Thumb-nailing introduction & task

Thumb-nailing introduction & task

Todays session was extremely beneficial in terms of teaching us how to jot down a range of quick design layouts through a thumb nailing process. Before going onto the Mac and producing a digital outcome of the layout its much better to exhaust all possibilities by hand drawing out quick rough ideas.

We began by highlighting elements within the grid in a way in which we understood, blue was body copy, solid red lines were the page folio systems, scribbled red were headers & sub headers, captions were scribbled red with a "caption" annotation and images were simulated with a cross. 

Using the above example we began creating mockup thumbnails using the same ratios of the content (type, image, captions etc). This gave us a versatile way in wich we can play around with creating different balances within negative and used space within the DPS and move the eye around the page in different manners. To keep things simple we began with a 3 column grid. Its advised we stick to a column grid (max of around 8-12) and stay away from modulars at the moment due to there complexity. Its important to consider how information is presented to the viewer, a visual clutter of information causes fatigue and strains the viewer making them lose concentration and not take in the information well. Aesthetics are important but creating a balance of accurate information presentation and pleasant aesthetics is important.

I enjoyed using this thumb-nailing method, it allowed me a lot of freedom to create a range of different possible outcomes. A lot of the outcomes look terrible but its a good way to develop a skill off thinking of initial layouts before tweaking then in more detailed drawings before final digital mocking up. 

Its important that the thumbnails are off correct scale of the final outcome. We were taught a clever method of using the golden ration to create scaled down versions of the original size layouts. This example used a 340mm by 240mm original "layout". By drawing a diagonal line from corner to corner it was possible to create any scale layouts from this framework.

After creating a few DPS thumbnails we were introduced to the task for next week. We need to decide on 5 pieces of content for the double page spreads we plan on creating. This means narrowing down the body copy so its easily digestible within a publication, and sorting out what images are going to be included in the content. 

We will be bringing this content into the next session to begin to experiment with inserting the content into a set of grid frameworks.

We need to decide on an initial format for the DPS. Be it square, narrow, wide format or simple a4 format. 

We will arrive at our decision on format through a range of experimentations through initial thumbnail sketches.