If You Come To London, You Must See..

After experimenting with some layout ideas for the Tunbridge Wells guide I've started to lose a bit of interest in the concept. Partly because the tourist attractions in Tunbridge Wells aren't very strong once you've done the three main ones (The Pantiles, The High Rocks and the Spa Valley Railway). Even with 5 attractions I feel like I'm clutching at straws a bit with things like the shopping center and the museum.

So I've opted for a change of location to somewhere with much more tourist appeal: London. London has a ton of well known, interesting tourist attractions and iconic monuments. I think I could have more fun designing something based around this ideas as I could experiment with the iconography and get some really good photos.

Possible Places to Include:

• Big Ben
• London Eye
• Buckingham Palace
• Tower Bridge
• Tower of London
• Piccadilly Circus
• Trafalgar Square
• St Paul's Cathedral
• The Gerkin
• Shakespeare Globe
• Marble Arch
• Golden Hinde 

I'd quite like to make a spread that focuses on all the 'must see' famous buildings in London that tourists would be interested in. Basically the top sites from that list.

This is a layout idea I was quite interested in. Taking all the iconic sights of London and creating like a collage across the spread with short discriptions next to each image like labels. I think this would be more visually interesting than just having photos in boxes and a less formal approach which should attract a wider audience. I also think it could add a sense of fun into seeing the sights if arranged in the right way.

Further Alterations (Game Review)

I made some further alterations to the previous spread I designed featuring a game review. On closer inspection I noticed that the scaling of the images was a bit off. When printed, they looked over-sized compared to the ones found in other magazines I looked at. I realized I hadn't judged the size of the spread properly because I'd spent all the time looking at it on screen which isn't to scale.

This was a problem when it came to adding finishing touches like a header and footer. There was no room for a header without obscuring the imagery. So I scaled down much of the design elements in the spread and reshuffled parts to allow space for a header. All the spreads I'd looked at from similar magazines used headers to tell the reader what type of spread it was (e.g. - review, timeline, coming soon etc).

I feel I've significantly improved the overall design. The proportions look better and the header and I think the header and footer add a professional feel to the spread. They also give the reader useful information. However the only problem is that I can't find space for the fact file about the game which has vital information such as it's name, price and availability. I need to keep working at it to get this feature into the spread.

5 Things To Do in Tunbridge Wells

I've decided to cut the tourist attractions down to 5 as I've actually found it quite hard to find 10 good tourist attractions, in town, that I can write a decent amount of information for. This might actually give me a bit more freedom when it comes to laying out images and text, but the basic concept remains the same.

 

These are some initial ideas I had for possible layouts. I want to create something less wordy and more image based as a way of capturing the interest of tourists. Plus, I want to sell the attractions to tourists but obviously they have to go and find things out themselves when they visit. So I don't want to ramble on about any of it, I'd rather have smaller, easy to digest chunks of information. 

 

10 Things To Do in Tunbridge Wells

This is my idea for the 4th spread. A tourist based guide to attractions in Royal Tunbridge Wells. It could be part of a travel guide type magazine (possibly based in Kent or the South). I think this would be a good opportunity for me to include some more of my own imagery and it's convenient as I live in Tunbridge Wells.

I'm interested in doing a spread that's a bit less formulaic in terms of the article structure. This spread might be a good time to experiment with modular grids instead of just column grids that I've been using so far as I will have lots of distinct chunks of information to include. All I have to do is think of 10 things to do in Tunbridge Wells.

To find out I had a look at Tunbridge Wells' tourist website http://www.visittunbridgewells.com/ . This gave me some ideas of what to include for this spread.

Things to Do:

• The Pantiles
• High Rocks
• Spa Valley Railway
• Victoria Place Shopping Centre
• Museum

Further Development

  

Once happy with the overall design I imported it from Illustrator into Indesign to start working with the article and page layout. To create the columns that appear at an angle I first had to draw text boxes based on the 5 column grid structure I had laid out. I then grouped the text boxes together and rotated them at a 25 degree angle so that they both aligned with each other and the rest of the design.

I chose to set the design at a 25 degree angle, as apposed to other angles, because I found out that the stem of the A in Futura (and other letters) sits at a 25 degree angle. I wanted to emphasize this by rotating the design so that the A on the right hand page sits at a 90 degree angle with the page, showing a relationship between the orientation of the design and the typeface.

This is an experiment I did using the existing design. I wanted to see how the spread would look if I filled the space at the top with another geometric form (this time the O) and I also added "Geometric Typeface" as a piece of extra information and a way for the user to see more aspects of the typeface.

I don't think the O is an improvement on the design. It's hard to place in black or red without making either colour seem overpowering. And setting it in a lighter colour breaks the established colour scheme. It also doesn't really align to anything and generally looks out of place. I think the design is better with the white space, which allows the design each page to breath (since they are quite busy in their own right but seperated by white space).

However I do think the "Geometric Typeface" I added works with the design and has more functionality. It also sits well with the lines and squares that surround it on the right hand page.

As a finishing touch I added some information in the footer. A title for the magazine / feature and a page number on the opposite page. I wanted the footer to correlate with the overall design (that's why I used the same colour scheme and typeface) and not impose on it. I tried to keep the information in the footer to a minimum (only using one page number for example) in order to keep the look of the spread as clean and as free of unnecessary objects as possible, thus reflecting the design and ideas behind Futura.