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.

 

 

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.