Week 4

Lecture:
Clearly identifying that design students are the users brief.
The things that we wanted to get out of this was:
-clarity, defined, tangible stuff, legibility
-understanding, well written, effective
-relevant, refined, crips, enough to go on, succinct
-hierarchy, differentiation from heading and context, overview, context position, navigate
-fluidity, flow

One thing I noted was that design is more than just pretty pictures. We have to consider all the elements (above) and making sure everything is relevant to the topic.

During the weekends we all split the work evenly between us so that when we came back together we can decide what is working well together and what isn't. We can then go ahead and further refine our layouts to make sure everything is cohesive. Some of our photos and type composition was not working well together as a whole so we decided to focus on one specific layout and then applying it to the rest of the spreads with small changes. After the lecture we wanted to play around create more hierarchy within our spreads as they were all the same sizes and it was hard to differentiate the heading and context from each other.

In studio we presented out layouts and received feedback from each group. One thing that was often noted was our type composition (blurry text) and how it really gives a sense of being sleepy. Although type was our main strength it had also became our weakness as we had too much variety with our type composition and it was starting to look a little random. We decided to focus on the one that worked the best and develop it further. After our class feedback, we had a talk with the tutor  about our visual rhetoric. We had a discussion on layered text and how it looked more like repeated text rather than it being blurry. He suggested us to play about with gaussian blur tool on photoshop to really make it seem blurry. However one problem that quickly arise with this effect was legibility. In the end it was really up to us to decide on what approach we wanted to take, and after discussing as a group we decided to combine both the old and new idea together to gain a stronger approach (make it more relevant).