Saturday 29 October 2011

Time management

Re-evatuated my time management for the submission of OUGD301 due to the addition of more briefs.


Wednesday 26 October 2011

Postcards

I want to make some postcards for this brief also so here are some ideas...


Tuesday 25 October 2011

Evaluation of week 3

I have done alot more work which I believe is more relevant to my practice and the final result. Experimentation has been a huge part of this week and it has resulted in me being much happier with the finished product of my specimen book. By experimenting with colour in more depth than the previous week and also correctly creating my font Exhilaro I have produced a deliverable which I am happy to show off and is a better final result and application of the font than I imagined at the beginning of this brief.

At the Manchester Book Fair I asked Jonny, Dutch and Steph for some honest feedback as we found that we had similar views on some peoples work. One thing that some people have said is that the font is a bit messy. I should have paid more attention to the vectorisation of each hand drawn element. Dutch also said that he likes that I have strong opinions and I voice them, even though he may not agree with my point of view, he likes the vocalisation of them.

Even though I started applying my font to postcards, I am leaving Brief 01 alone for now. I need to start working on other briefs and not get so consumed by one. This week I really need to focus my remaining briefs down and make decisions about content for each.

An addition of Brief 05 and Brief 06 have been added to my range. I have been accepted for the pop-up shop and would like this be become Brief 05. Brief 06 is proposed to be a revived identity for the digital print resource. I think it is hard for some to understand what stock they can print on and even though it may be cheaper to use their own stock, it is at the loss of quality. I want to solve this problem.





Friday 21 October 2011

Specimen printing and binding

This has been the most complicated print I have ever done for myself or printed for anyone else! By taking advantage of my knowledge of digital print I knew my restrictions and limitations. The printing process was very complicated and took both me and James to work out how to paginate correctly.

Each booklet had to be sent to print in 2 parts. Firstly with 2-up consecutive pagination and secondly with 3-up consecutive pagination. The first part of the printing also involved changing paper stocks for each relevant spread. I used A4 thick, A4 thin and A4 tracing. The second part of the printing was on A3 thin stock.

It took roughly 20 mins to print a complete book and so I only managed to print 5. Binding them was also an issue as I did not have the relevant tools and it was very fiddly!



Postcards

Now I have the specimen book created and ready to print, I have proposed some postcard designs I also need to make some posters. These will be promotional materials for my font Exhilaro.

IMAGES

Thursday 20 October 2011

Specimen colour

After looking at the Pantone Books, I have printed some selected colours in digital print on the stocks which I will be using for my books. By using the stock from digital print, I can get the best colours and most professional results.




















Tested the colours on the two weights of paper which I will be using to make sure the colours are the same. Also tested the colour on tracing paper.












































I want the Exhilaro font to pop off the page and I also want the Helvetica type to be bold. I would like the background to be pale. I have decided upon this from my research. I know that some of the above colour combinations are either feminine, masculine or just don't work. I decided upon the first one from the experiment to apply it to my specimen book.






















However, as I was applying the colour I stopped and saw what I had created and liked it better!



















The blue make Exhilaro seem flat on the page and having it black made it really stand out. I really did not want to use black! Black is such an unimaginative colour, but as I was explaining my book to someone earlier, I realised there are alot of elements to it (thick cover, thin pages, tracing paper pages, fold out pages) and 3 bold colours is alot... I rally do prefer it like this and believe it works so much better to communicate the font.













Specimen InDesign

Now that I have my font generated, and also have designed the layout for the specimen book for Exhilaro, I bought all the elements together and digitised the specimen book... I was hoping to print this today, however the generating of Exhilaro in Fontographer took longer than expected and more issues arised which I did not forsee. James is teaching all day on Thursday and we have a visiting professional on Friday morning so I have booked myself in for Friday afternoon to print this book. I am not happy with this time as it does not allow for any problems printing.

This is going to be tricky to print, and to put together. I want to saddle stitch this and round the corners. The front and back cover will also be printed on 245gsm and the inside pages will be printed on 140gsm. 2 pages have an additional fold out page and 2 single pages will be printed on tracing paper, the position of which has been worked out through understanding the pagination. I would also like to experiment with colour in digital print. Ideally I want to use 3 contrasting colours. One for the background, one for the information in Helvetica, and one for Exhilaro.

There are a few small additions to still be applied to this specimen book and one dps still needs creating, but this is the basic look...













Progress crit

Rules of the crit... I hope to get some really good feedback. But obviously I need work to show in order to get this. In the future I will be more prepared.




















Unprepared and let myself down with the limited visuals I had for my briefs. Unfortunately, I am just finished brief 01 and so did not want people to crit this, as it will be printed tomorrow and I don't really have time to make changes!

I showed only a few ideas as most of my work for the other briefs are research and on my blogs. I still got some good feedback and some things to work on, but these were mainly in relation to Brief 01. 




Wednesday 19 October 2011

Exhilaro

Typeface comeplete! I have imported all the elements into Fontographer, scaled them accordingly and generated the font file.