Laura Bennett Graphic Design
Penguin Book Cover Brief Before starting unit X we were given the opportunity to produce a book cover for one of two books. This was part of a competition in which we could send our covers to be judged by penguin books. I chose to make a book cover for the book ‘The Big Sleep’ as I though that it would best suit my style of work. This was a big challenge as I wanted to make a cover that related to the book but in a subtle way. After reading the book summary I was able to pick out key themes and
produce images that would relate to themes in the book. The image I chose was a pair of hands tied up to represent the character in the book being tied up. I felt that it related to the story enough but was not too obvious. The design was subtle enough to be understood by those that have already read the book and intriguing for those who haven’t. I found the brief to be quite challenging but I enjoyed experimenting with different design ideas and colours.
I did a lot of development work to get to the final cover and there are many options I could have gone with. There was a lot of research and development work involved as I had to read the book in order to get a feel of what it was about. I then had to carry out a lot of research, firstly of past book covers and then of images that I could base my designs on.
The book cover above is the one that I chose to send off as I felt that it best suited the book. I wanted a strong colour that allowed the white images and text to stand out. The colour also relates to blood which reflects on parts of the story line. Having done a book cover before I wanted to produce a cover that showed a different style and was
perhaps a bit more modern. I entered this cover in to the competition however unfortunately no designs from MMU were chosen. I am happy with the cover that I produced as I think that it fits the brief well. It also allowed me to produce something for a live brief and work within their deadlines.
Unit X - Collaboration The first project that we worked on for unit X involved collaborating with other students as a group of 3 which then went on to a bigger group of 6. The brief started off quite broad as we were given four themes to work on and no restrictions. As a group we decided that we would create a new viewpoint on food. We already had some ideas of what we might do and so together we sat as a group and talked about the next steps. There were many ways in which we could have looked at food however we decided that the strongest idea involved looking at ‘ugly vegetables’ and how over 1/3 of the worlds vegetables don’t even go to harvest due to their size and shape. We wanted to create a campaign to show just how much food is wasted just because it didn’t meet food guidelines. The purpose of this campaign would be to educate people as well as try and get them to buy ugly vegetables. In order to make it a strong, believable campaign we had to make sure that our concept had no faults and that we knew exactly what
we wanted to achieve. This in itself was a challenge as there were many ways we could have gone about it. The first thing we had to do was create a brand for ourselves and give ourselves an identity that would fit with our campaign and the message we wanted to put across. The idea was to promote the ugly vegetables as still being tasty and so we went with ‘tasty’ as our brand name. This became the main focus of our campaign. As a company we would buy the 30% of food that would otherwise be wasted and then sell it on to consumers at a reduced price. The audience that we wanted to target was important as it would reflect on the style and tone of our campaign. We wanted to target people in supermarkets and in order to catch their attention we chose to relate misshapen vegetables to the ideologies that people have about body shape. We made this link through the phrases that we chose to use. This then shaped our campaign and we felt that a hand drawn approach for the text
As a group we carried out a lot of research to make sure that we had all of the facts that we needed. We also looked at existing campaigns for inspiration. An initial brain storm allowed us to think of a variety of ideas before narrowing it down to our chosen concept.
would fit well. As a group we worked well as a team as we were able to delegate people for certain tasks. This enabled us to get a wider range of work done in the short time frame we were given. We wanted our campaign to cover various platforms and so initially we produced a series of posters to give off our main message. The images we used were taken in the studio and so were bright and strong. A short animation was also made to promote our campaign and it worked well as the opening of our presentation. Along side our posters we created bags that reflected on the shape and colour of vegetables with the idea that they would become distorted when filled. To further advertise our brand we created trolley tokens that would remind people to buy ugly vegetables whilst shopping. I feel that we produced a successful brand and as a team we worked well together to create a suitable amount of design work in the time given.
Unit X - Individual Project Part two of unit X allowed us to work on our own individual project. This made a nice contrast from the first part of the unit as we were able to make our own decisions without having to consult with the rest of the team. We were given three briefs to choose from and I decided that the brief set by MWM Creative was best suited to my style of work and so would be the most beneficial and enjoyable project. The brief was very broad and had few restrictions, however the one restriction it did have made the project very challenging. The task was to create a culinary recipe without using text or type apart from in the key. This meant that I had to produce a piece of design clear enough to be followed without the aid of text. The recipe that I chose to look at was Baked Alaska as the recipe itself is very challenging and has a lot of different stages. This meant that I would be able to play around with different symbols and layouts to best get the recipe across.
I did some initial research to get an idea of how pictograms should look and how they could be used without type and still be understood. I then went on to experiment creating my own pictograms that would be used as part of my recipe.
I started off by doing a lot of research on information graphics as well as looking at the recipe in thorough detail. I wanted to explore the ways in which I could best portray the recipe in a manner that was understood. I split down the recipe into it’s ingredients, timings and the utensils used and produced pictograms for each one. This was challenging as I had to make sure that each item was recognizable and that all of the pictograms where consistent with each other. The consistency of pictograms is very important and this is something that I learnt during a work shop ran by Maike at MWM. The workshop was especially useful for this project as I learnt how to transform a story into a simple pictogram. After producing a series of images I then had the challenge of arranging them in a sequence that reflected on the order of instructions of the recipe I was following. This took some developing before settling
on a format I was happy with. As the recipe is so long I chose to create a long A0 banner with the pictograms placed almost like a flow chart. I did this so that my images could flow and they wouldn’t be broken up from each other. The recipe is easy to read as you follow the pictograms from top to bottom and read from left to right as if reading a book. I feel that this project has been successful and that I have been able to produce an outcome that fits the brief. It has been challenging however creating vector images is something that I am comfortable with and so I found the brief to be both relevant and enjoyable to work on.
As well as creating a large format banner I decided to also make a smaller concertina book. The concertina book is a smaller version of my banner but folded up into a more manageable size. This works well as recipes have to be easy to handle and accessible and so it works well to accompany the banner. I think that I have produced a suitable range of work and feel that the recipe can be understood in both formats. It was an enjoyable project and it was good to work in a way that allowed me to reach different design outcomes.