it could be, and as a graphic design yearbook, we really wanted to push the boundaries of a conventional yearbook, so experimenting with more daring layout ideas that utilise the grid while breaking certain rules at the same time to achieve a structured yet relaxed and unusual design outcome.

We wanted everyone to contribute equally with the decision of the design direction during the early stages so that we can gather everyone's vision on what we all wanted to produce individually so we each spent 3 hours developing our own versions of spreads and covers based on the concept that we decided on.

Open publication - Free publishing - More yearbook

Spread development

Open publication - Free publishing - More spreads

From these, we printed out, compared and highlighted elements that we liked out of everyone's designs and moved on with the design direction. [ no idea why the images taken from the iphone always have a green circular aura in the middle of it...]