The Evolution of a Concept

The following shows the evolution of my final design idea

The first design I came up with focused on white space. This was the first incarnation of my concept before I'd fully developed my research and ideas. The idea came to me after playing around with kinetic typography  in my spare time, I realised that, in order to design something well, people need to understand certain concepts and students studying business for example have no such knowledge. From here on the campaign would be concentrated on making people aware that there is a skill to be had with designing and they can't always rely on what they think 'looks good'. 

Although the relative design techniques I plan on using are simple enough it's the final execution of such methods that work best.

  














These designs are simple as well as effective, although I felt something was lacking, this is why I decided, as explained earlier to implement a texture into the posters to increase their overall look and feel. I also felt these ideas needed to be  further refined and developed.

I changed the logotype font to Agency FB and reduced the size of it to make it appear more balanced, I also took out the 'Design Balance' caption as it detracted from the overall look I wanted to achieve.

I decided to use the same background for recognisability and consistency. The colour schemes remained the same but I still felt it could be improved on and despite preferring this direction, the first poster I created (Whitespace) doesn't really fit in with this design therefore it needs to be redesigned in accordance with these posters.

For the final design I decided to take an ever greater minimalist approach while still retaining the modern feel. "Less is more" was shortened to Design less, or 'designless' whichever way you prefer to look at it, this refers to the lack of design creating the design. The logotype was finally added for recognisability.

The previous ideas were based on a 'Design balance' but I felt this didn't explain enough, therefore I changed it to Symmetry which works in a similar vain to balance, where the symmetry creates a balanced feel to the image.















And finally the White space design was greatly simplified in order to fit within the campaign design but I feel this is much more effective and getting the message across by interacting with the viewer, asking them what drew them to the main sentence first.

Finally the leaflet uses the same backgrounds/textures but utilises a 3D text effect for the front cover to grab the attention of users. This will be a double sided flyer as they are cheap to make and can easily be distributed widely. In my experience if I'm given a leaflet or flyer I'm more likely to look at the flyer as it just involves flipping it over and scanning the information whereas a leaflet carries a lot of information and you only read it if its directly marketed towards you.

The flip side of the flyer is a quote by Steve Job's which perfectly sums up the whole concept behind this campaign.

If you want good design, you need someone who can understand what the design is all about.

Logotype

For the main brief I plan to keep things relatively simple but visually appealing therefore I created some simple logotypes for instant recognisability and easy application. I kept the clean/modern/contemporary look up by using Geometric sans serif (light) typefaces like Futura, Print Clearly, and Josefin Sans STD.


I decided to use Josefin Sans STD with the top left design. What set this type apart from the others was the slightly un-uniform styling of the letter 'e' and 'w' which features a few times in my logo as well as my tag line. These letters gave the design something the other typefaces couldn't. 

Research for campaign idea

For the campaign I plan on creating contemporary and modern designs which are simple but effective. To ensure these designs don't feel flat I will use some modern day textures as a background as well as some gradients to create an interesting depth of field. I think brushed metal textures are best suited as they generally feel and look quite modern, this decision can be further backed up by the fact that Apple feature brushed metal throughout their products including within their OS and they are incredibly popular.


Some examples of (lower res) Brushed metal textures:

The image across shows the natural lighting properties that these textures sometimes have with lighter and darker patches which would add an extra dimension to my campaign posters. They can easily be created in Photoshop from scratch as well although I will probably find an actual high resolution photo of Brushed Aluminium for authenticity.

The above is an example of a quick brushed metal texture I created in Photoshop, and although the quality has been lost due to compression it still looks relatively realistic but hasn't quite got the look I'm after.

The above is a texture I found on a texture library, under brushed aluminium. This has a more refined look then the one I created and is definitely an improvement

Concept idea

While playing around with some poster layouts in Illustrator, I came up with the idea of creating a campaign of posters (which would also fulfil the final part of the brief for a supporting piece of printed material) to raise awareness of the creativity of the Digital Arts students by demonstrating different design techniques and how best to use them. These posters will focus on visual techniques commonly used by designers to draw attention to certain elements. This idea provided me with a wide range of plausible routes to go down for each poster and also enabled me to persuade viewers into realising there are fundamental design concepts you need to get a grasp of in order to create effective design.
The tag line will simply be "We know design." And will be displayed below a simple logo type.

Logo/Poster designs

 Following on from the ideas phase I created the DAC logo I particularly liked from my hand drawn designs.

Something about this logo caught my eye despite its drawbacks (The 'D' and 'C' not being entirely suitable for the visual style being one of them). I liked the use of white space as my concept centred around this idea and the 'A' popped out the screen quite well. Especially when I chose to take the idea into a poster:

The use of white space was maximised for greater visual effect, it also draws the viewer in effectively but still I felt the design was lacking something. I didn't think it conveyed what the DAC was here for and that others could use it as a resource. It doesn't effectively raise awareness of the DAC

Therefore I started working on an idea that effectively marketed the arts centre as a resource people could use themselves for their personal and business needs

The brief so far...

The first few designs I created are shown below, these were a play on the idea of typography and white space following on from my research

The first DAC idea has potential as it is very eye catching and relatively unique using the shapes in between the letters to tell the letters but it only really works for the letter A as the other 2 letters are very open. This idea would probably work best for letters such as 'R', 'B', 'W' and 'K' as these letters have definite shapes in between the letters which would set them apart.

The DAC is an incredibly powerful resource for new companies starting out who need to be marketed well in order to get a foothold in the industry. Therefore this idea was created in order to represent the ability for business users to tap into a never ending pool of some of the most creative minds in our industry.

Although I believe the concept is strong, similar designs to this are generally quite common therefore it doesn't really break any creative boundaries, in addition I think the image is slightly too graphic even if it is only composed of letters and shapes

Where do I go from here?

I will experiment with some of the above design on the software and if I decide I'm not happy with the route I am heading down I will further try to develop my concepts and designs in order to get one I'm happy with.

The Typographic Route

Following on from my previous post where I decided to take the typographic route for my designs, I decided to start researching recent typographic trends in order to gather a better picture of how my work will fit into the modern place.

While researching I came across an interesting article referring to 'The Average Font' which, in its broadest terms, is an experimental typeface which utilises a wide number of types overlayed each other to create a an averaged out type.
http://iotic.com/averia/
The concept and idea behind such an experiment is strong but its uses in everyday is not. Therefore I started looking into other trends which have a greater impact on the overall market and field of typography.

The results of my 'mass Blog search' are shown below:

Designs which utilised narrow/condensed, bold and large display fonts kept creeping up, although most of these were web based designs, they could still transfer to poster design.

Although hand rendered typography isn't a new trend, it is still relatively popular. The designs have a certain charm and characteristic about them which cannot be matched by the likes of Helvetica and Futura.

Hand rendered type is best used on packaging and may not transfer well to print based.

Every year logolounge.com have a round-up of the latest logo trends, this year was no different:

http://www.logolounge.com/article.asp?aid=lnPf
This is an extremely useful too which also lets you compare the trends from previous years.

This year has seen the rise of:

• Gradients
• Characters/personification
• Visual Vibration
• Non-elliptical circles
• Earth
• Mono-line
• Series of logos
• The colour brown
• Concentric
• Loopy line
• Banded
• Comma shape
• Tan-grams
• Fruit

The idea of having a number of different logos is an appealing one. It lets you expand and diversify your logo across a range of mediums while still retaining some recognisability. 

What is White space?

Inspiration for my 'white space' concept

After watching this video I have decided to follow a largely typographic approach to the work, utilising white space and text to convey the ideas. This is mainly down to the fact that typography can be used to effectively get the message across while also being informative and eye catching.

Audience Research

In order to have a clearer understanding of my possible audience I created a free survey using the surveymonkey.com tool. This allowed me to ask up to 10 questions on the subject of my choice.
There were 34 respondents  to this survey, 44.1% of which do no currently study at this University
The results for some of the questions are detailed below:

As you can see 10 respondents did not answer the above 2 questions, these 10 were in the first set of respondents I asked. So after I realised people were skipping questions I changed the survey so every question was required, this improves the accuracy of results.


Question 6 shows that people are aware of the importance of marketing which sets up the next 2 questions nicely

The next 2 questions focused on the idea of working alongside students to create a business identity.

The majority of respondents agreed they would happily work alongside a student to market their idea effectively.
And surprisingly 91.7% of these respondents would pay a student to work with them. And although the DAC is a free resource for everyone to use it's always interesting to know that people would also be happy to pay for the service.

Coincidently the same number of people who would work alongside students would also pay for such a service.



As Survey monkey is a paid service the free trial only allows you to ask up to 10 questions which isn't enough to generate a perfect picture of  the target audience but allows me to see who the majority is. I addition due to the fact questions could be skipped, only 24 of the 34 respondents actually completed the questionnaire.

Logos/Logotype

Logos and logotypes
A logotype would generally be more suitable if 'Digital Arts Centre' is shortened to the commonplace abbreviation DAC, I think this would best work in a style similar to the blueprint logo below

Creative Work

5 Inspiring Poster Design

For the main brief we need to create a logo, poster, leaflet and a printed campaign extension. I have started my research by looking into poster design.. (Click images to enlarge)

The poster below uses a simple colour scheme which works well. The main graphic used grabs your attention and leads you eyes around the poster, Information is minimalist but functional and informative.

The second example also uses a simple colour scheme utilizing the natural white space around the letters to grab your attention, it's a very effective design which portrays the information well.

This poster caught my attention due to the grunge effect used on the image. I think this dark shading is what sets this poster apart, without it, it's a generic piece of design with no real impact (Generic referring to the red/white/black style used widely)

This is an interesting concept executed quite well, the simplicity of the poster sets it apart coupled with a nice graphic style in the image