Initial Design - Speaking From Experience

Initial Design

Size, Format and Layout
I initially looked at using a B size for my booklet, but the idea of the booklet was that it was pocket size, so you can take it with you when doing the food shop, and the B sizes didn't really lend themselves to the sizes of the back pockets, so I made a custom size of 75mm by 120mm as that keeps the booklet small enough to fit in a pocket, large enough to have space for information, and being the golden ratio. I decided I'd produce it as a hot dog fold booklet, due to the link with food. This means that I'd have to do an 8 page booklet, which seems appropriate, a front cover, a back cover, then either 3 spreads or 6 individual leaves. I stuck to the golden ratio when creating a grid, and used the heights of the Fibonacci squares to create by guides as shown below. I slightly altered the grid I set up for myself because the 5 stars didn't look very good squeezed into the bottom section of the grid, so to get round this I just combined the bottom two rows of the grid, and I don't really think the design suffers at all for this. 

  

Fonts and Text
Due to my booklet being small, it was important that the text used was both very legible and very readable, so I picked Helvetica as the typeface I would use as it's very simple. I built the hierarchy by starting with the title, which is 32pt, as that is the biggest common size that didn't make the title "Sausages" go right across the page. I didn't want that to happen because then that would be the only page where there wouldn't be an extra bit of whitespace extra to the margin to the right of the title. I then experimented with body copy, and found that 7 lines of text was generally enough to talk about the food, and so fitting that and a sub-heading in the middle section of the layout meant than 8pt body text with 12pt sub-heading text fitted perfectly. It seemed appropriate to use the same size type for the text at the top of the page so as to not over-complicate the hierarchy, I did however want to exaggerate the word "Real", as that is the point of this booklet. I did this by making it bold to emphasise it, made it italic to suggest irony, and backed the irony up by using the colour drop tool to make it the same colour as the green as Waitrose use, the result of this gave me exactly what I was looking for.

Feedback
I sent the people in my interim crit a message asking them for feedback on what I'd produced in terms of how suitable it was for the outlines I'd proposed during the crit, the feedback was this:

• I read it and was like "the good, the bad and the ugly."
• I think you need a different type face something that communicates your theme better. I do really like the layout though.
• It's a good idea but the layouts just a bit boring. I think the logo thing at the top is sound though.
• Maybe you could have illustrations to go along with the type and just use small images of the actual products.
• Maybe two different type faces, one for the good side one for the bad side?

My response to this was that the first bid of feedback was something I needed to do something about, as it's a completely irrelevant connotation. The second bit of feedback seems a bit vague to me, I'm not sure if the person who said it just said it trying to be helpful, or had genuinely thought it through, because I've no idea what it means, and it hasn't really pointed me in any direction, so I chose to ignore this. The third bit of feedback is difficult to know what to take from, as I appreciate that the layout is a bit boring, but it needs to be to aid readability on such a small scale, and when I asked for feedback I didn't explain that it was going to printed out small, and so it's difficult to know if this is really an issue. It was pleasing to hear that I got the exaggeration of "Real" right though. This sort of carries into the 4th bit of feedback, as it's clear from the way it was worded that they didn't know it was to be printed out small. I also disagree with the use of illustrations, as photographs would be the most useful thing to help people identify things, hence why they're used in catalogues. The final piece of advice was a very interesting idea, and wasn't something that I'd thought about, and is definitely something I'll look at.