Final Year Research Document by Dean Scicluna

Dean Scicluna U1154130 Graphic Design Research and Development 07811679667

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Editors Note This interview with Richard Sherman really hits me hard, it means a lot to me personally as someone who has passionatly played a sport throughout university and has struggled with balancing the sport aspect with the studies, but often people donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t realise how important sport is to the people that play it. I started to

realise there isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a lot to help those who play at university and want help to concerntrate on their studies as well as assisting them at becoming a better athlete at their sport. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how this project developed so well. This is my research document to show how my research changed this project and how it developed.

Contents Initial Ideas

Magazine Research

Skill Development

Idea Development

Skill Research

App Research

Brand Development

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Initially i needed a project idea, so before anything began, i just did a simple spider diagram to just spitball some ideas about what i wanted to do a project on, i truely believe that to create a great product, you must be passionate about what youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re designing, and this was my thought process when trying to think of an idea. I wanted something that i would really take hold of and enjoy making. My passions lie within Sports/ Fitness and health. but initially this felt too obvious and it had all been done a million times, i wanted to look at some other ideas as well to see if there was anything that i could really get my teeth into that i thought i could really develop a strong idea with and create an attractive well thought out final major project with. I also quickly looked at what sort of output i would want with this project, i wanted to test myself as well as encorporate things that i know i could create a quality product with. 4

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

I have decided that i want to do a student athlete magazine, student athletes are people who participate in a sport while at university and i feel that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a nichĂŠ market that often gets over looked, even though the people that play these sports often invest a lot of time and money into it as they are so passionate about it. I created another spider diagrams to look at the kind of things i would look at if i was to create 6

a student athletes magazine, this includes looking at what kind of things i would want in the magazine. This included looking at what sort of articles i would want, looking at what sort of advertising would be in this sort of magazine and what sort of content i would like to see in this and what would be the most informative in assisting these student athletes with their day to day life.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Womens Health Magazine Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve gone out and bought a few workout magazines, as well as some other couple magazines that are aimed at people around the same target audience that i would want my magazine to have, so i can tell what sort of articles that these magazines have, and how theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re laid out, this would give me good secondary research to get an idea of how a proper magazine is put together and the general feel of it. Again just using a spider diagram, i started mapping out how 12

these magazines looked and what sorts of catagories their articles fit into. To my surprise, i initally thought that the female magazine would be full of nutrition advice and not much actual work out plans, infact it was pretty well spread out. Also i was surprised in the type of some of the articles, almost like it was a gossip magazine or Cosmopoloton. Also the main spread about the cover model was more about her life than actually the workout that she does or how she stays fit.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Mens Health Magazine I found that Men Health magazine was pretty much exactly how i expected it to be, lots of articles, lots of hard core workouts with flashes of lifestyle articles, this particular issue focused a bit of celebrities a bit more than usual, but the other ones i bought were mainly fitness and nutrition workouts. Surprisingly though there were quite a few fashion articles, i suppose being aimed at the slightly more mature male audience than what i would be looking 14

at, this is to be expected. The thing that took me back the most about both magazines was the ridiculous amount of advertising in both magazines, as you open them, there are pages of adverts, before you even get to any content of the magazine, i would find this vastly annoying as a reader personally and is something i would want to make sure is kept to a minimum.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Comparison of The Magazines I wanted to compare the Mens Fitness to the Womens Fitness to see how they seemed next to each other, straight away you notice theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re both very similar in design, often fitness magazines seem to follow the same trend and maybe this is something that could be changed and looked into, maybe creating a new style of magazine. Surprisingly when comparing these, a lot of the stats you would initially think, wernâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually true. Such as that the mens issue had 16

more fashion articles than the womens issue. The mens issue quite clearly had a more aggressive style to it, which is obviously to be expected. Colours schemes seem to be changed on a monthly basis, there seems to be no consistency with it, this opens them up to use colours that are trending at the time, for example the female issue using pastel colours on their cover and through out the issue.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Potential Articles Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve started to think about some articles i could add to this potential magazine, what i feel would interest me and other people around the target audience iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m looking at. This would include something like a cover model that had an exclusive workout inside, everything kept sport specific which would best assist these student athletes better themselves in their sports. I want some articles about how teams are ran, the running of a team takes just as much 18

time, if not more, than any other aspect of being on a sports team, and committees dedicated significantly more time than most to making sure this goes smoothly, so artcles to help them would help my projects intent. Focus on nutrition and helping students not only eat on a budget, but eat healthy to match how they want their body to grow depending on the sport will be positive, I want to keep advertising to a minimum in my magazine.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Photoshoot With Josh Culling

Aberystwyth Student Athlete

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Conversations With MASS After doing my own photoshoot, i decided itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definatly something i need to look more in depth to if iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m to carry on with this project, it turned out to be a lot harder than i thought, and getting the lighting right was probably the hardest of parts, so i decided to get in contact with a few companies and heard nothing back, i remembered there was a student body building company called MASS that have a lot of media content, so i sent them over a message 22

and hoped for a reply, luckily i got a reply from the owner of the company David Bissel, after a few back and forth messages and emails, he said he is more than happy to help me out with the project and invited me down to London at the end of November to sit in on a photoshoot, this meant i could go watch in person how a professional photographer sets up a studio, and how a photoshoot unfolds.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Joshua Couchman While working in the studio and writing up my brief, i looked at last year students work “Joshua Couchman” who created a great Zine called “Catalogue” a user added content magazine about cats. It’s great tongue and cheek humour, its layed out and feels very well put together, i decided to get in contact with Josh to speak to him about his project to see if he could give me some guidance towards where to go as it had been suggested to me that doing 24

an entire magazine might be too much work to take on, so i wanted to get to know how he got on with it. After a discussion he told me he designed the entire Zine in InDesign, he told me to go visit a store in Leeds called ‘Colours May Vary’ and that it’s a great store if i want some good influence when designing my magazine, so i kept looking through Joshs Zine and planned out my trip across to Leeds.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Colours May Vary After travelling to Leeds i went and found the Colours May Vary store and had a look round, initally, at first sight it was a very small store and i was wondering what the big deal was about, i found that a lot of the items in the shop were quite unique magazines and other books that you would usually over look somewhere else. As soon as i walked in, a book caught my eye simpily called “logo” for a while i have wanted to look more into logo design and it is a skill 26

i have wanted to develop, i immediately picked it up and had a flick through, it just had tonnes of logo designs with them explained, i thought this was perfect and bought it, after having a more in depth look round, i found a premium music magazine called ‘Bonafide’ I loved this style of magazine and definetly wanted to use it as influence on my magazine in one way or another, fitness magazines are usually these mass produced products that don’t take as much care as this.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Bonafide vs. Mens Health Now i had bought the Bonafide magazine, i didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to just go through it and analyse it as a magazine, i wanted to see how it compared to the fitness magazines and what is similar and different about these two, side by side. Right off the bat you can tell that Bonafide is more premium, more minimalistic look, thicker paper and cover, it even smelt more premium which is weird to say, but i can still smell the paper every time i open it. The card has a soft touch to it 28

where as the fitness magazines have a glossy cover. Flicking through them both, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re both well designed but with quite obvious different design styles. Bonafide has quite a consistant colour theme, Mens and Womens Health tend to have more of a colour scheme, but leave it quite a lot. There is significantly more advertising in the fitness magazines as well, this is maybe to cover the cost of it being so cheap in comparison to premium magazines such as Bonafide.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Talking with Brent and Matty I had a very interesting meeting with Brent today, the outcome is that i should really take more of a step back from doing a magazine, as suggested before, he thinks that content would lack too much if i do so much, so maybe i should look towards alternatives forms of media to still do the same project idea that i had. Initially i was kind of taken back and didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to change my project as i had already done so much towards doing a magazine, but i thought i 30

would try and have a broader view and change my outlook slightly to see what happens. I also spoke to ex student Matty Bornshin who said i should look at some things such as brochures, web design, banners, TV animation etc. This got me thinking a little about maybe looking at an online magazine, or website that articles can be displayed on. a little like BodyBuilding. com does. It ends up being a lifestyle using the website.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Jake Greenwood This ended up being quite a similar talk i had with Matty, but Brent started a conversation up between myself and Jake Greenwood, I basically ended up explaining to Jake what my project is and why Brent has started this conversation, that he thinks i should potentially take a step back from a magazine and look at alternatives, Jake agreed with Brent straight away and said i should look at trying to create a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;systemâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for conveying information and then produce 32

what i want using this system, what ever i decide it to be, he said he thinks this would be far more exciting than just designing a magazine, i kind of understood where he was coming from and it was just another person advising against doing a magazine, so i had really taken a step back from this and started looking at alternate graphic devices to show what i want.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

One of the ideas that have been put forward to me to look at instead of creating a whole magazine, is to instead look at maybe doing a series of advertorials, these are adverts placed in a magazine, often made to look like an article to fool the reader, but will have in small print saying it is an advert as a disclaimer. I had a look at these and really felt like a didn’t like these, i felt that for what i want to do, they wouldn’t have as much of an impact that i’d like them to, it’s not just an advert i want to create, i want to actual develop something that becomes part of student athletes lives, that can really impact them postively. 34

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

My App Ideas

So iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had a look at a few alternatives and have decided to go along with developing an app, i feel it will best engage with my target audience a lot of the younger generation that are at university who spend a lot of time on smart phones and devices. I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be developing the coding of the app, but just the design of it and layout to make it appeal to student athletes. I created a list of some other apps to look at, this is a mixture of fitness apps and organisation apps as well so i can draw in what i like about these and note what the market is lacking so i can exploit it in the best possible way. I also created a list of things iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d want my app to encorporate; such as the ability to sync your unis timetable with your calendar, which is nothing new, but also having the ability for committee and coaches to add to your calendar which would make keeping up with team events a lot easier than having to individually add them in yourself. 36

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

MASS Research After being invited down to the MASS photoshoot, i decided to look into the company a bit more and find out what they were about, i came across a leaflet down by the gym and turns out, not only are they a student body building company, they’re also a society in lots of universities, they help in assisting students start the group at university for people who are advocates of fitness. Funnily enough, when looking at them, i came across their website in which they have created three issues of an online student fitness magazines, after lookinga them, they have some of the same intentions that i wanted 38

and so im glad i have changed my project to designing an app, because, it now means i am in contact with someone who has tried it and it didn’t “fail” as such but didn’t quite work out, so i can speak to Dave about what went wrong and how i can potentially learn from it to tweak certain stuff to make sure that my app would be successful. After flicking through the online magazines, they have similar ideas of types of articles i would have in my app so i can see how a quality article about the type of things i want to write about, is actually written up by a professional editor.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Attending A Professional Shoot I drove down to London to go down to a MASS photoshoot with Dave Bissell (MASS owner) Matt Marsh (Photographer) and Hattie (Model) after talking to Dave for a bit explaining my project in a bit more deal, he was interested and suggested that MASS are making more of an online presence and are considering the posability of an app and so maybe it was something to consider, making a ‘MASS’ app, I liked this idea but it also seemed like he 42

wanted a bit of creative control and so i’m not entirely sure. I spoke to Matt about how little i knew about photography and he reassured me, everything he learnt was off Youtube and is self taught, he made me feel great about being around and i just stood around and watched it all unfold, i learnt so much just by watching the photoshoot, including what lighting needs to go where in order to give muscles the best shape to them possible and make for the best photo.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

The App

I started to think a bit more indepth about the app and how i wanted i wanted people to react it, this was all still initial early thoughts, the main thing i realised is that i want it to be an extension of their life, much like people use widgets or cetain apps on a daily basis to check up updates, I want people to not have to worry too much about going out their way to use the app, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all about ease of use, other people will be updating their calendar so they dont have to be concerned about doing that, i want the articles to be communicated in a similar way where they wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to worry about actually opening the app and having to scroll through the feed to find articles, they can just have it given to them on a plate, my target audience are ones that have a short attention span, so being able to give them everything they need without them having to go out their way is ideal, this can be done in the form of a widget, especially with the articles. 44

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Free vs. Paid Apps Tutorial With Brent I had a meeting with Brent today that has given me a more sense of direction, it has made me realise where i need to be going with this project, and what i need to focus on, iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve decided to create some mood boards of some things that i would like to influence my work, these will be app designs i like, my target audience and the feel of sports teams i want to appeal to. I also need to create a basic wireframe to my app, it has to give a basic idea of where the app will be 46

going, these basic sketches will help anybody understand what direction i am going with it and should be able to grab the concept of my idea. After looking at free vs. paid apps, i feel like iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d still rather mine was free, students are more likely to download it like this, the income will come from the university paying for their teams to have a subscription to use the full service, this will give me the ability to limit advertising on my app which can deter some people.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Designing My Questionnaire To ensure i am heading the right direction with my project i wanted to bring in some primary research and find out that students are actually spending a lot of time on their sports and fitness as well as their education, i want my questionnaire to be short and quick multiple questions as i’m more likely to get a higher volume of answers by doing this. I didn’t care about too much personal details about the people filling out the form, i just wanted to know their age 48

to ensure the people answering are around the target audience i’m looking for. It will be a survey for student athletes, so knowing if they play a sport isn’t needed. I basically want to know how often this demographic are using apps, and how much time they are dedicating to sport and how much is being dedicated to their education, this can help me analyse if there is a direct corrolation between the two and it trends in a certain way, or is completely random.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Results from the Questionnaire

The results from my questionnaire were very helpful, there was only 5 multiple choice questions, meaning that i got a strong response from 54 student athletes from across the country. The main figure i wanted to focus on and look at was comparing how much time people spend on their education, and how much is spent on sports/ fitness. As you can tell there appears to be a trend of people spending between 5-15 hours on sports and fitness, this is at the lower portion, but is still a lot of time to be spending at university, per week, on what a lot would consider just a hobby. there seems to be more of an even split on the education half of the qustion with it favouring between 10-20 hours more, but significantly more people saying 25+ hours on it (8) 50

in comparison to Sports (1) there seemed to be a trend of people that spent more time on their sport spent less on their education and vice versa, which makes me feel that my app would help with this greatly. also taking a look at the other answers from my app, there essentailly everyone who answered was an undergraduate at the point they played their sport, so i know that i will be aiming at your typical 18-25 university student as a target audience. I also found that most people used apps a lot, with around 65% of people answering “how frequently do you use apps” with either “Frequently” “Few times a day” or “All day” this gives me a strong opinion that an app is defintely the strongest route to go to appeal towards my target audience, these student athletes.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Acorn Acorn is a great document that basically catagorises all target audiences into many more sections than the usual A,B,C etc. This allows you to identify exactly who youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re looking at selling your product to, and what sort of trends they follow and how they react to certain advertising or marketting strategies, this has helped me look at students and see what kind of products they use, for example, they are owners of smartphones, tablets and other hand held computers and often buy into new tech as well as, they have interest in leisure activities, this helps me develop my app to react best towards student athletes. 52

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Asana Two apps i wanted to look at for comparitive reasons are Asana and MyFitnessPal, both very sucessful and well designed apps, firstly Asana, bits of this app does actually cross over with what i want to do, but it’s main target audience is business people doing group projects, it helps 54

them with tracking what projects are happening and keep up to date with tasks that they have to do, in the same way i would want mine to run, managers can add in projects as i would want the committee and course leaders to be able to add in to each players app, but this lacks things a few things that

i feel would help massively appeal to Student Athletes, it does have a widget, but doesn’t have it’s own calendar in which you can just have the entire month of plans. Over all it is a very well designed app and is something i will draw in lots of influence from during my designing off my app.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

MyFitnessPal MyFitnessPal is also a very well designed, highly complex app that has had ridiculous amounts of sucess, it is the go to diet app for most people and has utilised a very saturated market very well by making the basic use of it very easy, it allows you to input exactly how much you want to consume and just by scanning the bar

code on your food, it will automatically input all of the macronutriant content for that into your daily planner. The problem i feel with MyFitnessPal is they have tried to over complicate it a bit too much by adding a bit too much to it and is something i want to be wary of, i want my app to have lots

of elements, so they must all tie in together, otherwise there will be parts of the app that just don’t get used or people don’t understand how to use, and people feel hostile to things they don’t understand which could greatly hinder the initial growth of the app while it’s just in it’s infancy stage, which i won’t allow.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Naming The Brand So with my target audience fully established, i started going through ideas for the name of the brand, this wasn’t only for the app alone, this is an entire brand, so i wanted something that represented it as a whole, and really gave off a powerful motivational message, as well as being short and simple, it can’t be too much of a mouthful. It must reflects the companies ethics and so i started writing a list of names that i thought would potentially fit, my initial favourite was 56

“Grind” it represented the struggle that student athletes have to go through, but then thought it’s too close to one of the biggest apps on the market “grindr” so i changed it over to “Rise” as it represented everything a student and athlete wants to do. With this done i started designing quick logo sketches and ideas, again i wanted something very simple that represented rising up and how student athletes are forever wanting to become something better.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Logo Sketches With the brand name of ‘rise’ i decided to start designing a logo which really represented the app, as you can see on the previous page i played around with it a little first and i initially wanted something that quite clearly represented being a student and an athlete, but most of all i wanted it to be simple, when this was becoming hard to do, i just started writing out ‘rise’ in different ways, i started to realise a nice way to have it written in which it had quite 58

a sharp attractive look to it, i liked it and moved it over to illustrator to design, after playing around with it a bit, it got to a stage i really liked it, i changed the ‘S’ to a ‘Z’ and flipped the ‘E’ so it has the same shape as the rising sun flag, this tags in with the name and really represents how these student athletes rise and shine early to better themselves every day. I really like how i came to develop this logo and how it finally became a finished product i liked.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

Colour Study I didn’t have an idea what colour i wanted to have the logo at all, i just wanted it to go well and be consistent through out the app where it needs to be, and look good when the user customises it using their teams colours. i started by looking into some colour study with logos, and what certain colours represent, I knew i didn’t want green that represents fitness, i don’t want my app to be recognised as just another fitness app, i want it to be something different and 60

to be able to recognise that easily. I started playing around with lots of colours and am still currently playing around, at the moment i have decided i want a gold colour at least, this represents rising up and becoming the best to get that gold medal in your sport and in your education, i’m either using a Navy colour to represent the sunrise or a maroon which to me really shows academia, this really ties together both parts of being a student as well as being an athlete.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

With the basic design drawn up, i took to Illustrator to start playing around with the logo until i came across something i really liked and was a good showing of what the app represents.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document

From there, using the colour study i did earlier i played with some colours, i decided on a gold to represent coming first and maroon as it went well and it gave this sense of scholar.

Dean Scicluna - U1154130 - Graphic Design - Student Athlete Research Document