Studio brief 3 (OUGD405)

In a mini crit I had before the interim I was struggling to come up with a style of layout for my book. I was told to look for inspiration in layout designers I like. One of my favourites by far is Matt Willey.

Above is a spread Matt did for The Independent magazine. I love the how minimal this is, the photo spreading the whole right page with no border looks really effective and bold. I also like the bold type on the left page with small body copy, this layout really grabs your attention and makes you want to read the text as it doesn't look daunting and long winded. As inspiration from this I thought I could have the twenty words bold one on each page, a photo and a fact or opinion written in small body text creating a minimal and interesting book.

This example shows how Matt includes large landscape images without taking up a full double page spread, this is a helpful bit of inspiration as many of the Egon Schiele photos I collected were landscape.

I love the aesthetic of these front pages. The pastel colours would go perfectly with the photos I collected as they're very complimentary. As I used pink for the research brief I could use a pastel blue for this one possibly? The high contrast in weight and sleek serifs in the title font give the paper a sophisticated yet modern look which I really like.

For this crit we presented our layout sketches for our publications (to be printed on the booklet making machine). I had already produced a digital idea of my book but this crit made me want to try a completely different layout and idea.

Above is my initial layout before doing artist research. I basically changed the colour and compressed the information, choosing the most interesting parts to include. I used the same layout style as I did in the last brief and it wasn't very creative and different so I decided to change it and get inspiration from Matt Willey's work. I didn't like the layout as I only used one column so the information looked like to much and it was likely people might not want to read that much. I also decided I wanted the images bigger and more in your face like the examples I had looked at. I chose the typeface Bodoni because its high contrast in weight and its links to high class magazines makes the booklet look high end.

I did a mock up of my booklet and drew layout ideas throughout it. This is a sketch for my front page. I kept things pretty central and simple, with a bold typeface like Bodoni or Futura possibly and small descriptive sentences below the photo. Another front page idea would be to take inspiration from The independent covers and go for an asymmetrical layout with the title running down the side.

Above you can see two layouts for the front page. I went with a pale blue to compliment the images. I preferred the asymmetrical design with the type running down the side, this layout creates lots of negative space and looks spacious, clean and minimal.

These are the other sketches for double page spreads I showed in the crit. This first layout is a really simple central one. In the crit people said it was effective but quite boring and it would be interesting to see something more adventurous. 

This next idea was a really basic sketch but the idea was to have a page filled completely with an image and another for text. The idea is simple but I liked the idea of having large images and minimal body copy.

My next idea was to choose some of the 20 words I collected and have one word in large header type on the left side with a few small paragraphs of body copy then the other page filled with an image. In the crit most people said this looked like the best idea as it would be really minimal and attractive.

My next idea was for a spread layout. I thought I could photoshop out the background of some of my images then wrap text around them. This idea was okay but I think it could look messy and not minimal which is the aesthetic I was going for.

This is my first double page spread design. I carried on using Bodoni as the header font as I really like its professional and stylish look.  I used light blue for the background as its a calming colour and its something id look at and want to pick up because of the peaceful colouring. I used some facts on Schiele and put them in 8pt very small columns. I didnt want to include much text as I wanted to keep a lot of negative space. I placed the text below the half way point of the page, I liked the idea of having negative space at the top as its different to standard layouts and draws your eye to it more. I made the image slightly opaque so it didnt contrast too harshly with the background colour (informed by looking at port magazine). I decided on two columns as from my research I think for magazines and booklets it effectively breaks up the type into manageable portions. I think this is an effective spread it looks minimal and attractive.

From the crit people told me to compress the information as much as I could, reduce it down to the words, photos and a few of the most interesting facts. People said they liked the idea of having lots of negative space.

This is my next spread, I wanted to include large landscape images without them taking up the whole spread. I took inspiration from Matt Willey's layouts by having it large spreading onto two pages but still leaving space for text.

This is a similar layout to the first spread but the type is at the top of the page instead.

Once again this is a similar layout but the body text is at the top of the page. I wanted my pages and theme to flow nicely but I wanted to change where I put the type just to keep it interesting and not too predictable.

And the last spread is the same layout at the first.

For my back page I didn't really want much content so I just used the word that I thought most effectively and simply described his work 'real'.