OUGD404: Studio Brief 1 - How do you Read? (Initial Thoughts/Ideas & Inspiration)

Brief

Design and produce a small publication (booklet, leaflet, etc.) that collates material which, in turn, can communicate key design principles to a reader.

Initial Thoughts

After one of the taught sessions we had on Folds I stumbled across one that caught my eye in terms of uniqueness. It would fold as a regular 8 page book, but also doubled up as a poster. Along with that it is able to stand up on any flat surface to become almost like a stand alone informational piece.

Straight away I thought about creating an informational booklet that could double up as a poster with potentially a poster design on one side.

Given that the publication had to be about something we'd learnt during the design principle lectures, I decided to go with colour theory. I thought that having something bright and colourful would work well with this kind of fold as it can double up as a poster. A topic such as grids may not work as well on something such as this fold simply because it feels a bit more of a playful fold which is better suited to colour theory.

To fit with in with the whole colourful and playful style of how interpret the colour theory topic to be, I wanted the whole book to reflect that through the typography and shapes used.

I wanted an on going theme throughout the booklet and Jackson Pollock's work was something that triggered off my first idea to have paint splatters as the underlying theme running throughout the booklet. But regular paint splatters would have been too complex for the style for booklet I was aiming for and could have possibly taken the attention away from the content of the book and onto the colourful paint splatters. So ultimately I settled on creating minimal paint splatters to better suit the booklet, hence the designs below.

Initial Front Cover

I initially had the idea of having everything one or two colours so that the coloured shapes that would be representing the primary and secondary colours etc would contrast nicely. But soon realised that given it's a colour theory booklet it makes sense for it to be colourful throughout and instead keeping the contents itself to a minimum would allow for the key aspects of the book to stand out.

Revised Front Cover

First Page

As much as the colours do work well together, the whole style of these first two pages don't work as well as I'd hoped simply because of how the titles take away from the primary and secondary colours being displayed.