by Sixue Cui
Process Book
for the course DSGN 2010 Fall Semester, 2011
Design Studio 1:
Principles, Theories and Practices Prof. Michael B. LeBlanc Division of Design NSCAD University
by Sixue Cui
Process Book
for the course DSGN 2010 Fall Semester, 2011
Design Studio 1:
Principles, Theories and Practices Prof. Michael B. LeBlanc Division of Design NSCAD University
Table of Content Type Specimen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Design Permutations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Grid. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Word Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 Product Expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 8 Urgly Web Site Regrooving . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 “Day“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3
Type Specimen
DejaVu Sans Type Specimen A type specimen is a sample of a typeface, a kind of a catalog for fonts. In this project, we were asked to choose a font from the DejaVu family and make a Type Specimen page.
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Design Permutations The objective of this assignment was to gain insight into the almost infinite range of possibilities available within strict constraints, to try to place values on these artifacts, and to explore methods of combining these idea families to create new and unexpected designs. In this project, we needed to create different monograms by using our initials. My used “SXC“ as initials. We first created 45 thumbnails of the positional set, then chose 2 best designs to create a rotational set, a weight set, a scale set and a border set, 100 designs in total. The objective of this assignment is to help you to gain insight into the almost infinite range of possibilities available within strict constraints, to try to place values on these artifacts, and to explore methods of combining these idea families to create new and unexpected designs. Last, chose one design from each of the 4 variational sets and use them to “breed” 50 monograms. Then we chose top 10 as the final designs. The end result of this exercise is not a finished Monogram Design. It is an exploration of the complex and iterative nature of the design process.
Brain Storming
1.1Positional Set
Main idea: Consider the letter “X“ as the connecter of “S” and “C“.
Best 2 From Positional Set
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SX C
S CX
1.2-1.5: Rotational Set, Scale Set, Weight Set, Border Set
Final 50 1.1
Best 10 1.1
Border Set Redo
After finished the first version of best 10 designs, I found that these results were not satisfying. I thought that they did not show enough variation. I also found that the border set needed to be explored more. So I decided to redo the border set and pick four new “parents“ to “breed “ another 50 monograms.
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Final 50 Redo
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Best 10
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Grid
rid
G led
Fai
Cover Page
“Wallpaper” is a magazine that talks about design and fashion. The layout style of this magazine is quite clean. For every issue of the magazine, there is always a picture that occupies about 85% of the cover page. At first, I thought those texts on the picture are placed to avoid covering those girls’ faces. But actually the cover page layout fits a 7/8” x 7/8” grid system. 7/8” is also the x-hight of the magazine title letters. The reason why I didn’t see a clear grid on the first glance is because that some elements are moved to left or right a little bit. It seems like the designer took 1/8” as the basic unit when moving the elements. Every element on the cover page has a connection with the number “1/8”. For example, I found the stroke width of the magazine title letter is 1/8”. the gap between“new model army”and small text below is 1/8” too. The layout of the cover is designed to the detail. Every element follows the grid, and also considered the picture. The layout of the texts on the photo connects with the photo. These texts create a triangle area that highlight s the main content of the picture.
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Content Page
The content layout is simple and clean. The layout of this page has connection with the cover page. There is 7/8” of space from the top and the left side. The content page is divided to two parts. The top part is a picture occupies about half of the page and its left side lines up with The issue date “march” and text on the left corner. The bottom part is divided to three columns by the content texts and picture. The left and right columns are 2/3 of the center column. The small text on the top picture is half wide of the right column. The small text “wallpaper” at the lower left corner shares the baseline with the text which at the bottom of the cover page. “March” is 1/3 high of the letter “a”(from the magazine title) on the cover page. Overall, the layout gives the content page a great balance. Since this magazine doesn’t has many sections and articles, the table of content only consumes a quite small space. The use of the huge picture at the top of the page I guess is to fill up empty. Because this magazine is full of pictures, and there is no page has large blank space on it. All the content pages in this magazine follows the same grid.There some pages in this magazine that use the same layout as the content page. For example, the page on the right side of the content page.
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Spread Pages
The layout of the double page spread I chose is quite symmetrical. Each page has two equal columns, or we can say each page is divided to four parts evenly. It seems like that we can find more smaller columns on this page, but I don’t think is necessary. Because the four equal parts on each page are divided to many smaller parts in different ways. The left and right borders of the spread are 7/8”, the same as in the cover page and the content page. The columns lines up with the black bars which at the top and the bottom. The bars are both 1/4” wide. The black bar at the top lines up with the top of capital ”W” (from magazine title) on the cover page. The bar at the bottom shares the baseline with the small text “wallpaper” at the lower left corner on the content page. The two bars can be considered as one bar which starts from the upper left corner of the spread and ends to the lower right corner of the spread. I
think this design shows well to the readers that this is a spread not two separate pages. I have seen some magazines that apply this kind of grid system to the newsletter pages. I think this kind of layout fits the page that contains only short articles. Unlike the first spread, the other spread I chose from this magazine
only contains one article. This spread has a different layout, but we can still find something connected with the first spread. There is a huge picture that consumes the whole left page and extends to the right page. On the left page, the picture runs out into the top, bottom, and left border. The extended part of the picture
on the right page occupies half of a column that used for the first spread. Beside the picture, there is a two-column text. The gap between the picture and the text is 7/8”. As we can see the placement of the text doesn’t fit the columns from the first spread. But each text column is half width of the column from the first spread. The gutter between two columns is 1/4”. The heading has five lines. Part of the heading is placed across the article and overlapped with the picture. It applies the same style as the texts on left page. The last three lines align to the right, and their right sides line up with the right border.
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Hierarchy In this project, we needed to design a poster that promoting “Free Jazz Festival”. We could only use the given images and text. We were asked to create a hierarchy of information base on which information would be important to the audience or would attract them. First, I arranged the information from the most importance to the least importance by Changing the font size, weight and colour. Then I did research about “jazz” and “Africa” to see the features and stereotypes of them. I did 50 layout thumbnails based on research and some certain grid systems and selected six to make draft posters. The final poster was the improvement of the best one in the draft posters.
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Research and Sketch
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6 Poster Drafts
Experienment: I tried to use text to create the shape of the mask to make the poster more fun. But it was not that successful. The layout looks really loose and did not show a good hirarchy.
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Final Poster
Final Poster Main Idea: The final poster combines the features of two posters. I made the most important textx look like the sound wave to attract the reader’s attention. I changed the straight text lint to the curly line. It’s because I feel straight line is more rock, and curly line fit jazz style better.
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Word Play In this project, we were given an adjective and a noun. The adjective communicates a positive idea and the noun communicates a negative idea. We were asked to use typographic design to adapt the noun so that it communicates the idea of the adjective. The two words I got were “Gracious/Mafia”. This Project is an exercise in visual rhetoric and semiotics. I did lots of research about the word mafia and gracious. I listed some symbols and images that could convey the message of the words. About the main idea of the final work, “Maria” is the Italian spelling of “mary“. Italian mafia is famous around the world. I adjusted the letter “f“ to make the word “mafia“ looks like the word “maria“. In the first version of the final poster, I scaled the letter “f“ to fit the x-hight of the lowercase. But it looks smaller than other letters. So for the final version, I didn’t scale the size of “f“, but cut the bottom of it to make it have the same hight that “r“ should be.
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Research and Sketch
FINAL POSTER
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Product Expression Scooter Drawing
Scooter Design
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Emotion Expression
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Ugly Website Regrooving
Regrooving process When I looked at MHS’s home page, I found it had a bad layout. Because of the bad layout, the page had so much wide blank space which didn’t do anything and made the page really long.The page was divided to so many blocks with different sizes, and some blocks had too many texts which made users don’t want to read. Some information on the home page was not necessary. The menu bar had more than 20 links that were not organized by alphabet order. There were even several links overlapped information with others. All of these problems made the navigation of the page unclear. In order to make the website more user friendly, I redesigned a simple and clear homepage. I simplified the layout and made the page shorter by dividing the page to four parts. On the top part, I added the school name and made it obvious to see. Then I replaced the old gloom school picture with a bright one and placed it underneath the school name. After that, I started to reorganize the menu bar. I removed several links that overlapped information with others. Then the rest of links were grouped into 6 main links. I placed the menu bar at the top of the school picture and gave it a background colour which matched the school picture and also made it stand out. The bottom part is divided to 3 columns. I got rid of some unnecessary items such
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as the introduction text of Student Radio Show and the calendar. I grouped four website links with logos in to the left column. I simplified the text of “News board” and “Coming Event”, then placing them into another 2 columns. I kept “News Board” and “Coming Event” on the homepage and made the titles quite big is because most of students and parents look for this
information. Because of that mass texts make users hard to find key information they want, I shortened the text, and the full contents can be found on the subpages. The regrooving website has a clear layout and a better navigation structure. All the items are organized based on hierarchy.
Final Website Regrooving
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“Day“ This last project was an exercise in speculative design. We had to prepare a photographic scenario as a full-page spread that could illustrates the use of a product or service that we have developed, using the theme “Day”.
Process
I strated ti design a lamp is because I heard people are easier to have depression in the winter than in the summer because of that the night is longer in the winter. So I was thinking to design a lamp that could make the user keep a positive mood in the room. The lamp is charged by solar power during the day, then provide a sensation of daytime during the night. Turn on the lamp, you will see a window frame on the wall or on the floor. The lamp can simulate the effect like the sunshine comes through window. It creates an illusion that it’s a sunny day outside. Then I made the product looks like a flexible rubber sheet rather than a real lamp it use to be. The lamp is charged by solar power during the day, then provide a sensation of daytime during the night. Turn on the lamp, you will see a window frame on the wall or on the floor. The lamp can simulate the effect like the sunshine comes through window. It creates an illusion that it’s a sunny day outside.
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