Studio Brief
During this week you will design and produce a folded leaflet entitled "The Design Process" that describes your understanding of the design process and specifically how this is applied to design problems. This assignment will allow you to explore the nature of design at an increasingly commercial level while also exploring creative approaches to leaflet design and folding.
This brief is only one week long and therefore will be very intensive. You will be given support by your tutors in the form of crits and tutorials while studio tasks will focus on aspects related to constructing and designing leaflets. You will be expected to explore and experiment with paper and card stock: folding techniques and styles; and graphic concepts and communication. Your progress, developments and creative decisions should be documented in your studio blog.
At the end of the week you will present your final leaflet design and plan for print to the rest of the group. You will receive feedback and points to consider during this final crit.
Background/ Considerations
You are graphic designers, everything you produce should be designed, considered and effective. You need to be in complete control, even if it's carefully arranged to look casual! Don't ignore your knowledge of layout but expand upon it!
Leaflets are ubiquitous! They are a favoured medium for many businesses and organisations for delivering information to customers and clients. Most commercial printers will offer at least some leaflet printing/folding services while others will offer more complex and sophisticated folding and printing packages. Therefore it is important to consider not only the potential of leaflet design but also the financial and practical limitations.
The design process: In developing your understanding of the design process at an increasingly professional level you will show that you have considered the financial, practical and time-based concerns in regards to leaflet design.
Mandatory Requirements
All research, development and decision making should be documented in your studio practice blog.
Your work including research, experiments, developments, etc. will be presented and neatly labelled on design boards.
You must demonstrate that you have explored and considered a range of material, folding and printing formats in developing your leaflet.
Your leaflet design will describe and explain the design process and as such your design should reflect your understanding of 'process'.
Your work must be accompanied by an evaluation of at least 500 words.
Deliverables
1. A completed leaflet printed and folded
2. Design blog
3. Folded card stock experiments (with annotations)
4. Design boards
Brief
The design process
1. Research the design process - consider the aspects of the design process that encompass all design practices.
2. (In groups) discuss and write down all the aspects and stages of the design process.
3. (In groups) organised the aspects listed above into a visualisation of the design process
4. Present your findings to the group
5. Photograph and blog
We came up with a selection of words that describe the design process, from the basics, to the struggles and successes, then we decided that they could be divided into seven and visualised them across a timeline.
Stage 1 - Brief
Stage 2 - Research
Stage 3 - Sketch
Stage 4 - Mind map
Stage 5 - Concept & Design
Stage 6 - Feedback
Stage 7 - Final Outcome
We wanted it too be simple and not just a list of words so created some icons that would represent each of the stages. In between the seven stages we added intermediate stages of extra research, discussion and feedback which we thought were essential throughout, and arrows that showed how the central stages of sketch, mind-map, concept and design would be interlinked and during the dynamic process you would need to go back and forth. The first and final parts are definite which is why we thought something linear made sense, however we wanted to show how the middle is fair more varied.
