Overview/Evaluation

     Overall I would say this project went fairly well, the group that I was put in was very organised and there was no problem with group members getting their work done on time, whenever there was a task given to a group member they would always produce that work for the next meeting. The designs that I made during this project were in my opinion simple, strong and each one puts across the message that I wanted them to, the way I got to my subject of student tuition fees was when I just started looking at matters that effected students and this was the one that I wanted to do the most.

     The problems that we encountered in this project I wouldn’t say really came from group members, rather it came from things like the printing paper that we wanted to use, we wanted our magazine to look like it was made with the cheapest method available so we wanted to use some recycled paper hoping that it would look like a newspaper or something like that, it didn’t work  out that way though, when we looked at recycled paper it wasn’t how we wanted it to be, it was only when we went to print that we found a paper that was exactly what we were looking for, which was layout 50gsm. The whole process of getting the paper was a struggle, we got the recycled paper but it was very white and does not really look any different to standard paper. There was no other way for us to give the impression of cheaply made as this is what we want to portray.
 the options that we considered were; the tracing paper was too thick and was actually quite good quality so it wasn’t really doing what we wanted it to do, as we wanted it to look cheap.
News print, which was unable to print because it needed lithograph printers that we didn’t have access to and would have taken too long to do.
Greaseproof style paper, this didn’t work as the ink showed through too much.
Recycled paper, also didn’t work because it is high quality now due to today's technology and does not give the required effect of being cheap.

So we went in the paper shop as discussed to see if there was any other option to the 4 paper options that had failed us.... we left with 3 that could possibly work.
Layout Paper which was the preferred option, we needed to test this to see if it will run through the printer as it is only 50gsm.
Sugar Paper, this doesn't really give required effect of being cheap but would possibly be better than standard paper.

     If I was to do this project again there isn’t much that I would change, for example the biggest thing that I would change is the typeface, I would have explored a lot more fonts and seen what would work the best with what I was trying to do. The communication in the group was really good, we all looked at each others work and said what changes needed to be made if any at all, to help blend everything in when the magazine was brought together, so there I would have looked a lot more into what everyone else was doing while I was still in the initial idea stages, as I looked at theirs when I was in the development stages and had to scrap a few ideas.

Front Cover design

The front cover design was an open issue for our group, so I said that I would design one and Rohan would design one aswell, we both did and we decided to go with Rohans design when we brought ours together, the designs below are just the early ideas for a front cover that we looked at, the final one went through many development stages after group meetings and everyone putting in their input.

My ideas (above)

Rohan's idea (above)


As I've said after going with Rohan's idea here it went through many development stages, also the name of the magazine changed to "Our Welfare", just sounded better.

All the work I've done in this project was done in Adobe Photoshop for the photo manipulation, and Adobe Illustrator and Indesign, for the text and composition.

Final Developments with Impact

Final Development 1 (above)

Final Development 2 (above)

Final Development 3 (above)

Final development 1 here hasn’t had that many changes made to it during this final development stage, the only changes are the font from Century Gothic to Impact and the positioning of the text to make it all more structured. Looking at it I believe that this is the strongest that I’ve seen this piece and I am happy with its development.

Final development 2, the only change made here is the font, from Century Gothic to Impact. This change makes this piece a lot stronger, it almost demands authority with the font impact and the different sizes of text, also the word “more” that is blown up the most, as well and being used with the rest of the text is also as I said earlier demanding authority and the attention of the viewer, all in all I am pleased with the development of this piece.

Final development 3 has gone through the most changes out of all three ideas here, besides changing the font from Century Gothic to Impact, I’ve also changed the background contrast between the black and white, reading through the text that I’ve placed on the piece I had the idea to divide the page into ten and make six parts black and four parts white, to visually show what the text is saying about six out of ten wouldn’t have gone to university if the prices were as high as they are planning to be soon. Here in this final development I’ve made the white side six pieces of the page and the black side four, this I might just flip around and see which way it is stronger, but besides that these are pretty much my 3 A5 double page spreads.

Further Developments with Century Gothic

Development 1 (above)

Development 2 (above)

Development 3 (above)

Development 1 here has drastically improved in my opinion, using the black and white to create tension subliminally after the viewer sees the question is what I intended to achieve with this piece, the only thing that I would possibly change is the positioning of the question “UNIVERSITY, you going?”, just to make it more typographically appealing.

Development 2 has also been altered, the image on the left has been blown up, and this in my opinion has produced the images full potential in this design, the text on the right has also been blown up in certain areas to almost exaggerate how the tuition prices are rising.

Development 3 here is like development 1, in terms of using the black and the white to play off each other, taking away most of the imagery I’ve decided just to leave the student finance logo, because having it next to the text and statistics I’ve placed in this design is something that they would never put their logo next to normally, so its there for a comical value, possibly shock value.

Also the font used in all three designs here is Century Gothic, this was decided by the group, we are all using it to unify our designs for when they’re put into one magazine. The reason this typeface was chosen is because it’s not an aggressive font, it’s friendly and attractive.

Further Developments

Idea 1 (above)

Idea 2 (above)

Idea 3(above)

These are my further developments after meeting with my group and analyzing my work I’ve developed these. After scrapping one idea from my previous experiments these are what I produced instead, idea 1, for this I have made two developments playing with composition and the use of contrast between the black and the white. After making them though, I’ve decided to try a different, more structured layout, also I’ve decided to use only the pound coin image since it will work more smoothly it will be more attractive to the target audience.

For idea 2, which is pretty much the same as experiment 2 idea 3, I’ve just looked at the image on the left again and tried to strengthen it to its full potential, just to see which would be stronger, I took away the background inside the image to possibly make the information on the image stand out more. After making these and looking at both of them I had the idea to zoom in on the image to strengthen it and make the information the main thing on the image because as it stands I would say that the star is the first thing that you notice when looking at this image.

The third idea has been developed yet again, playing with the contrast of black and white which goes along with the text in the piece, also I’ve added the words tuition fees along the side starting thin and getting fatter, to symbolise the increase in tuition fees visually. Doing this along with adding the images has made it too busy and just unattractive to look at, in my opinion all that’s needed to make this piece work is the text, layed out typographically structured and a little image maybe so that the piece isn’t just text.

Early Drafts

Here are a few early drafts that i've mocked up, just experimenting with the play on imagery and typography mostly, composition aswell.

          Experiment 1

                                          Idea 1 (above)
The first idea above labeled idea 1 was just experimenting with composition to see what kind of affect I could get from it after a while I decided that it was kind of boring and would be something that the target audience (students) would just flip past, so I scraped that.

                                          Idea 2 (above)
This idea above (idea 2) was made with me thinking "how can I spice this idea up after idea 1?" so what I did was play with the composition a little more splitting the text onto both pages to make the viewer look at the whole thing, then i placed the image of the piggy bank in the middle of the double page spreads, the reason for this is because I wanted it to symbolize the splitting of money these days for students, its basically saying that for students money is folded in half as easily as a couple of pages in a magazine.

                                          Idea 3 (above)
This experiment above (idea 3) is kind of simular to idea 2, in the sense that I tried to use the image of the piggy bank to give the impression that students money dissapears easily, specifically here i've given the impression that money is stretched, this is done with the stretching of the piggy bank.

These experiments above were just me exploring the idea of an image covering the entire A5 double page spread, along with some information and statistics that i've gathered. Also the manipulation of images to help portray something, these experiments in my opinion are too complicated with the image covering the whole  background, looking at them now I don't think that I will develop this idea further.


           Experiment 2

                                         Idea 1 (above)
This experiment above (idea 1), was made with the intention of making the text and the image slanted to add an attractiveness to the piece while also at the same time making certain things stand out more than others, for example, using the full stops leading off the image and even getting bigger draws the viewer into the part of the image that the full stops are coming from which is the price of student tuition fees in 2010, other techniques like making some words bigger than others is also used for the same intention.

                                          Idea 2 (above)
Idea 2 (above) is the same as idea 1, nothing is added although the compsition has been manipulated, i've moved the image to the right page and the text to the left just to see if it makes the whole thing stronger since people tend to look at things like magazines from left to right. In my opinion the text being on the left makes the whole double page spread weaker, the reason for this is because when the image is the first thing seen it engages the viewer alot more than them seeing some text and then looking at an image, also the composition of the text on the left was altered a little since the image was moved, this doesn't work and is something that I will not be developing in the future.

                                          Idea 3 (above)
 In idea 3 (above) as you can see I have moved the image back to the left of the double page spread and moved the text into the same position and it was in idea 1, because this is where it works well in my opinion, the text itself is not the strongest it can be, but for now in this idea I wanted to focus on the image on the left, i've added a black background to the rest of the page, adding contrast between the two pages, I would say that this enhances the piece.

Experiment 2 is something that I think has potential so I have decided to develop this idea further and see what I can come up with.

          Experiment 3

                                          Idea 1
For experiment 3 I only made one idea, idea 1 (above) the reason there is only one idea is because after making it and stepping back looking at it as the target audience would, I think that it is too busy, using an image to cover both double page spreads is something that doesn't work with what I want to do I think, so I decided to scrap this idea altogether.

Ideas

The next thing I decided to do was gather some images to help me inform what I wanted to inform students about which is the rise in tuition fees and help them make the decision on weither university is worth it or not these days.

Here are a few of the images that I gathered,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5124610/One-in-20-1-coins-is-fake-claims-expert.html

http://www.bucksstudent.com/news/index.php?page=article&news_id=172743

http://heystudents.com/govt-is-dropping-tuition-fees-for-students-who-stay-at-home/

http://thesmarterwallet.com/2009/student-loan-programs-pay-for-college-tuition-costs/










http://syracusefinanceclass.blogspot.com/2009/11/college-loans-could-contribute-to.html

http://grcc-ip.blogspot.com/2010/08/fall-2010-e-newsletter-issue-1.html

http://bullythebear.blogspot.com/2010/08/tuition-nation-no-more.html

http://armenianamerica.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/uc-regents-increase-university-%E2%80%9Cfees%E2%80%9D-by-32-california-students-fight-back/

Obviously the images will be in black and white when I experiment with them, like the brief states. The reason why i've chosen these images is because I believe that they are all strong images, some I would even say shocking like the one directly above. After looking at Medium is the Massage I realised that what I wanted to do with this project is get very strong imagery next to as little text as possible because when you are trying to inform, I would say that this technique works well becuase it engages the viewer and makes them want to know more so that they research the topic themselves.