Design Practice Blog: Preparatory task for double page spreads

Preparatory task for double page spreads

For this task we were required to collate our research information in the form of information, type & image and narrow down what content we want for 5 definite double page spreads. I will be bringing in the bellow content in black and white print outs.

Most common color connotations & there meanings?\
Red can represent fire, blood. Can be associated with energy, war, danger, strength power, determination and love. Emotionally the color red is very intense. It enhances respiration rates and raises blood pressure. Its high visibility benefits its use in stop signs & stop lights.
Red brings text and images to the foreground, when used as the accent color it can stimulate people to make rash decisions. Its used often in "click here" or "buy now" buttons.

Yellow is the color of sunshine. Its associated with joy, happiness, intelligence and energy. Yellow has a warming effect sparking cheerfulness, stimulates mental activity and generates muscle energy. Yellow has links with food associations. Taxi cabs are painted yellow due to its high impact and luminance. In use with black it can simulate danger.

Orange combines both the energy from the color red and the happiness of yellow. It has associations with joy * sunshine. Orange can present enthusiasm, fascinations, happiness, creativity, determination. attraction, success, encouragement and stimulation.
Visually the color orange is a very hot color, it gives of a feeling of heat. The color can stimulate mental activity, and due to its citrus color companion it can be associated with healthy food so stimulates the appetite. Orange is also the color of fall and harvest.

Green has links with nature, it can simulate growth, harmony, freshness and fertility. Green has strong connotations with safety, dark green with money. Green has a mental healing power, can improve vision and can suggest endurance or stability.

Blue has associations with the sky and the sea. It often simulates trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth and heaven. Mentally blue is considered to enhance the mind and body. It has a calm in effect due to its association with tranquility and calmness.

Purple makes use of the stability of blue and the energy of red Purple has links with royalty, symbolizes power, luxury, nobility and ambition. It has links with wealth, wisdom, magic and mystery. People consider purple to be artificial due to it been very rare in physical nature forms. Light purple can be seen to be quite feminine.

White has links with light, goodness, innocence and purity. It is seen to be the color of perfection through its simulation of safety, purity and cleanliness. As opposed to black white has positive connotations.

Black has links with power, death, evil and mystery. Black is seen to mysterious, a color linked with fear and the unknown. Its a very negative color but denotes strength and authority. It can also be seen to be very formal and sometimes elegant so it is quite a versatile color depending on its use. For example a black tie is formal, a black funeral car has obvious connotations with death.

How does pantone work?
Pantone is a color matching system wich was introduced by the Pantone corporation in 1963. Its main uses are for printers and graphic artists to deliver reliable color matches for the customers. It is a color language that is communicated and understood the same worldwide.

How the pantone system works is that that each color swatch has a code. This code can be translated by printers to create specific color matches. Designers can see colors in the real world and translate them into a color code.

This is the screen representation of the physical color swatches through the pantone matching system proce.

The pantone system is made up off CMYK colors. (cyan,magenta, yellow, and key/black). Each color code has certain percentages of each color proportion. Or the pantone code can be entered into the print process to create an accurate match.

Top 10 most famous type designs?

Neo-grotesque sans-serif
Designed by Max Miedinger
1957

Old style serif

1989

Huminast sans-serif
Adrian Frutiger
1975

Serif
Giambattista Bodoni
1798

Geometric sans serif
Paul Renner
1927

Transitional serif
Victor Lardent
1931

Slab Serif
Monotype
1936

Sans Serif

Linotype

1931

Humanist Sans Serif
Eric Gill
1926

Neo-grotesque Sans Serif
Adrian Frutiger
1957

How is woodblock type traditionally made?

Wood engravings are a form of relief printing. The starting point would be a hard block of wood that would create a solid shape when printed. The letterforms are created by wood been cut away from an outline leaving a final image. The other common relief printmaking methods are the woodcut and linoprint methods.
All engravings start with a drawing. The image you cut into the block needs to be the reverse output of the final print. This means when the print is pressed the letterform appears the right way round. A good tip would be too create mockups on acetate so the actual print outcome can be viewed on the other side of the acetate.
The block engraving. The wood that you intent to use needs to be cut across the end grains of the block. The depth of the block is normally the height of the letterform. The traditional wood to use for wood engraving is boxwood, alternatives could be lemonwood. The wood needs to be capable of coping with fine detail and be robust enough to withstand many prints.
There are 2 methods of drawing onto the block. You can draw onto the natural wood block, or you can cover the block in watercolor wash and draw on in pencil. Its a good idea to use tracing paper before hand to plan on were to place the visual elements onto the block.
Using typical woodcarving tools like; spitsticker for curved lines. A scorper for straight lines and large surface areas. A tint tool for parallel lines.A lozenge graver for cutting lines of varying widths. The multiple tool cuts several parallel lines at once.
After lots of patience the block glyph is finished with sandpaper for curved elements of the letterform.
The block is ready for printing now, good quality printing paper is recommended. Strong thin paper like a Japanese paper is the traditional medium.
In terms of a printing press it can be done by hand for a more worn out rustic effect. Or a proof press or a typical letterpress were moveable type can be placed in the pressing tray.

What makes a letterform legible?

To best answer this its best to look back into history, 100 years ago Germany was divided between people who claimed that either Blackletter or the Romany face is more legible and should be used to set German. The supporters of blckletter typefaces claimed that the simple Roman shapes would hurt the eyes and cause fatigue. The supporters of the Roman typefaces claimed that the blacklister shapes are way too complex and therefore hurt the eyes and cause fatigue. In science there are two models of how letters could be read: as a visual template or as a combination of features.

For every letter of the latin script we can think of a certain generic skeleton, a unique set of stems, curves and diacritical marks that in combination make up a letter. We depend on a structure to define it as a legible designed both in a generic and familiar way (recognizably) and also in a way that stressed letter differentiation (distinguishability). These are the two forces a type designer needs to balance out when creatine a legible typeface. Simplicity makes a legible letterform, minimal manipulation makes an easy to understand form.

Typeface designers work hard to ensure that the individual glyphs in a typeface design adhere to expectations and represent identifiable characters for reading. The legibility of a typeface then is inherent within the design of the type. It included characteristics such as stroke modulation (the changes from thick to thin) relationships between proportions of character width and height, serif size and formation, the relationship between shapes of individual characters and the size and shape of counters. All these effect the legibility of a typeface and letterform.

Legible example.

Illegible example.

Format choice

We need to decide on a format for our DPS, to do this I carried on the thumb-nailing started in the previous session, I did a few thumbnails on narrow pages and square pages. Through doing this I decided that the square format would be the format I want to go with due to the versatility of a square frame for the composition layout. The magazine i was analyzing was very image heavy with a fair amount of text, the square format gave good opportunity to still have negative space within the composition. This gave the reader opportunity to rest and avoid fatigue by very busy layouts.

I will then use this format to create some initial thumbnails of my 5 double page spreads with the content, I will use the content in a variety of ways experimenting with image size, body copy size, headline size, drop cap size etc.

The format I will be using is 210mmmx210mm square format, with the content I chose I feel I have good opportunity to create well balanced layout compositions within a A4 square format(210x210mm).

Here are some examples of rough thumbnails based on my 210mmx210mm square format. I stuck to using a multi column grid in various formats (2,3,4 column) It was quite difficult to create good balance with the DPS with lots of content. The DPS with less content are easier to create better balance within the composition.

Colour connotations.