Brief 3: Bargaining, Sadness & Acceptance

Brief 3: Anger Page Development

Brief 3: Landing/About Page Development

Brief 3: Editing the Photos

These are the photos from my recent shoot. Overall I was pleased with the images I managed to take, although some of them needed brightening/colour adjusting.  

Anger

Bargaining

Sadness

Acceptance

Brief 8: Finished Cover Mock Up

Brief 8: Book Cover Development

I am finally getting round to getting my book covers printed, and having left my cover slightly unfinished, I decided to go back to it to prepare it properly for printing. However, when I went back to it, I realised that there was something off about the cover and I decided to develop it. I asked for other people's opinions on what they felt could improved, as well as taken into account my own opinions on what could be made better.

I liked the typeface I was using, and the image of Alfred Hitchcock digging the grave, but the way everything was laid out, as well as the blue coloured background were bothering me. Other people agreed, and looking again at the type I realised that it looked a lot like the type used in news publications, and so I began to work with the idea of creating a tabloid style front cover. This relates to the book as not only does Hilary write for a newspaper (a naff one, just like The Sun or The Daily Mail) but the entire story is something that if it really happened would be pored over in the newspapers.

Covers as they looked before

Inspiration

Covers created in a similar style to an older tabloid. 

I also experimented with creating an homage to Private Eye, as the story is exactly the kind of thing which would be satirised in their publication, plus they have a distinctive style which would appeal to the audience the book is aimed at. 

Inspiration

Covers

I was told by people I asked to give me feedback that I should get rid of the outside border, and so I removed it and then began to develop the back of the cover, another element of my original design which was bothering me because it kind of felt like an afterthought. 

With the back cover, I created a layout that felt like a piece of editorial in the Private Eye, which adds additional visual interest as well as relating to the story. 

Final cover

Brief 10: Staff Led Crit

Today we had a crit, following on from the student crits last week. I attended with Jenna, Mike, Suzanne, Lisa and Hannah with Brian leading the crit. Hannah and I decided to take our collaborative Pen Pals brief, 'The Write Way' to gain feedback. This is a project that incorporates interests we both want to showcase within our portfolio so we felt it would be a valuable talking point. It was really useful and as we are at the mid point of our project we can effectively take on board all feedback and improve our final designs before taking it to print. Some suggestions from Brian was to consider extra elements within the stationery set such as lined paper. There was also a suggestion to expand the campaign so that it included the use of different languages, this would help broaden the range of the campaign and help support the benefits we had gathered of a pen pal, the learning of different cultures. We had already included some join the dot type postcards with simple phrases but wasn't something we had considered taking further. Another suggestion, we are seriously considering taking on board is the possibility of teaching traditional letter writing skills within the writing set, using lined paper and set layouts to teach where the address goes etc. One last idea suggested was perhaps the addition of primary colours to our colour scheme and look at a more traditional writing style. Although this was interesting to take into consideration we both feel happy with the colour scheme we selected.

Brief 3: Website Photography Inspiration

Ro and Co
This style of photography is exactly what I want to achieve with the images I will be using on the Heartbroken Records website, as well as in my promotional material. I intend to use colourful, pastel backdrops similar to the images below, but the photography will be less structured and formal.