GRAD503 - Kayleigh Erwee

GRAD503 Materials & Media

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Week 12: Final Reflection

As this journey comes to an end we are no longer ‘little aubergines’, today we are “little joy germs”.

Final Reflection 

Through this journey with the course GRAD503 Materials & Media I have learnt many useful tips, tools, skills, and insights. Before this course, I had never used any Adobe design applications and the tools from them. I hardly knew any graphic designers and didn’t recognize any of the names in the assigned designers. I also did not realise how many different design tactics there are to consider when designing specific genres or types of design. I have now learnt the main adobe skills in the 3 applications for designers and been exposed to many great designers from the past and present day. From preparing the timeline poster I have learnt the importance of thorough research and finding many sources of inspiration and examples to keep the ideas good, plentiful and have the skills to choose between them to best portray the purpose. When preparing the InDesign document I learnt the importance of Grids, I have not used grids on anything before, so at first it was quite challenging, and I was unsure what type of grids or what would be good to use considering how many there are. To overcome this, I did the grid activity that was shown in class on many bespoke publication designs and some of Herbert Matter’s (my assigned designer) work to get an idea of the commonly used grids and then applied my own version of those on the design. Something I was challenged with on the 12 Page publication and the poster was creating a layout that reflects the designers work, life, and influence. I have placed many of his work or recreated his designs to attempt to overcome this but think I could’ve done it better with more experience or practice. The lecturers were very helpful with providing tips, resources, and meaningful feedback to help me overcome any challenges I faced like the tools I struggled with or creating a visually pleasing design that has good legibility and readability. I cannot complain about anything that I’ve learnt or been exposed to during this time and even though I did struggle with many things like the pen tool, grids, and generating good ideas, after working on them, receiving feedback, and practicing I feel confident to be able to use and improve them further in my projects to come. The tools, tips, and skills I learnt through this course I can see as being long-lasting tricks and insights for my future in design. I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and find it very informative and useful to have gone through. Thank you to the lecturers and everyone involved 😊 

Regards Kayleigh Erwee

[grad503-kayleigherwee]

Final Print Spreads

Printed out as imposed spreads in full colour and scale, with the crop and bleed marks still applied.

I will be cropping and stapling it together tomorrow during class and handing it in.

I’m quite happy with how it came out and had a successful print.

There is slight ink fading but its due to the printer and its not too bad so I am alright with that. If I were to create something like this professionally or for a company I would definitely outsource it to a a professional print shop to avoid the slight incorrect

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Print Test

Printed out on an A4 with reduced colour quality and crop marks. Not a full scale print.

There are a few things that didn’t print quite how they should’ve because the printer i used doesn’t print very high quality, and i selected Save ink toner so it has incorrect colour hues in some places.

I’m not sure why on pages 8-9 the border around the chairs can be seen as the image itself is on a transparent background.

I also fixed the page number issue i had before that was making the page numbers appear below my images, I created another layer and recreated the numbers on the parent pages again but on the 2nd layer that i placed above all my other layers.

Cover

Page 2-3 Intro & Quotes

Page 4-5 Reworked Poster

Page 6-7 Article

Page 8-9 Article

Page 10-11 Article & References

Back Cover

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Update & Feedback applied

Front cover

Pages 2-3 (Intro & Quotes)

Pages 4-5 (Poster reworked)

Pages 6-7 (Article)

Pages 8-9 (Article)

Pages 10-11 (Article & References)

Back Cover

[grad503-kayleigherwee]

Week 11: Reflection & Notes

This week we focused on our own summative projects and received feedback on them.

We also went over the importance of printing correctly, why you should print multiple versions, and also over submission.

Things to note when saving the InDesign document:

Save as booklet to get imposed spreads.

Make sure you have the correct settings such as bleed, full scale size, centered on page, correct page size you will be printing on, correct orientation, and crop marks.

You can save imposable spreads as a pdf using the print booklet option and selecting Postscript file, then converting to a pdf with Adobe Distiller, or in my case select the pdf app that i have on my device.

Have the correct naming systems

Use document bleed

Feedback: 

Cover: My front cover positioning of text and the human figure on the bottom can be better placed to support the perspectives. I reduced the space between the text lines and created a coloured box around like Paul .S suggested and showed me.

Page 2-3: The layout i have on pages 2-3 reads left to right, so even though the brief says page 2 should be quotes, my lecturer said I'm the designer and suggested I switch them around and have my Introduction page as page 2 and then the quotes with Herbert Matter on page 3.

Poster (Page 4-5): Placing Herbert Matter in front of the railway as though he is standing is a better placement because it focuses more on him, and Herbert matter walking along a railway in the swiss alps. I also recreated the text on InDesign to better format the text and have more control over it after Paul showed me (I was doing it all on Illustrator for the poster)

This feedback was really helpful and i can already see more things to improve on the other pages from it.

SDL:

Gather everything that needs to be submitted 

Finalise the 12 Page publication

Create the digital process workbook if not already done

Update your tumblr

Write the overall reflection (min 250 words)

Print the 12 page publication to be handed in

Save the publication as Imposable spreads & Readable spreads

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Bespoke Example Grids

Research on more bespoke publications & grid activity.

Commonly used grids in bespoke publication appears to be columns of 2 or 3 sometimes 4, with gutters that are more or less 5mm each.

A common tactic that I've noted in the spreads is having the one page use 3-4 columns and the opposite using either 1 or 2 columns, this creates a nice clear page layout without being overwhelming. Rows seem to be determined by the content they plan on putting onto each page.

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Draft print

I printed out my progress so far, in B&W to save on ink.

Its printed as imposable spreads and on an A4 paper, so its not full scale.

Unfortunately, I do not have a guillotine at home so I cut my pages by hand, so they are not very straight or nicely aligned. I stabled it together in the middle and placed the pages in the correct order. 

I ended up printing the pages on single pages, not double sided, so i glued the corresponding pages together because I didn’t want to waste the paper.

So there are quite a few improvements to make when printing, but now I know for next time. I will probably print another miniature version like this once, hopefully better, once I have decided on a final layout and before printing it in full scale and colour.

Some things i noted within the design itself:

My front cover could be more clear, the text is a bit overwhelmed, to fix i could increase the font size or remove the chairs behind it like i have in other versions.

The back and front cover are not perfectly aligned on the back fold.

The back cover is cutting off one of my human figures.(could possibly be my bad cutting skills)

My introduction page needs some adjusting to layout and placement. (Update: Added more text because it didn’t meet the 150words min requirement)

Page 6-7 looks good but i could use better imagery to portray the topic in the text.

some body text looks a bit lopsided or too jagged in some places, and has quite a few “orphans & widows”.

I think my images should have captions to help the viewer understand how its relevant to the text and what it is.

My page numbers are below the assets (not sure how to change this because i placed them on the master pages and it automatically goes at the back)

There are some pages that came out nicely below and the front cover.

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Draft Layout

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Cover Drafts

I want to use this for my front and back cover, so here is my tedious editing process for it, that eventually got me to the final result that I'm now playing round with compositions and background colours or images on. Here’s my progress so far.

Front Covers:

Back cover idea: (Below) All the back covers would match the front except the text would be removed and the people are placed differently.

So, why do i say tedious? Well.. because i used a low quality reference image (couldn’t find a higher quality anywhere), i struggled to isolate the chairs from the background. I first selected the chairs as groups with the color range select tool, which worked, but it left me with many pixels and jagged chairs, i also tried the object selection tools and different variations of selecting individual chairs or all at once.  

Original Image taken by Herbert Matter for Knoll furniture.

Unfortunately, every time i ended up with the chairs looking like this below.(Black background is so you can see it better, Below)

Many pixels from the original image stayed behind, and with the colour selection tool it didn’t fully delete the colours, that's why there's a grey mist in many areas.

You can see in the one area where i started to manually erase around the chairs using the layer mask and the brush tool it looks a lot better already. This was only after trying many different selection and mask options as well as filters to sharpen and reduce noise which didn’t work very well.  

I also want my front cover to flow nicely onto my back cover and not have a seam down the back of the book. So I expanded the pattern to a double page spread in photoshop using layer mask and copying & pasting.

I then copied and pasted the group of chairs i had cleaned up to create the full pattern nicely.

(Below) This is after pasting, and then cleaning up around the human figures individually.

I also changed the hues to match with my publication colour palette. The Black background is only to see easier. I’m sure there was an easier way to do this, but with my experience and low quality image, that didn’t work the best, this was the only way I could find and wasn’t too time-consuming once I chose a final method.

[grad503-kayleigherwee]

Matrices

After being informed in-class what these are, i created and printed out a matrix for my body copy and my header.

I used a range of leading and tracking, and some different point sizes and printed it to 100% scale on an A4 paper.

I can see from here which text spacing suits my design the best and the point size that won’t be too large nor too small.

I decided for the headers, I wanted a good space between my header lines, and also not too tight letter spacing so that it will match with my body text. 

Herbert Matter’s headers that I have seen before which weren’t too tight or cramped, they had good spacing between each line as well as the letter spacing so I have picked the header format I think best suits his designs, for my 12 page publication.

These are not for my front cover design.

[grad503-kayleigherwee]

Week 10: Reflection

This week , the lecturers and the “little aubergines” (my fellow students) went over grids and guides again.

It was very helpful and perfect timing for me because that is something i have been struggling on a bit, and also forgot how to create the guides properly.

I am now using a 4x4 grid with 5mm gutters and a better margin than before, I can already see the improvement in my layouts after changing my grid and guides.

I was also introduced to Body matrices and Header matrices.

They are when you use the same text or header with different settings to find the sweet spot, and print it out in full scale to get a better idea of how the text is going to look.

Notes:

Use Master pages (parent pages)

Watch the Blade Runner

Read some Sci-fi novels by Philip K Dick

Looking into Grid theory is a very good idea to help with the publication

The top left corner of your pages is a hotspot, because western people read left to right, top to bottom.

SDL:

Continue to develop the content and layout of your 12-page publication.

Have the 12 page draft ready for Week 11 to begin printing.

Print out a body copy matrix and a header matrix

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Asset Drafts

Playing around with some of Herbert Matter’s work in Photoshop.

I will either use them within the publication and remove the backgrounds, or refine and edit them further for cover designs.

I have adjusted the hues and tones, and removed the backgrounds and added my own background to them.

[grad503-kayleigherwee]

Layout Start

A start to my publication project layout ideas.

This is a very rough draft, there's a lot of things i need to figure out and place, but I've started with inserting the text and giving it the paragraph styles I wish to use. I’ve also inserted my Poster design which will only have small refinements. I have a placeholder for the front cover design for now, and the back cover is blank so I didn’t include it. Page 8-9 is currently a copied layout so I will need to play around with it more for now, I am thinking of using one of Herbert Matter’s page layouts for it, that i did a grid activity on.

Article: 

Herbert Matter: Defining Knoll Design Pulse July 21, 2016

https://www.knoll.com/knollnewsdetail/herbert-matter-defining-knoll

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Typographical Roulette

In class we participated in the Type Roulette Activity.

This was a 1 hour challenge to create a double page spread. We were all given the same text, images and requirements, but received 4 random fonts to use.

The requirements of the challenge was:

Use only the given assets

The entire text must be used, but the headline can be changed or adjusted

You must have a Pull-quote w credit to the author

The images must have captions

Export as a facing page pdf & upload to Microsoft Teams before the time is up

Include a Colophon

300dpi Images.

This is my creation.

Overall, I am pleased by what I created in just an hour, but I didn’t include a pull quote. I think I have completed all the other requirements though.

Once the timer started I kind of forgot all the tips and efficient ways to work in InDesign, hopefully with more practice they will stick better.

Something I personally struggled with was trying to put together a good grid and margin beforehand. 

I also changed the second page text to 3 columns in the refining stage and I actually preferred it as 2 columns.

This was a good challenge and very interesting to see all the different designs my classmates put together in the same timeframe.

[grad503-kayleigherwee]

Week 9: Reflection & Notes

Where should we be?

About to enter the digital design phase surrounded by everything we need.

This week we are advised to gather our assets and everything we need to be able to start working on the 12 page publication.

Am I supported by the assets that I have, to go forward?

Personally, I need to edit a few photos depending which article i have chosen because I was originally wanting to use an article from the Knoll furniture site, but I have realized i want a broader information on Herbert Matter so i am not limited to using his knoll works.

Something to keep in mind when looking for inspiration and resources is to remember the different publication styles. These are: Trade, Popular, Design, Bespoke, Books, Academic, Cookery, Catalogue, Etc. Be mindful of Product pull.

Tips:

Use the Web address not URL to reference the article

Break away from black text on white paper

Focus on body copy first

Don’t have the body text all in different frames.

Default leading is good for body copy, not so good for other things

Check the font glyphs available for fonts

Don’t use returns - using space before & space after will stay intact as you edit

Use paragraph styles! They will save time in the long run

SDL:

Have another go at the Week 9 Class activity

Start creating your 12 page publication

Have all your resources together to bring to class in Week 10

Review your Tumblr - Update it, and start pulling out content to be put in the digital process journal PDF.

Lock in your chosen article

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Reworked Poster WIPs

I’ve starting working on my poster for the summative that will span across two pages. Surprisingly easier than i thought it was going to be, to turn it horizontally, but still adjusting things. The one thing i cant really decide where to put yet is the short bio I've included above his head, it was in the original poster so i want to keep it. I had to add to the mountains and scale the background railroads image up to fill both pages, so the space where my header and bio originally were, has been reduced. I’ve also placed rulers just to align everything nicely across both pages but will be improving upon this and using a proper grid and columns like the original used or what i decide to use in my publication. I need to play around with the text sizes again because I've scaled them up instead of selecting appropriate text sizes.

 The singular guide line down the middle that doesn’t line up with anything is a place holder for the fold.

I did have to work on the mountains in the background more because they were cropped off too much and didn’t fit well on the horizontal design. I used the content-fill tool to add to the sides of it. The photo has saturation reduced to 0, and the inverted effect applied.

Before:

After:

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Layout & Grid Tips

Notes from the resource provided by the PowerPoint presentation:

Sean Adams - Foundations of Layout and Composition

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/layout-and-composition-grids/working-with-the-content-2?autoplay=true&u=43761236

Things to keep in mind when designing my summative publication:

Keep the height or width the same for your images

Do not exceed 52 characters with text line length

You can add an element or icon between title and body text to make it more interesting

Place headlines in the same place across every page

Maintain consistency

24 columns is probably way too many

Prioritise your information

The readers need help to understand the content easier

A sidebar can tell a separate story to the page

Pay attention to any fold lines

Showing the grid can add an interesting aspect and help with lower quality images

Other:

Below are 20 rules from a book on Graphic design. To understand them properly, its better to read the book or watch the YT video that I did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2poa5iZ6L5A

Design Elements A Graphic Style Manual by Timothy Samara

Quote within the book: “Rules can be broken, but never ignored” ~ David Jury

Have a Concept

Communicate don’t decorate

Be universal

Speak with one visual voice

If you can do it with less, then do it

Create space - don’t fill it

Give ‘em the one-two punch

Beware of symmetry

Fight the flatness

Pick colours on purpose

Less colour is more

Master the dark and the light

Type is only type when it’s friendly

Use two typeface families, maximum

Treat type as you would image

Avoid redundant redundancies

Create images - don’t scavenge

Look to history, but don’t repeat it

Ignore fashion. seriously

Be decisive: do it on purpose, or not at all

They say these are things to keep in mind or always be aware of, but not that you have to follow them.

Looking back at my 12 page draft layouts, I can already see I do not use white/negative space in them, I could definitely incorporate it better into my designs and layouts moving forward. I was also using multiple grids and margins, which is good for the experimentation and exploring phase, but there isn’t consistency throughout the publications that I've sketched and planned so far.