Again, I've been feeling a bit stuck with this brief, mainly because of the conflicting feedback I've received in crits. As I was feeling stressed as I feel like I have spent a long time on this brief but don't seem to be getting anywhere, I organised a mini crit, showing people where I was up to with the book.
Here is the feedback:
- Don't use the cmyk colour scheme. Too obvious and colours don't look good in this format
- Try looking on the pantone website, look at the colour of the year as this would appeal to designers
- Keep things a bit more structured to make it look more professional
- Some of the text looks a bit too big
- Use the same typeface for each quote to keep it consistent, and make sure the colour scheme is consistent too
So after the feedback, I feel more like I know what direction I want to go in. This brief started out as the 'play' brief I thought I would have the most fun with, but I've ended up hating it as I've found it so hard to get it how it should look. Now that I kind of know what I'm doing I hope it will be a bit more enjoyable.
After the suggestion on the colour schemes, I looked up some pantone colours, and thought 2013's colour of the year, emerald green would be really suitable for the purpose. It will be appropriate for both a male and female audience, and also, graphic designers will be interested because of it being a pantone colour.
I've gone through the document and changed the colour scheme, to be black, white, and emerald green. Previously the backgrounds had an effect applied to the edges to make them darker but I've also removed this as I thought it was too distracting.
Now I need to edit each quote, so that it is suitable for being placed in the book.
I decided to remove the simple but effective quote, as I felt a bit like it didn't work in with the other quotes. This is because the other advice contained in the book is more about motivational advice for staying on top of your work, where this quote was about the actual designing. I think it was quite obvious and one of the first things you would learn anyway, so I've replaced it with 'Use Your Initiative' which will give some advice about organising your own events and just making things happen for yourself.
When I've been placing in the quotes, I've realised that the new design direction style I was going in with the text doesn't work next to the decorative style of the quotes, as shown in the screen shot below.
The next step is just to make all this match, and get rid of the irrelevant stuff.
