ITAP - David Osbaldestin's Introduction

To kick us off and launch us into our new Graphic Communication module David Osbaldestin gave us a talk about the main roles of graphic communication.

• Design for invitation 
• Design for information
• Design for expression

These three roles within the graphic communication world are key to understanding any piece of design in it’s purpose and intention.

Take this Advert from Nikon for example, 

http://markertising.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/i_am_brave.jpg

Nikon launched their 'I AM' campaign back in 2010 but it is still going strong, I can isolate each of the three design roles within this one image.

Design for Invitation - This image persuades/invites you to engage with it in many ways,

 - the quality of the image.

 - the bright, bold, striking graphic in the centre.

 - choice of language, 'BRAVE'.

 - capital letters.

 - subject in in the photograph.

 - warm, inviting colours within the photograph.

 - the size of the tagline being small, requires you to read deeper, focus in more and that itself is a technique to get to you engage with it.

All these things are examples of design for invitation but what are they inviting you to? 

I think the invitation is one of the IDEA, the concept of 'I AM'. Nikon have gone personal, using real life images captured by Nikon cameras and real people, Jamie Oliver and Robbie Williams to name two, they have made it about the customer. Birgitta Olson says, 

“We hope this campaign will help to extend the legacy of the Nikon brand to a wider European audience. By reminding our customers that they too are at the heart of the image, we hope to ignite a new understanding of photography – one where anyone can express themselves, regardless of their photography experience.”

 I AM *insert line here*, you can make it whatever you want. They've invited you to be a part of Nikon, not just a consumer.

Design for Information - This campaign is one with little conventional 'information', or information as you would expect to see it. This is the beauty of the campaign. The main information in the image is the Nikon logo, but along with this goes the colours and typefaces used in the graphic in the centre of the image, they are all within Nikon's brand guidelines informing you of the brand, the product. 

In the case of the TV ads there is more design for information at the end of the video when the viewer needs to know the product comercial is advertising and also the tagline and the website are arranged on screen in the perfect way so that you get all the information needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwEZUiE97Uk

 

Design for expression - The print ads are the best example of design for expression, using inspirational lines matched with excellent images. The designer is allowed to express the concept freely. 

http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/print/2010/3/i_am_neil_armstrong.jpg

I particularly like this 3rd prize Nikon competition winner. The composition, symmetry and humour expressed through the image is great and it's a very cleaver entry. Good enough for 3rd place and a D3100 kit package prize!

http://blog.iamnikon.com/en_GB/wp-content/uploads/I-am-a-lady.jpg 

3 Principles that influenced my work

Over the course of this ITAP lecture series i have learnt so much that is important to the development of my thinking as a designer as well as important to the development of my work in the module.

Here I will write about 3 of the principles i have written about in my ITAP blog series and show how they apply to my work.

Legibility
This is a very important principle for my work particularly as we as a group chose to use a typewriter as the main provider of the body copy of our magazine. This was a deliberate choice because we decided on maintaining the principle that not everything that is old, is bad. we wanted to show that old techniques are still useable. So here are a few things i did to ensure that legibilty was always the best it could be.

So as you can see from this original scan this document is very hard to read. Well we scanned in the documents at an extremely hight resolution, 1600dpi so that when I got the images into photoshop I had the best quality possible. that meant I sort out blemishes to detracted form the words themselves and also correct spelling mistakes (a manual spell check!!!).

I concluded this in my study of legibility "The context of the image (web/print/screen) is important in analysing weather something is legible." So i considered this when making the final product and i think the final outcome is one that is legible, it's not the easiest of things to read but I'm not designing a magazine for children nor am i designing a magazine for people who have trouble reading. Our taget audience is one that is intelligent, educated, doesn't mind reading and has an interest in the things of old.

Visual Hierarchy
Using my magazine cover as the example here we can asses the visual hierarchy of this image.

- The thing that stands out the most is the large letters 'see?' partly because they're black on white on a brown coloured background so they colours help is to stand out. Also the text size is large as titles normally are this draws the eye to text, 1 - because our eyes a drawn to titles, 2 - because it's the biggest text on the page. The position also helps, it is central this draws your eyes to it also.
- The second thing the eye is drawn to is the text below, 'the birmingham issue - for the creative mind'. This is because the eye follows downward when reading naturally so after reading the title 'see?' you then move on to whatever it beneath it. This was an intentional design feature based on what i learnt in my study of visual hierarchy.
- your eye then having nowhere 'natural' to go looks around the rest of the image and picks up the title at the top of the page and any other details that may be ont he document.

Text and Image
This one again is very apt to my project mainly because we used the typewriter we had to treat our text as images, they were photographed or scanned in and therefore were .jpeg images. We did use computer text too in our magazine, everything except the body copy of out articles was Times Italic. We chose this as we felt it offered a nice contrast to the gritty hand typed typewriter text, it was nice and clean yet still 'old enough' to be in keeping with the design of the whole magazine. This was important because we didn't want a magazine that looked like it had conflicting styles, we wanted something that worked well as a whole and party due to the correct us of text and image i believe we achieved this.