Concept Development

 

Based on my sketches I chose to create icons of all the tourist attractions I wanted to talk about and lay them out in a grid based design resembling an infographic type guide. To maintain the simplified style of the spread I used block colours and a limited colour scheme of just pink for the background and white for the monuments. I chose pink as I wanted something that portrayed a vibrant and modern take on the city, much like the olympic branding for London 2012 which uses lots of vibrant block colours, particularly pink for the logo. In this way I hoped to make the branding of London in my spread consistent with existing branding of the city which is very contemporary.

 

The typeface I used for the header was Bebaus Neue, a typeface that can be found on dafont.com. I chose it because of its resemblance to Din and its bold condensed styling which I think carries connotations of an informative piece. Using this style of san serif typeface in infographic design seems to be popular at the moment as it appears in many existing designs.

  

The left page features two enlarged vector graphics of Big Ben and The London Eye. This was to add visual interest to the look of the spread and make the first page eye-catching enough to draw the reader in. It's also used to break up the more rigid grid based design of the opposite page, giving some of the attracts a bit more freedom visually which should help maintain a more light-hearted feel to the spread. They're both accompanied by a description like the rest which makes them fully functional promotional pieces like the smaller icons.

 

In order to start designing the finished version of this spread in InDesign I had to create quite a complicated grid layout to ensure everything lined up properly and looked in order. This was important as the structure is noticeably grid based. The left page uses a basic 8 column grid. This was to aid me in creating the proportions of the header and aligning the larger objects around the edge of the page to balance it out. The right page, however, is based on a 3 column grid for the articles with a 9 block modular grid over the top for the imagery. This creates a designated area for text and imagery to be placed in which is aligned and balanced across the page. Some of the vectors had to be moved slightly to improve the overall look of the page as some didn't appear to be aligned in the right places.

But once the grid was in place it was fairly easy and straight-forward to import the type and imagery.