Fedrigoni Brief: Personal Boards

YCN Submission Boards

Its been a long way coming within just a few weeks but here they are. The final three presentation boards were printed and mounted today. After spending last friday tirelessly with the camera trying to get some decent picture within a dark room I am quite pleased with myself. Hannah work on the layout design of each of the boards taking inspiration from the previous years of submitted designs. The text at the bottom of each of the boards directs to what was produce etc which I've listed below. Overall I'm very impressed with what we produced and what we have produced is something much more different that what we have done before, a portfolio piece that shows how our practice can range in visual appearance.

Board 01.

Designers:

Hannah Jackson & Carl Holderness

The Brief:

Encourage more designers to visit and use the Fedrigoni London Showroom.

Concept:

Don’t waste this space.

Rationale:

We intend to market this space by means a poster that will be included in every paper order and sample pack that Fedrigoni send out as a means of appealing to existing customers and potential customers alike.

Audience:

Existing and potential Fedrigoni customers.

Duration:

Four weeks.

Resolutions:

4 x A2 Posters & 1 x Business Card

Board 02.

Product:

The resolution that we have designed is a range of A2 posters in a series of four, one of which, picked at random, will be included in every sample pack and/or paper order that Fedrigoni send out to potential and existing customers. Each poster is designed to communicate a certain feature or piece of factual information about the Fedrigoni London Showroom in a high impact manner. The poster allows the customer to take something away from the pack to display and keep as an asthetic piece as well as a reminder of both the showroom and of Fedrigoni papers. A business card has also been designed to be included, tucked into the packaging, that will unfold into a pop-up representation of the showroom, giving the customer a level of interactivity.

Board 03.

Context:

The designs shown use a limited colour pallet of two colours plus stock in order to keep printing costs down, here the colours that we have used within our designs is the Pantone colour of the existing Fedrigoni logo and black. The colours used can be tailored to be in context with the colours of the sample pack that is sent to each customer, giving a feeling of consideration for the design of the pack and of the paper samples that have been requested.

The poster also provides an additional paper stock sample and allows the customer to see the quality of the paper in a printed form and/or a different stock that may not have been considered by the customer.

Sample Pack: Product Shots

With the final products printed and produced the very last thing on the agenda was to produce the boards for submission. Product shots can make all the difference and being a bit of a perfectionist I felt I didn't want to compromise here. Unfortunately my camera was out of action and Hannah's camera didn't quite take the shots that I was looking for, probably just because I couldn't get the settings right. Luke offered his camera thankfully and i managed to take a few decent shots for the board. The three boards that we were to produce would each show different things:

+ The Concept

What we were proposing and why. The target audience was also specified here as well as the rational and the resolution brief description

+ The Product

Here is the design of what we produced. This shows the visual styling and the physicality product as a whole.

+ The Context

Where would this thing that we produced sit in relation to what exists already? Using the photographs the idea was to produce photos that show how both the business card and the poster designs and the overall design and product fit within the context of our target audience

The shots should show the design in context with the sample pack.

*I would have liked to have taken the shots further by doing what was said in the Crit and actually posting an example. This would have show better how the product would come through the post.

Fedrigoni Brief: Final Poster Designs

After negotiating and taking some time out to reflect on what we had produced there were a couple of issues:

+ Impact Factor

+ Typeface Selection

We selected the typeface based on the grounds of a mutual agreement, based upon characteristics that we identified with the Fedrigoni Company. However, this was challenged and we should consider not just what the company's characteristics give off but what we want from our design and what feeling the recipient should have upon opening up this poster.

+ Layout design

Although neat it was cluttered and there was a lot of information to take in, reducing the quality of the 'Impact' factor that we were wanting to acomplish.

After I took the time out the other day to reflect and coming back and proposing and making the final editions I feel strongly that this is a much better outcome than what we had previously. I took the other day as a chance to finish the design properly, some of the maps for example needed tinkering with and some details etc. After that we decided to get the final few printed and 'hey presto', 4 limited edition posters designed to be included in eery sample pack that Fedrigoni distribute to its customers.

Adjusted Business Card

As the design of the posters has changed I decided that in order to keep the consistency of the new look I changed some of the information on the business card design. Simply adding 'Don't waste this space.' and the rest of the information fitted the new look of the posters really well. Unlike the design of the poster editions the business card comes in one design, this acts as the link between all of the designs and will reduce printing costs also for larger print runs.

To be honest I really like the business card design, as a simple idea that myself and hannah developed from our early mock-ups the design hasn't needed to move on very far. Just using the simple idea that it folds out into the size of the room illustrates the notion of what we are trying to communicate, getting people to interact with the showroom space.

The adjusted position of the dates appears to fit with the whole look of the business card. It appear much more effective and by utilising the blue circle creates an added consistency between the designs.

A Change of Direction

Based upon the crit feedback that we recieved it seemed that what we were wanting to produce lacked impact. After negotiating and taking some time out to reflect on what we had produced there were a couple of issues:

+ Impact Factor
+ Typeface Selection
+ Layout design

Almost the crucial thing that needed to be there lacked that quality that makes the design jump out and speak to the viewer. Hannah and I both decided to go home and think about what we were wanting to produce. I decided to stay a bit longer and work on the project.

It just needed to be simpler. The design had become much more complicated and the amount of information that were were wanting to communicate made it hard to actually see what were were wanting to put forward 'Don't waste this space.' I decided to break down the information to the actual basics of what we needed to be there using the simple idea.

Don't waste this space.

As a Fedrigoni customer you can also visit and

hold your own events with our exclusive

London showrooms.

Using language such as exclusive indicated a much more personal tone and directed the viewer to something because it was not just generic. Using the 'Don't waste this space.' as more of a tag-line almost asked the viewer to do something about this, almost like an order. I decided to put this in context with the poster and proposed various designs and layouts below.

I worked out that we were trying to produce lots of information and deliver in too little space. Why not deliver it across several different ones? From this I then took the visual I had generated and created a series of 4 posters. Each comprised of a separate piece of visual information which would be printed on a gorgeous piece of stock. This could be tailored to each different consumer pack giving a feeling of a individuality and accentuated that idea of speciality.

Proposed Layout Design

For the Crit we had to have a very clear and almost finished design direction and visual that was close to completion. For this myself and hannah had been working on the poster design, with myself working on the layout design and and Hannah working on the graphs for the design although at this point here we both had a rather evenly distribution of workload and contribution to each others practice.

The Front of the poster indicated the statistical values that we had collected and were displayed. On the reverse of the design we simply printed one of the statistical values that we were working with '76m²'. Personally I'm quite impressed with the amount of information that we were able to pull together and I think the organisational layout design works well.

Poster Design Development

For the design of the poster I have been struggling lately, some kind of designers block, either that or I'm starting to think too much at the prospect of the end of another year at university.

For visual appearances i started to simply experiment using Adobe Illustrator. Looking at visual styles will allow myself and hannah to work further on the project and determine a real design direction. As a starting focus I wanted to look at simple geometric line drawings and creating composition elements using the map and the logo that we have been looking at; '76m²'.

For the minute perhaps I am looking at more simple compositions , using a the diagram a the main feature and aesthetic within the page and the text placed around it.

Typeface Selection & Design Development

As myself and Hannah are both completing the typography module we both though that one of the useful ways of type selection was to base it on certain desired characters for the business of person wanting the typeface. So using the college library as a basis for our font selection we identified several typefaces that suited our desired qualities.

+ Traditional

+ Specialist

+ Corporate

Our chosen typeface was 'Big Caslon', identified from the qualities that we wanted to give off about the company from our typeface. We did think of asking Fedrigoni but based upon our last attempt of trying to find out details of the room I wouldn't think that such a big company would be interested in coming up with 3 words that sum up the company. Never the less myself and hannah feel that 'Big Caslon' works well for our designs, in particular its us of numbers which sit irregularly either on the baseline or on the descender height.

Timetable 23.03

Given myself and hannah are getting less and less time to complete the project we have decided to layout out time management again this time in much more detail for the next two or so weeks. We have decided to manage the project properly with time for errors in printing of the boards etc, we will be finished for the project on the Friday before hand-in. This gives us a few days to get this project finished. One of the things I have found which is particularly hard in the partnership is that we both have part-time jobs but at different times within the week.

CV Draft

Utilising in this session we were looking at tabbing in Quark Express. For our challenge we had to look at producing our own CV. Having not had much commercial experience apart from competitions and selling merchandise I chose not to include any design work. I do like the tabbing process its so neat, makes sense and gives an impression of being organised.

Business Card Draft

For the next session we have been asked to produce a business card, this tie for ourselves. The use of type here is important and should reflect the qualities if yourself and your practice. Graham then described our business card in the metaphor of a drink, mine was "cooking lager". Oh god. I didn't even know cooking lager existed. Perhaps I should give myself more time to work on this. I wanted to convey something more sophisticated but with a twist, perhaps a fun twist. I think I chose Futura for the wrong reasons, its too rounded and bubbly and perhaps the colour negotiates a more cheaper look than what I thought.

8 Page Booklet

One of the challenges for last weeks session was to create a visually appealing layout for an eight page document, type based. I felt given that it is a long winded piece of text two column would not be appropriate because it makes the text more broken up and 6 words per line in a document would surely mean that it the text is hardly readable, especially for eight pages long. I aimed for about 10-15 words per line, along with a size 8pt on the body text for easy of readability hand-held and I increased the leading to make the text seem less heavy.

I didn't however consider the use of a heading page or making it more of a feature, maybe this should be something to consider next time. For myself though I feel this layout sits comfortably on the page especially with the larger margins to make the text seem smaller.