OUGD504 - SB1 - A-Z: Type In Context - Study Task 01 - Presentation

This Summer, I travelled all over the Seattle area of America with my Dad and his best mate from school. The city is extremely vibrant and busy, with a huge diversity of typography styles everywhere you look. Across the water is Bainbridge Island, which is where we stayed. It's much more rural and contrasting to the city centre, which allowed me to take an interesting range of photographs that showcase typography, culture and environments. 

Alongside staying in Seattle we also stayed on Mount Rainier, which has the most incredible views. By taking photographs of all these areas I was hoping to respond to this task by generating a diary about the trip - including places visited and an in-depth analysis of the type seen along the way. Below are the best 26 photographs taken of A-Z letters.

To try and make all the photographs look more consistent as a set, I applied the same filter to each image in Lightroom. This ensures that the publication will have a clear, defined visual style throughout, in respect to the photographs. A light layer of noise was also added to all the images - whilst digitally generated noise can give the effect of of analog photographs produced on film, it can also make slightly pixellated images look better in quality. Applying the same amount of noise over every image causes the set to also look consistent in terms of the quality of image.

To follow on from last year's self branding project I used the same logo and chosen typeface to create a new presentation template in InDesign. To try and make the presentation as engaging and useful as possible I took close note to the following aims:

• Communicate an overview/selection of your images and annotations in a clear and engaging format.

• Consider the feedback I'd like to receive and how it could inform my approach to the presentation.

Rather than showing all the letters in alphabetical order, I ordered the presentation so that it would take the class through some ideas I had for the publication. The order that I settled on was:

1) Some information about where I went and stayed.

2) Some very clear examples of type seen on the journey that were effective and ineffective

3) A bit more about the environment surrounding Seattle, the culture and the trip itself.

To keep the presentation clear and straight to the point, I just used full-scale images and talked about them in person. This allowed me to adjust my presentation to feedback and explain things more directly. The presentation can be seen below.

Note: My logo slightly pixelated in the PDF upload - the actual presentation was high in quality.

Overall, the feedback was very positive and informative. I mainly wanted to find out what direction people thought I should take for the publication. Simon mentioned that target audience really needs to be considered, as the publication must be designed in a way that appeals to a certain set of people.

As there are a lot of avenues that could be taken for the content, I am going to research into some existing publications and consider the target audience and purpose of my publication. One aspect that I have wanted to go down is a travel diary of Seattle and the surrounding area, combining typography with culture, landscape and more. Research into existing examples of this may help to find a clearer direction.