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.
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.
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.
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