AF105 | Brief

Final Design | Evaluation

I've not enjoyed this project nearly as much as the previous one in terms of the research and preliminary work, but i have enjoyed producing my art work far more this time.

I think I didn't enjoy the preliminary work as much this time because I am naturally far less interested in The Wind in the Willows than the world wars and the history that was bought with them that we had to research and immerse ourselves in for the last project.

When it came to the production of my cover I was far happier than last time. I felt far more confident with the software and I knew straight away what exactly I wanted to produce and moreover I knew most of the techniques I could use to create the effects I wanted, although some development and learning was on going throughout the production process as I came into new obstacles that I had to get around. I'm also far happier with the final outcome this time. I was far more focused and I felt I took on board a lot more of the discussions I had with my fellow class mates.

For my final tweaks I've added in shadows to show depth on the cover, and also the all important eyes of the Wild Wood. These final changes have given me a great sense of achievement and I feel I've suceded in creating an eye catching and effective design.

1

2

File Size | Compression

All the way through this project I've had problems with Illustrator lagging due to the huge file I have created. At its peak it was 160.9mb, which is far too big to enter into the competition, or to work with in this project. So I've been compressing it using Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Illustrator in order to get it down to the 5mb standard ready for competition entry.

In photoshop I rasterized the whole image so it became a flat pixel based image that I chose to export as a .PNG. This lost a lot of data; 151.1mb to be exact. It was then only 4.8mb, but I still had to put it back into the template created by Penguin in order to keep the vital trim marks around the edge. Once I'd imported it into the template and then exported it as a .PDF as specified by the brief it was once again far too big for entry into the competition at 11mb.

These compression issues will hopefully be resolved very soon ready to hand the work in and to enter it into the Penguin Book competition.

Progression | Illustrations

I have started making more changed to my book cover since the critique. I've changed the background colour to be darker as this makes the scene on the cover seem a lot more sinister. I've also added the extra text that was missing previously from the front cover, spine and I've moved the blurb to sit onto of the trees instead of underneath. I am undecided as to whether I will keep the front underneath the trees or on top. I will discuss further with my classmates in order to make a decision. I've thickened up the tree lines so that it seems more like the Wild Wood its meant to be, not just a line of trees. Here's some screen shots to illustrate |

Still to do:

• Evil eyes in the woods
• Roots
• More snow falling
• Move bottom left text elsewhere

Branding Guidelines | Research

As part of this project I have to write a set of branding guidelines to describe to another designer how to recreate parts of my design. I've decided to do some research into this before writing the guidelines and this is what I have learned so far:

What are branding guidelines and why are they used?

Branding guidelines are a set of rules and regulations set up to guide a designer into creating a cohesive, yet creative piece of work for a certain brand. The brand itself want to make sure they're are consistently viewed in the same way, but without being boring and so the guidelines are set up to limit the possibility of an incoherent design being created for them but not to restrict the creativity of the designer to zero. 

What makes a set of guidelines good to work with and what can we expect to be included in them?

A great set of branding guidelines for me would allow me to get on with a project without having to ask any questions about how something has to be portrayed, but whilst having a decent amount of flexibility to be creative. As a general rule I'd expect to see information about font faces, colour, positioning, imagery, brand identity and I'd like to see some examples of work that has been previously produced to the brand. This would give me a great overview of what the brand are about and what they expect from me as a designer.