Testing Out Potential Designs

Taking inspiration from my mood boards, I decided to try out different, quick ideas for the final design. I knew that I wanted to aim the design at older students; perhaps from 18-20. This meant that the infographic would focus more on text, rather than images, to deliver the information. Here are the designs I came up with:

Poster Tests Poster Tests2

After that, I decided to look at text combinations a bit. Here are some of the combinations I came up with:

Poster Tests3

As I stated before, I knew I wanted to aim the design at students and that I wanted to give the infographic a darker and more serious aesthetic. At least, I though I did. After messing around with different font combinations – I decided to drastically change my approach. I still wanted it to be focused at the same demographic, but I decided I Wanted to make it more fun and less aesthetically boring. I decided a font based off chalk would be a good idea – it wasn’t too goofy, but at the same time, it was interesting to look at

Real Life Uses For “Barcode”

The font is not subtle. I feel like this is not just a font you could have at the bottom of the page; this is certainly a very “artsy” font. The kind of things I feel this font could be applied to include modern and minimalist style pieces of media. Here are some examples where I feel this font could shine:

Poster 2

This poster was designed for an imaginary art festival in Paris. The design is very inspired by the modernism movement – it involves a lot of straight lines and bright, bold colours. Like I said before, the letters are big and bold, not subtle or hidden. Personally, I like the bottom part of the poster. the mix of black and grey give the “GEL!” a shine to it, making it stand out more. These two colours with the font could be used for the important parts of information.

Album Covers

This is the design I made for an album cover. Again, another simple design where the font is the main focus of the piece. The cover only features two words: “monohaze” and “toon”. I tried to make this more obvious by changing the colour of the font for each word. However, after asking people, it was still hard to tell that there were two rather than three words. Considering “monohaze” is a made up word though created by combining two existing words, I’m not too bothered by this.

Bag

This is a shopping brand and logo for an imaginary store. Used in this style, I can see the font being some kind of very expensive and high quality fashion store; certainly one for women, rather than men. however, I do not think this is purely due to the font, I think the way the font is positioned and the the colour scheme I’ve use does play a major part in that feeling. Box

I decided togo further with the bag idea and made a box for the fragrance, which could potentially be made by the same made up brand. I also updated the logo a bit to suit the design a bit more.

Research into Infographics

In this post, I will be looking various bits of research I did to prepare for the infographic.

Yellow Infographic

 

Source: infogr.am

This is an infographic I made using an automatic infographic creation service. It involved taking images and graphs from a pre-made list and inserting them onto the graphic. I could change the values on the graphs, change the order of the elements and alter the titles and quotes, but that was it. I couldn’t even change the colour scheme or font. The rest of the features were hidden behind a pay wall.

 

Below are a few mood boards I developed to help inspire me for my design.

Mood Board

These are infographics I found while searching all over the internet; using various sites such as Reddit and Pinterest.

Mood Board 2

This mood board focuses more on the Relativity part of the brief. I knew I wanted to make it in a blackboard style, so I complied relevant images to help me come up with ideas.

The Final Font – “Barcode”

Below is the final font I developed based on all the research I have done:

Font Design small Luke Halstead Font Design small Luke Halstead2

I have dubbed the font “Barcode” – after a friend said it reminded him of barcodes.

The cityscape in the back is not part of the design; this is just to show how the letter can look. The space is meant to be negative and can be filled in with anything image the user desires; whether it’s cityscapes, materials, plants, or just standard bold colours.

I also made some pieces of punctuation to fit with the font. These include an exclamation mark, question mark, full stop, a forward and back slash and an open and closed bracket as shown below.

Font Design small Luke Halstead3

In conclusion, I am very proud of the final product. There is not much improvement I feel I could do with these fonts; it’s not often that I work on something for as long as I did with these and I don’t become sick of the sight of it at the end. My personal favourite is the capital H, I feel like like it has a lot of detail and character, while still being obviously a H and not being too hard on the eyes.

Experimenting with Negatives

This time, I decided to experiment with the inside of letters, rather than the outside. Rather than using conventional colours, I thought I would make an out like of a letter and fill the inside with a photo or texture, etc.

Here, I decided to fill the letters with an image of the Liverpool skyline:

A H Z

The A is my personal favourite, I actually took to the idea of letting the filler spill out from the letter. While the H does look good as it is, having the A’s background spill out makes the letter more unique and eye-catching, as well as adding more character to the letter. I will try and stick more with that style; with the points, etc.

Below is another experiment I did, using a texture rather than cityscape as the filler

LM

I do not like this as much as I like the cityscape letters – they do not seem as unique as cityscape one. While close up it does look nice, from a distance i just looks like generic colour filling with nothing special about it. while I like this idea of the letters being negative, rather than just the generic form, I don’t like this very much.

I do however like the cities behind it and have decided to take that further for my final design.