Studio Brief 3 - Page Layout - Crit

Yesterday was the crit for Studio Brief 4.

I showed the 2 layouts which I had produced in time, both in full colour and black and white, a sheet with some preliminary sketches of layouts, a research sheet, and 2 books where I'd found inspiration from.

The two layouts I showed were the ones below

The feedback was quite mixed, the main points were:

• It was clear that I had taken inspiration from the book, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing as some people thought the books designs weren't very nice.
• The body text was too big.
• It wasn't clear which text was meant to go with which image, and boxing off sections of the page is something I should consider. 
• Some people thought the serif font was more appropriate as the serifs reminded them of fish fins, whereas others thought that the sans serif was more appropriate as it's plainer which means it doesn't detract from the images as much, as well as being easier to read.
• I need to base my designs more around the images because of how pretty they are.
• The blue used on the second spread reminded them of Facebook.

My thoughts on this:

• Personally I think that one of the books is considerably nicer than the other, but my initial design didn't look anything like it anyway, although I couldn't work out why.
• The body text being too big is probably why the first one didn't look too similar to the books, and I need to sort this out.
• When designing I didn't consider that other people wouldn't know which picture went with which text, it's obvious to me as I've researched the subject, but I need to change the layout to be more reader-friendly to those who haven't researched or don't know the subject.
• I will experiment with both sort of fonts on both pages. My initial reasons for using the serif on the first design was that it was more delicate like the fish, and the sans-serif on the second page reflected the cold, hard nature of statistics. After I finish all 5 designs I will look back on this issue and make it all consistent.
• Whilst it might seem a bit obvious that the pictures are pretty, it might be something I initially over-looker, and so I aim to include more photos in future. 
• I will darken the blue, this makes sense.

What the pages look like now after some alterations taking my feedback into account.

I changed this spread quite a lot to take into account what the feedback said. Despite it looking a lot better now (in my opinion at least), I still feel there's something missing from it. Hopefully I'll discover what it is while designing the remainder of my spreads. I did experiment using sans-serif text but I found that the plain nature of it clashed with the decorative nature of the images, so I stuck with the serif text.

The only change I made to this spread was darkening the blue slightly, I felt at the time that it had helped but looking back on it I'm not so sure. Like we learned in this design principles session, colour can only be perceived relative to other colours, so I think it will be fairly difficult to find a shade of blue that reminds you of Facebook without having other colour on the spread, which is something I want to avoid, as I want to keep this spread quite formal due to how it's based around statistics and numbers.

After taking into account the feedback from the crit I designed a third spread, which I believe takes on board all the feedback given in the crit which I believe to be useful at this point. I'm really really pleased with this layout.

This layout it based around the fact that the Kissing Gouramis are not actually kissing, hence why the image is spread across the two pages, creating the impression that they are in fact apart. I've backed this up by having the fact related to Kissing Gouramis as the only fact on that page compared to the three on the opposite page, further backing up the concept of separation.