The final look on both APP’s

XXXL SHOOTINGS

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The White Hart x Step by Step school

 

p.s. I will be doing one more blog showing the outcome of the print on both projects once I get into a photography studio to get some snaps!

 

Evaluation, thoughts and reflection on both APP projects

After finishing both my projects over a few months, alongside my dissertation I feel that I have achieved a lot. I think that I had matched the brief correctly and considered my time wisely along with other things that are going on. I was fast to think of a concept to work on and was quick to take actions to them. I took into consideration that the final pieces needs to be something to show someone that a lot of time and effort has gone in to them. If I were to have done something such as an app design, I would have never of got the appreciation than I would have if I were to have made a booklet or something that they can physically hold.

I made sure that I didn’t sit on the projects for too long and just kept moving to bring up fresh ideas for them. I took breaks when needed to clear my mind and asked for lots of feedback from people around me, this was consistent throughout the last few months with regular meetings with my lecture to be sure I was keeping on top of the outcomes to the brief.

At first I was going to do the larger dissertation so then I had to only do one APP though this idea changed more towards the last few weeks because, I didn’t want to base my final grade on a written piece seeing as my strong point in this course as you could probably tell is not my writing! I made sure that this was ok to do with my lectures and they gave me the go ahead, I got cracking onto the other project straight away and it helped that I had created a backup brief just incase this happened!

The design in my XXXL SHOOTINGS was created in a way to not come across as sinister but yet it had to be so powerful to show the sinister problem but in an approachable way. I feel I achieved this by keeping the design consistent with the brand identity, like the colours and shapes. Throughout the design I kept in mind the target audience and kept showing parts of it to friends, family and lecturers to gain outside opinions from both professional and normal people.

The design in my White Hart menu was created in a fun way to show that they are doing something good for the given charity. The design was to gain awareness to the piece making it stand out from the others. At the top of the menu I wanted it to look different so then it made people curious as to why it was different to the other menus. Again like the other project I kept getting feedback from all sorts of people to constantly get an outside view from it and I worked off the feedback in an appropriate manner taking in every last bit of it.

When it came to printing for the XXXL SHOOTING booklet it felt like it was going to be a massive ball ache though luckily I knew a graphic designer who I have worked with in the past and he said he’d sort me 50 copies for free in the highest quality. Usually this would cost about £300 minimum! This backs up the saying that it’s not all about what you know, it’s about who you know. I was extremely lucky to have this contact and was so grateful.

The print was done on an extremely high end printer which made sure that there were no jolts or miscuts and it was mostly done manually. If I had gone to a print shop near home that was cheaper, they would have just ran it through a printer that would sometimes move the pages just ever so slightly, that would lead to misprints and even crooked alignments on elements on some of the pages. This is all hard to explain as I don’t know much about print but this is what my guy told me.

The print on my pub menu was done simply at a local print shop seeing as it was only just an A4 piece of card to then be folded. I was very impressed from their printing standards down at minuteman press and their timing was on point, only a 10 minute wait! I will be using them for projects like this.

Overall my time keeping skills were good keeping almost like a diary on what I was going to do each week considering my dissertation on the side too. After getting my final response from people with the printed versions, I am very proud to call this work mine and feel that I have certainly progressed throughout the last few years! I will carry on proceeding through my last few projects just like I have with these two to gain great success and will jump on to the projects straight away.

 

Experimentation and justification on the last bits and decisions

Here I will be explaining what I have done to achieve this final look of the menu for the charity and pub.

Throughout the menu I have looked at the spacing between each paragraph style and applied it to each section in accordance of the first page. This is to keep the style consistent and gain more of a flow. I have also made sure that all the elements of each page are aligned to the middle to stick to the design.

I have also changed the opacity of all the illustrations to about 50% to 60% just to make sure they don’t disappear off the page. My lecturer did tell me that I may want to consider using greys instead of the opacity option to stay on the safe side but I decided to flatten the document layers by exporting it to PDF. Doing it this way does the job for you and transforms the transparent elements into solid colours. During my test print it was done from an Ai file, that’s what caused the illustrations to go missing.

The text had to be amended based on some final feedback from the charity. They wanted it to be a little more shorter and only highlighting the main points being a slight description of what they do. If the viewer wants to find out more they can simply look up their website.

I decided to look critically into the placement of the illustrations now as they could clash with the text, a few pieces from the wines list did in fact clash or come too close to the text to I adjusted the placement of them.

The reason why I didn’t include the glass sizes on the gins, wines and other spirits list was simply because I didn’t want the menu to become too crowded and the viewer could easily ask the waiter what the sizes are but they may even already know because, in the pubs main drink menu it has all the sizes labeled.

Why didn’t you just use their current menu and add icons to the drinks that were on the charity list? – I wanted this to stand out a lot as it was such a great cause and I thought if it was just a little amendment to their current drinks menu it wouldn’t gain much attention. Also all the other menus are dark on their tables, this one would strongly stand out with its bright colour which is also vintage looking, keeping it classy.

I will be going onto printing this piece and doing a final blog showing the outcome and the PDF. The print will be produced on thick card paper with a matte finish to stick to the formatting of the pubs other menus.

 

 

Designing the last page

Taking into consideration everything that was mentioned in my feedback I will now go on to completing the style by finishing off my final page which concedes of beers, ciders, other spirits and a small bit of information about the charity which links to the * on the front cover.

Keeping consistent with the new elements I have placed the formation of the squares the same to represent the main headings within the page.

Keeping the hierarchy approach of what I have used in the last two pages I’ve kept the importance of each bit of text very clear. The bio at the bottom is only temporary as that I do not know what the client wants to include in this part so I will have to ask her and she’ll get back to me.

As you can see that I have stuck to the feedback by keeping the text very visible, made sure that there is no loose wording around and kept consistency with the two brands. I also kept white space to the maximum.

Now I will be going through a few slight adjustments before finishing up such as the opacity of the illustrations throughout the menu. I will ask the charity for the information content and speak to my lecturers one last time before print just incase they notice anything that may slip up.

 

Feedback amendments

Here I will be analysing the feedback that I had got and I will be amending my menu to the standards of the feedback and also my own feedback on the menu.

change size of text at bottom of front page – The text could be a little too small to read for some viewers especially the bits that are a lot smaller than other areas.

With this bit of feedback I amended it straight away as that this was in fact key to change as it heavily considered the audiences point of view. Increasing the text size a few more points made it a lot easier to see, and avoided the possibility of it not being seen easily.

Inside, make sure there is no lonely text hanging about – These bits of text can be seen as a waste of space, if there’s a word on its own drop a few other words down to bulk the line out.

Here I made my paragraphs more bulky by doing what Tim suggested to consider. Also referring back to my research in looking at typography in lists. It makes the document look a lot cleaner which isn’t surprising! I also felt the need to break up the page just a little more with some elements from the charity brand, because I said that the menu was lacking the brand.

Inside, maybe consider Aligning the text to the left – text to aligned to the left is usually to inform the reader.

This bit of feedback didn’t really justify itself as it doesn’t look right. The balance is not right now and I feel it doesn’t go well with the consistency of the rest of the menu – ie the front.

The front page, Consider using a different title and look into whether or not to have all lower caps or caps lock on just the first letter of each word.

Redoing this area of the front page has worked to make the title look somewhat equal. I felt it didn’t really work with the first word being the only one with its first letter capitalised.

Doing this has helped a lot and has given me some things to consider when it comes to finishing off the menu ready for print.

 

 

Feedback

Now is the time to get feedback from a few experts and people who I would consider as the target audience. Here I will be showing what feedback I got from lectures, profession standard graphic designers and the public.

change size of text at bottom of front page – The text could be a little too small to read for some viewers especially the bits that are a lot smaller than other areas.

Inside, make sure there is no lonely text hanging about – These bits of text can be seen as a waste of space, if there’s a word on its own drop a few other words down to bulk the line out.

Inside, maybe consider Aligning the text to the left – text to aligned to the left is usually to inform the reader.

The front page, Consider using a different title and look into whether or not to have all lower caps or caps lock on just the first letter of each word.

While I was asking for some feedback I had also noticed a few things myself, one of them being the fact that it was still just a little short of incorporating the charities brand into it. Also on the first page it needs to say “Step by Step – a school for children with autism.

Doing this procedure has raised awareness on a few flaws within my first take on the menu. It has made me think twice on my piece and has given me a great outside view on the menu from many kinds of people. Most the feedback was good though and was given the go ahead to carry on by my Mum who acted as part of the client as that she works at Step by Step.

 

 

 

 

Test prints

I thought it would be very necessary to test out what my menus will print out like on just a standard printer. I wanted to check that it was physically easy to read and looked appealing to the eye.

I tested this on just a standard brothers printer that I own at home so hopefully the print will look a lot more better once professionally printed. This test is just on the front cover.

Below are the results.

As you can see the pattern on the front here is not visible at all, the opacity of the pattern was about 30% so in order to make it more visible I am going to bump up the opacity to about 50%.

Obviously when printing on a bulk standard printer it will cut off the edges. So that is not so much an issue as that when it comes to printing at a print shop it will come out as A3 and will then be trimmed from that format.

The print was also tested through an AI file so that may well be another reason as to that the files layers aren’t flattened until it is exported into a PDF. So I am going to make sure to print it from an PDF format.

 

Experimentation on the inside pt 1

Moving on to developing the inside pages I will consider my findings about laying out text and will keep in mind my knowledge on leading and font sizes.

Going back to my blog from when the pub gave me their content I will start to lay out the text as followed.

I’m going to be keeping the font the same throughout because I want to keep consistency of the pubs brand alongside the elements that run the consistency of the charity brand. This will bring balance to both brands.

Below shows how I have placed in the text. I have made the title of the drinks along with the prices bold by keeping them a dark text and with the leading being fairly large to make it easy to read. The bio of the drinks are decreased in size but only by a couple of points, still being able to be read easily. I will check this though on a test print once I have finished this experimentation session.

Here is how the leading and text size looks on the character palette for the drink bios.

Though the layout is no where near to how I want it to look I went on further to laying out the text. Below is the result.

I saw that one of the drinks on the list were in fact not suppose to be included on the list so I took it off. I made the background colour the same and chose not to put the pattern over it as that it would again clash with the content of the page. Instead I added a couple of the wine glass illustrations to the piece to add some flavour to it.

To help bring in consistency of the charity brand I chose to again, like I did on the front cover, lay the boxes aligned to each sub heading which was: White Wine, Red Wine and Rosé Wine. This was done to indicate each area of the pages. Below is the other page to the DPS that also included Gin as I had made space for it seeing as I had to still place the beer and other spirits section in on one page. Gin is also very fancy and pricey as well as wine so to keep these drinks on the same DPS I felt was necessary.

I added an illustration of a glass of gin to the gin section only where there was a bit of white space, it was hard to find a slot for it because it was too text heavy but I think I found a good place for it and didn’t feel the need to add another one because then it would get too busy.

On the Gin list you can notice some blue text, this is to highlight the section of the bio giving their audience a suggestion on what they can drink it with. I chose blue as that it represents one of the charities brand colours. I chose blue because it is a friendly colour and easily visible. Red would become too dangerous looking and Yellow was too bright against the background colour.

Conclusion to these two pages is that the style works well with the font and elements within, it will most likely need looking at again as there will be a few issues with it as I can already see there is a fair amount of lonely text laying here and there. I will revisit this DPS after implementing the style from these pages on to my last page.

Experimentation on the front cover pt 2

Here I will be experimenting with my illustrations and looking at what works well to make the front cover stand out. Originally I was thinking of just getting my illustrations in a line and laying them along the middle of the page to break up the text. Although I didn’t find this so eye catching compared to ones in my inspiration post.

Instead of that idea I thought it would be a good idea to have them laid out as a wallpaper style like so.

To give the pattern some movement I came to a conclusion to place the illustrations in columns and shift the columns. I also thought it being straight didn’t make it look natural so I rotated the whole artwork a little to the right.

Also making the pattern hang off the page was to again show natural movement. Now the pattern makes the page look too busy so I went on to dropping the opacity to about 50% maybe even less, though I will have to be careful as I don’t want to clear the pattern off the page completely. This does depend on printing.

Here’s what I have got so far, plus the subheading being in the similar style of the main heading/ title. I did this because that part of the text is just as important as the title. It is also in italic to show that it is informing.

I decided to cut the illustration pattern at the bottom before the text because it would have clashed with the text making it hard to read. Once I had done that I aligned the text in the middle of the created white space to keep it looking neat.

To bring in elements of the charity I done it in the simplest way possible. I’ve worked with the school before so I have experienced combining the brand elements into a piece of work.

I took the simple boxes used in the charity’s logo and aligned them to each section of the front cover, it’s hard to explain so here is a screenshot.

The simple boxes from the logo

The alignment

Finally I thought it was key to show the logo of the charity at the top to highlight more what the menu is all about. I did this because, the things at the top usually are the first things to notice, seeing that logo in a pub comes across different and makes the viewer curious as to what it’s about, therefore they should pick it up to read.

That’s a wrap for the time being for my front cover. Keeping it minimal and vintage yet sticking to the Step by Step brand I think it has come out very successful. Solving problems such as the possibility of the front looking too cluttered I have solved it very well. I will now move on to laying out the inside of the menu.

 

 

Experimentation on the front cover pt 1

To start off with on my design route I thought it may be necessary to style the charity’s logo in the same way I did with the drink illustrations. Below you can see that I have tried it out. I will be keeping that version on the side to see how it looks once I’ve finished my first design.

I am going to be going for an A4 sized document that will be standing tall folded. This is to bring as much attention to is as possible because if you think about it, in pubs, restaurants, bars, etc today they mostly always have their drinks list the most biggest and visible menu standing on the table, because it’s showing the things that bring in the most revenue. It’s the same when they want to show offers.

To start off with, I wanted to make the front cover stand out and draw attention to the menu. I thought it would be a good idea to state what the menu is, what pub it is and what charity is involved, also a small bit of information to tell the audience what the menu is for.

An ‘x’ was used to signify the collaboration of the two organisations. The font I used was based on the content of the pubs website. They seem to be a high end pub with a very modern approach as well as a traditional approach. I did search a few other fonts for this but this font had a happy approach to it as well as sticking to the style of the pubs brand. Thus leant the style of the menu a little towards the charity.

Having a headings style approach to this section worked effectively avoiding clutterness. Doing this created a hierarchy. I’m also placing this part at the bottom as that it is not so important as the title of the menu. People already know where they are.

Now onto the title, it had to stand out and be different to the bottom section. A good way to do so is to place a box behind the text and making it the colour of the other text that is on the page then inverting the colour of the title. The text colour matches the vintage warm colour of the background.

I did also experiment with making the title stand out more with placing boxes around it like so below, but came to a decision to not do this because it didn’t look right.

As I can see is that it’s too harsh and not so natural with the font. Also with the piece of info below it it just made it look really bad looking.

Next I will be experimenting with how I could place the illustrations onto the cover to make the cover stand out and have some depth to it.