OUGD404 - Studio Brief 01 - Evaluation

Throughout this brief, I learnt a lot in terms of colour, layout and format through research and the production of three small booklets which allowed me to put these principles into practice. One thing which I felt was successful in the production of the books was their consistency in the use of type and layout. This was enhanced through splitting the research into three categories so that all information within flowed nicely. For instance, one of Josef Muller-Brockmann's classic and lead typefaces is Baskerville which was used throughout each book to ensure legibility of large passages of text. Although considered a good choice of type, one limitation of this was that the type was far too large for the scale of the book which makes it seem too prominent within the design. Therefore, in future development and production of booklets, scales will be more carefully considered.

Although consideration was taken in the use of ultramarine paper for the covers of each book, which links to the resin binder in which ultramarine pigment is suspended to produce the colour International Klein Blue, the additional paper used within could have been improved. This used standard printer paper, which could potentially have limited the quality of the images when printing. These pages were also formatted incorrectly when printing and therefore did not print double sided, which means each book has a series of blank page breaks throughout, which can be considered to disrupt the flow of content. In the future, principles learnt from the pagination workshop will be referred to in order to print such books in the correct format.

Despite this, I feel that these booklets communicate effectively what I have learnt through this module. For instance, research into the attitudes of artists Josef Albers and Johannes Itten on colour theories have been practically applied to some elements of these books, such as the colour swatches taken from a primary photograph of Leeds which uses ideas based on the contrast of saturation. These were then also replicated into similar formats of Albers' work 'Homage to the Square' which shows some of the effects colour can have on the communication of design work.