Today was the first dissertation design class, we had a workshop with David which was a really useful editorial nudge to. remind us all about how impactful using different typefaces and sizes work in an editorial outcomes. At the start of the online class David introduced our editorial brief involving our dissertation in which we need to produce five editorial spreads presenting parts of our dissertation. I believe this is will be something g really good to include in my portfolio because my dissertation is an achievement of mine but also something I enjoyed writing about so making into a design outcome could really develop my work and something positive to show off .
at the start of the workshop David gave a small presentation of examples of previous dissertation editorials outcomes too given us all an idea of what we could use as inspiration to design our own, I found this really useful as I couldn’t really think of ways to design mine but since looking at others student ones has helped me spark ideas to design for this outcomes to. really show off my studies. i really love how creative all these are in their terms from using different methods to to display the studies from layout, colour and space The design that stands out the most to out of these is the blue yellow, blue and pink editorial at the bottom, the usage of spaces, typography and spaces is a fun unique way to get information out but it also makes the user want to follow the type across the pages, while looking at previous outcomes by student it has helped me and feel excited to try out my own ideas.
workshop – we had to work in groups to produce editorial pages with given text on a word document with date. There were three rules, the first rule was really restrictive, we had to arrange the page using one size font, the same font, the same weight and the same leading.
challenge one : One typeface, one weight, one size, one size leading, one colour
For the first challenge for the group was using one typeface, we tried to focus on the layout of the text as layout are a important way to commutate information but can be a playful fun way for reader to get the information instead of left to right and up and down the page, we found the first rule a bit challenging as we wanted to really show off the different area but we knew we have to do this in the next round when we could use a different typeface leading
the group deiced to try to find a hierarchy from the positing of the text as well as the table. another idea was we picked to use colour to break up the pages and make this a bit more playful than black and white. This really highlighted the different elements are in creating hierarchy, as a group we agreed from our fist attempt that we needed to rearrange the text on the first blue page as it wasn’t that clear where the reader should start reading from plus We also really needed to work on our table, we also needed to change the results at the bottom.
challenge two – One typeface, one weight, one size, one size leading, one colour
The second rule was that we were now allowed to use more than one weight. This really helped us, allowing us to hierarchy as we were able to make the vertical titles stand out more as well as the headings on the table, this made everything more readable and stand out that we wanted but having access in the next round to another size could help benefit a bit more, in this the team did r struggle with time on this spread as Emily Indesign kept crashing and us not knowing how to make a real professional table indesign but we still made it back to the call with The other teams.
improvements ideas for the next round change size of typeface more, change the table layout and the second page has too much dead space and add in some more deign elements e.g a logo as a background just to add some visuals to the mix
Rule 3: One typeface, one weight, one size, one size leading, one colour
The third rule allowed the team to be more wild with experiments and trying out different ideas however we still had to now keep consistent typeface choice of ‘Avenir as it legible compared to other typefaces ut there in the world are more creative but are hard to read . as a group Our final version was a lot more playful, from where we started we added in a pop of colour to make areas stand out more changed the sizes of typefaces and leading just to just experiment but bring a pop to readers, the colour ideas was to bring out a quotation as well as the heading on the table. In the last round as a group we spoke about adding in a logo for some visuals while we had some couple of minutes left we added in the logo and used it as a decoration the editorial but also to separate the tables.
I feel if the group had more time to improve we would probably move the text around a bit more and experiment more with the tables as they aren’t the best but taking away from this task we have all learnt how to make a table in indesign.
Georgia Smith 