This brief posed many challenges, but was also fairly simple at time as well. The actual designing of the publication from creating the front cover and the amount of pages and how each page will look was vey enjoyable and once a basic layout was formed for the actual letterform pages, it was very easy to just slot everything into place. What was more difficult was designing the front cover, mainly choosing the typeface and altering the leaf pattern, so that it didn't look too feminine or ditsy, and so the title looked bold and assertive rather than just blending into everything. This just resulted in a lot of experimentation and presenting ideas to peers and friends to get their opinions as to which worked best.
However when it came to the actual production of the publication, there were several things that went wrong which resulted in things being changed and altered. Initially the duotone colours weren't printing as vibrantly as they should be, which turned out to be a problem with the photograph colour modes themselves in InDesign, as although InDesign previews duotones, when it prints them it doesn't recognise them as a colour mode so the colours aren't as vibrant. This was simply fixed by altering the original photograph files, and changing the colour mode from Duotone to RGB, which made no difference to the colour luckily. Another issue that occurred was the oversplay, which resulted when the pages were cut down to size before being bound, so the bleeds was no longer there to help make up for the oversplay. To resolve this problem, the publication has to be printed as two pamphlets, which were then bound individually and together at the same time, resulting in one complete publication without the issue of oversplay.
One of my aims for this brief was to expand on my knowledge of editorial design which I don't feel has been achieved, as the only research that was undertaken was into the aesthetics of page layout, which doesn't even touch the surface of editorial design. However my context of practice essay will give me a chance to look into editorial design in much more detail. It would of been beneficial for the COP essay to have a bit more of a prior understanding into editorial design, so I won't be starting from scratch.
Another publication brief was undertook in the Studio Practice module last year, and one of the aims for this brief was to improve on this brief, and any other previous publication briefs, producing a higher quality and more professional outcome. This has been touched on in this brief, and in some ways it is more professional in the typeface choices and the overall simpler aesthetic, however the overall finish could of been more aesthetically pleasing and contained more high quality details which were experimented with such as foiling. If time and budget would of allowed a more complete outcome would of been produced.
One of the failings in this brief was time management, as it was started late after the briefing due to finishing previous briefs, and therefore ran into the next brief, taking more time than was allotted and using another briefs time to finish it. This was due to poor time management earlier on in the module with previous briefs, which could of been avoided by being more concise in the blogging and making a point to finish a brief before the next one is briefed.
For the next brief and in future and currently running modules more experimentation should be undertaken into different finishes and techniques such as foiling, embossing, letterpress etc, to produce a range of resolutions, not just going straight into digital. Also, time management needs to be improved, to get on top of the workload, and not let briefs run on for too long, to get them finished to be able to move onto the next brief, without having to go back. The experimentation and development with the aesthetic and stock choices in this brief was completed to a standard that I am pleased with, and this should be maintained throughout the rest of the year.
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