OUGD504 - Studio Brief 01 - Final Developments

Based on feedback from the final crit session, some adjustments were made to the final publication before printing. The main development was in regards to the use of type, as it was suggested through feedback that the use of a sans-serif font for the headings and a serif font for the body text was quite contradicting. Although my initial reasoning for this design decision was to produce a suitable contrast between the traditional and modern aspects of the art scene and architecture in Barcelona, upon reflection it was decided that these did not work together as well as I had initially thought despite there being examples of both typefaces being used together in other pieces of graphic design work. For this reason, the typeface used for the body text was also utilised for the page headings to produce a better consistency throughout the publication, however this was given a bit of extra weight in order to help continue a slight contrast between both. The typeface used for this was Caslon 540 Regular.

Another consideration given through feedback, in terms of type, was that the use of specifically developed grids was seen to obscure the content too much which affected the legibility and communication of the text. Although others considered this was an interesting decision based on my rationale, if this guide were to be published, the audience may not be as obviously aware of these design decisions and may affect their understanding of this. For this reason, it was decided to alter the use of such grids. The headings now fit within the structure of a modular grid and has been centred to work in correlation with the body text, which has been kept justified with the last line being left aligned.

In terms of the overall layout of the publication, it was decided to continue to work with initial ideas based on the structure of tiles used in various architectural structures in Barcelona through the use of square frames and negative space. Those images which have been formatted in square frames have been placed in additional white borders and used over scanned material collected by the author on their trip to the city in order to reflect the personal and subjective nature of the publication and of typical travel journals. Feedback suggested this layout worked well to reflect this and the chaos of navigating your way around a foreign country or city. The predominant use of photography was also shown to be understandable as a key component of the publication. In addition to enhance the personal nature of the publication, the use of white 'polaroid' borders around some of the images were used to also to enhance the initial idea of structure based on tiling, since this negative space around the images almost mimics the negative space around individual tiles and smaller pieces of mosaic material.

In this final development of the publication, it had been decided that additional collected material from the author would also be bound along with the printed publication to act as content in themselves, since much of this material was of an informative nature. For this reason, spaces in the publication needed to be created and carefully considered as to where and how this material would be bound within it. Some of this material had been scanned in various combinations, to produce collages of material, for instance one based on receipts and tickets collected on the initial trip. This particular spread within the publication, once printed, a brown envelope would be place over one of these pages to act as a space for travelling designers and users to place their own tickets and receipts from their own journey. As a result, this adds to the mandatory personal requirement set out by the author for the purpose of the publication.

Additional pages have also been created with similar collages and images of scanned material, pages which do not support much information since this may be overshadowed by the bound physical material since these are already filled with information themselves.

In terms of the physical structure of information, a typical modular grid has been used, since it was considered that this type of grid system would support the squared format of images better than other grid systems. Modular grids have consistent horizontal divisions from top to bottom in addition to vertical divisions from left to right, which helps to govern the placement and cropping of pictures and text. It was also considered that the consistent horizontal and vertical divisions would therefore ensure consistency throughout the whole overall publication.

Although the use of specifically developed grids were discarded for use with the title text pieces and other main content elements, these were still utilised within the publication in another way which was initially considered. Since the purpose of this publication is to act as a guide and inspirational piece for travelling designers to use to inform their trip and ultimately their future design works, it was decided to use these grid systems to produce a section of various gridded papers for the target audience to work with on their travels. This idea was inspired by the Wallpaper* City Guides which supports a similar notes section within their own publications.