Final Major Project: Year Book

Although a fair few decisions have been made about the yearbook considering what we want to say about us as a year group and our work it's been difficult to pin it down to an actual concept. The design decisions we have been making have all been for the same sort of reasons but at the same time it's difficult to try and justify certain decisions without having that 'theme' or 'concept' to back it up. Finally today, we arrived at a concept that we agreed suits what we are trying to say and so has helped tie together a lot of what we have been doing. Our concept developed from the idea of journeys and movement because we saw this yearbook as not the end of our 3 years but the beginning of everything else to come. We always seemed to take the view of, we wanted the work to speak for itself. We didn't want too much of the yearbook design to encroach on the actual work of everyone in the group and our aim was to keep it almost neutral with no particular style generalising the group. Our concept is now 'Exposed'and this has transferred across into the design decisions we have made and are yet to make.

To begin with I didn't really like the idea of having people in the photo with their work because I felt I was always distracted from the work itself and looked more at the people in the photo. We then thought about whether we should actually include a photo of the person on the page, or rather include it somewhere else in the publication, so that if people wanted to see the designer they could but is what the designer looks like as important as the work? By moving the profile shot to another part of the publication it gives us more space for bigger/more photos of the work.

I though it might be interesting to make more of a feature of the contents page and perhaps this could be where the photo's were used, rather than having just a list of names.

This was far too full on and too intense so we thought about removing some of the images to give the photos a bit more breathing room. Also I was looking at having the name underneath with the page number for their work, so here I was testing different type faces. I preferred the serifed typefaces but I think that now we've chosen a front cover, they don't suit the tone set from the beginning, they look too delicate perhaps.

Here I was looking at potential places for lists of names incase people didn't want to have to search for a particular person, or to give information about the rest of the content. It could also be used for a course introduction or contact details.

We'd originally been thinking about a blue/green accent colour to go with the black/grey/white but I think having this sort of block colour actually cheapens the design. I was also a bit worried that this green/blue has been used quite a bit and is perhaps dated.

Thought about a few different placements for this box, but I think it's most successful when it's on the edge of the page.

Sample double page, by removing photo's it means that the contents would need to spread across more than one double page spread, so it was suggested that we could use a gatefold so all the photos are kept together.

This shows the potential for using a gatefold with the actual fold being two thirds of a page. Carl is going to look at developing this a bit more now to fit in with the design direction we're using and how people actually interact with the publication, whether there is a way that all the photos can be revealed at once, or how a course introduction could be integrated into the design.