Last week, I started to describe my personal design process for a project that I am working on. Today I wanted to continue listing out that process for you, as well as give you a final update on the project.
A Brief Recap
I went over how the first thing that I do is list out the given parameters of a given project. These parameters guide the creative process to be aligned with what the client is looking for. Usually, as part of the parameters, I, or the client, identify who the targeted audience is, and what exactly the message is that we want them to quickly get to when they look at the piece. Once the pre-drawing work is ironed out, thus begins the hand sketching. Typically, I go through many thumbnail sketches before deciding on a few to try digitally. Once I create those initial digital mock-ups, then we move on to the next step.
Peer Reviews/Product testing
What I typically do is then bring my concept and my initial digital draft(s) to fellow designers and ask for their critique of the work-in-progress project. Based upon their feed back, I will then begin to make some alterations to the initial design. This step is meant to help and refine ideas to where they meet the parameters of the client the best, as well as more clearly convey the intended message.
For this project, I got some good feedback (as you can see from the red drawn over draft). Major fixes that I needed to make were alignment and spacing issues. Reflecting upon this, I decided to double check my parameters, and discovered that the minimum expectation was AT LEAST three pages (two of which had to be a spread). When I saw that, I realized that I was not needing to confine myself to just three pages. My article was a longer one, and so I took the initiative and added an additional spread. What you will see is that by doing so, many of the alignment and spacing issues practically disappeared.
Finalizing
Once the feedback has been collected, and recorded, I went back and began the changes. Like I said before, I created an additional spread. I then opened up my paragraph styles window in InDesign, and increased the body text’s font size and the leading. Immediately, the article began to be much more comfortable to read. I then went and adjusted the title of the piece. I make the third line of text smaller, and decreased the space between the words. I then brought them to be aligned with the left edge of the “E” in Fear, and the right edge of the “A” in Fear as well. This helped to bring the initial message of not fearing to go out and serve, to pop a little bit more out from the article.
On the draw over, a peer noticed that there was an irregular spacing issue on the word “Christ” in the text within the yellow box. When I went and checked it out, I found that there was actually a space glyph splitting the word in two. Something to always remember to do is to go and spell and grammar check all of your text in a project. It can be a very embarrassing if you don’t.
(The photo of President Henry B. Eyring was taken from his official portrait found on LDS.org)
On the first spread, I began to feel that my pull-quotes lacked any sort of appeal. They were just kind of bland. So I went in and changed the font family to Bickham Script Pro. This made it so much more appealing to look at. I needed to adjust the size of the font a little to make up for this change. I also brought the second part of the quote higher up, solidifying the relationship between the two as a single, continuous quote. As a result of the move, I needed to go in to my text wrap settings and change the bounding box boarder around each so as to better visually have my body text flow nicely around the pull quote. I also moved the yellow box and image from this spread to the next.
On the new spread, I went through the text and found a second pull quote that fit the intended message and made the settings of the text wrap to match that of the previous spread. And that, in a nutshell, is what the purpose of this spread was. It was meant to apply repeated styles and elements from the first three pages, that bound the entire project together. The image and yellow box were reformatted and cropped to fit the new space- much like the opening page. The headings and pull-quotes match earlier examples in the article. I also moved the references from the bottom of the article’s final column of body text and placed it inside the yellow box, and changed the paragraph settings to match more of the bio on the speaker on the first page.
(The image of the study materials and The Book of Mormon were taken by me for this project)
The Wrap up
Although I feel there is always more to tweek and twiddle with on a project, this project has reached its conclusion for the deadline. I might go back one day and revisit it to make more changes as I progressively get better as a designer. But what is important to take away from today’s and last week’s blog posts are the simple design process that was taken. They were to: 1) List parameters, 2) Identify audience and message, 3) Sketch, 4) Initial Digital mock-up(s), 5) Peer review/Product testing, 6) Implement changes and Finalize.
L337 Productions 