Rationale

My topic for the brochure was famous crime locations of Wellington. I wanted to create a historic, sinister feeling through my design, and I think I achieved this through the use of colour, iconography and symbology. I was fairly minimalistic in terms of colour, using burgundy, some greyish browns, and occasional mustard tones. My use of black and white and newspaper clippings hopefully communicates the historical aspects I was trying to convey. My designs break the grid in some ways, often crossing pages, but I think they have a good relationship with the body text, which does conform to the grid. I learnt that with my design ethic I sometimes need to go the extra mile. I think that I have good concepts in my head, but sometimes they don’t initially pan out. Through the process of making this brochure I have learnt to sometimes persist with a design if there is something there that I believe can work. Having said that, I believe it is also important to keep your options open, and not be bogged down in what you think is best. Basically, be patient with your ideas, but accept advice.

Week 6

As the deadline approaches, I have had to focus on fine tuning my spreads and creating my cover. Through help from the tutors I have made adjustments to my type, in terms of layout, leading and colour. The cover is something I have struggled with a bit, wanting to stay stylistically in line with the rest of the booklet, but also wanting it to be enticing. Hopefully what I have ended up with fits thematically but is also something a reader would want to pick up. Over all, I am fairly happy with how my brochure has turned out. I think it conveys the theme appropriately. My only concern is that the destination spreads aren't individual enough, but I worried about having a disjointed feel.

Week 5

The first lesson this week was the first since the holiday break, after which we were supposed to have basically finished our brochures for a cross class critique.  For the most part I had my brochure complete, except for the cover. It was interesting to see where others had gotten to in the process.

Something that was very helpful about this process was seeing the range of maps, and this made me realise how inadequate my map, design and layout wise was. It doesn't really give enough context, and is really just plonked into the middle of the page. Although, I do like the crime-board, thread aspects to the map. The cross class critique also made me realise my activity type page was fairly lacklustre and basic.

Week 4

Since last week I've started some a couple of basic InDesign spreads, hopefully taking on board the feedback from last week to try and make my designs more effective.

In the second lesson we had a cross class critique, where we got to see what the other classes had done, and get some feedback from them. Unfortunately I didn't really get any feedback from this, but through a one on one with a tutor afterwards I was able to get an idea of how my layouts were coming along. My Haining Street spread is working fairly well, but my Thomas Murders spread is fairly disjointed and doesn't really relate well to the Haining Street design. I will have to think about how I will maintain certain elements across my spreads, so they don't feel all over the place.

Week 3

Since last week I created some more collages, trying to emphasise the themes and time periods that I had associated with my different sites. For Haining Street I have focused on the early 1900s, the time of the Chinese settlers in Wellington. For the Thomas murders I have used a 1980s, Wall St approach. Finally, for the Trades Hall bombing, I have tried to look at a 70s, union protest angle.

On the second lesson we critiqued these latest designs and it was apparent that my designs weren't really communicating a sense of danger or crime. This is obviously something I need to work on, as it is the core concept of the brochure, and I need to communicate perhaps a more sinister vibe.

Week 2

After deciding my activity set, I photographed my locations and brought them to this week's lesson. We looked at mark making, representing our imagery in more abstract ways. This helped me to look at smaller details of my locations, and different ways of communicating a design.

I created some rough collages, but decided I needed have clearer styles for the activity set, so I created some mood boards to help differentiate the activities.

Week 1

In the first lesson, we brainstormed in groups on possible activities for the subsets; Food and Drink, Sports and Rec and Arts and Culture. For homework we completed three matrixes based on these activities, going into more detail on the visual and emotional elements of the activity. This helped to get us thinking about how we could push aspects of the activity, rather than focusing on the surface level understanding.

For the second lesson, we brought our matrixes and critique each other's ideas in groups. This was helpful, having other people give their thoughts on your plans, and giving ideas on how to think of them in new ways. My group critique helped me come with a new activity set entirely, something a bit more atypical: famous dangerous criminal sites of Wellington.