graphic design (processes & evaluation)
TRANSCRIPT
Graphic Design Processes & Evaluations
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Enders Game BookCover Evaluation
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Spine: The spine features the name of the book and author. Compulsory information really.
Back Cover: Blurb - The blurb gives a brief synopsis of the story.
This blurb also contains endorsements and awards information, specifically that is won the hugo award. This is attract more audiences as people often read books that have won more awards.
Left Flap: Author Bio - This area is tell the reader more about the author, maybe inspiration for the story or about previous books. This is to create a personal connection with the author.
Back Cover: Barcode- This barcode is make the book more identifiable and will also contain the ISBN number.
Front Cover: Title, Author & Qualifier -
The main thing on the front cover ,besides the Title, is the qualifier. The fact that it is a New York Times best seller is instantly going to attract
Right Flap: Tagline/ Splash quote & Endorsement-
The tagline does a good job of giving just a snapshot of the blurb really and the endorsement only uses one word from one book review. Which could be considered deceiving.
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Video Game Cover Analysis
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Exclusivity: This is way to make people feel like they are missing out on something. This should help insight certain audiences to go and purchase the console and the game. Thats why bundle packages are created.
PS3 Masthead: Standard issue for any game. You have to show the platform of the game.
Game Title Masthead: Same principle applies, this lets everyone know the name of the game. This is often a way for graphic designers to show off their skills. The font here is simple and empty. It reflects the apocalyptic feel of the game.
Game Age Rating: This is how parents are able to make an informed choice on whether to buy this game for their children.
Studio & Distributor: This is how naughty dog get their name out there. Some gamers will be sold on how good a game is by seeing who the developer was. People may be aware of the Uncharted Series.
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Xbox MastHead: This is present on all games to show what platform it is. The pattern is still in its green and white iconic colours.
Game Title : Notice the game title is in large font, and all other writing is small. This makes people know this is the title by default
Games Central Character: The cover image of the game is a way of letting the player know what is going to be in the game. Central characters and plots are often hinted at on the covers of games.
Game Age Rating, Game Design Studio & Game Distributor: These are all the things that casual and even core gamers are not really bothered about or even know what it means. The age rating is kept simple and clear for parents to understand.
Accolades Won : This is a way of selling the game, core gamers will be sold on the game as they know the importance of the E3 awards. This is the equivalent of a film winning awards. It promotes the film.
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PS3 Masthead: Standard issue for any game. You have to show the platform of the game.
Game Title: As their have been many different faces of Lara Croft, the name still hasn’t changed. So the title is bigger as this will insight more of a reaction from fans of the franchise than the image of the woman itself.
Game Age Rating: This is how parents are able to make an informed choice on whether to buy this game for their children.
Game Design Studio
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Little White LiesCover
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Little White Lies Issue 30 July/Aug 2010
Target Audience analysis for Little White Lies
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Demographic Age, occupation, Education, Background, gender and income.
Mid 20’s, 18+ - 30, Professional, degree, middle class, affluent + time
Geographic Region, post code & area code London, Brighton, Cambridge, Oxford, BristolUrban, affluent, cultural
Benefit Why do they use this brand- What do they get out of it?
Cool Factor, into alternative culture, Film information, Knowledgeable.
Psychographic Social Class, Lifestyle & Personality
Middle class - Conscious of tastes, passion for film. Successful, creative.
Behavouristic Behavior - Loyalty to the brands, frequency of purchase
Status symbol - suggests that the consumer would purchase regularly - Collectable.
Price £3.75
Target Audience analysis for Little White Lies
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Advertisers Independent films : “White Materials”, “Mother”, “Scott Pilgrim Vs The World”, “In The Pit”, ATP ConcertsIn Between Days (Amos Toys Event)Festival Republic Presents : The Big ChillBret Easton Ellis (book)LastExitToNowhere.com (T-shirt website)BarbicanShooting People
Reader Interaction LWL competions, Music festival, shop
Content Abstract, Pretentious, Arty, Exclusive, Niche, Confident
Target Audience analysis for Little White Lies
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Degree Educated “Mature” “Truth & Movies”, Sophisticated design, for the middle & upper class demographic. Compared to the bold, loud and disjointed design of Total Film & Empire which is more for the average movie watcher, but not enthusiast.
Why does the design of the Little White Lies Cover appeal to the target audience identified?
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Film Obsessives Film choice - Independent film, edgy, different. In-depth knowledge and analysis. Design explores themes of the centre film. Example: Black Swan : fragmented personality)
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Design led creative Creative, hand drawn, craft gone into the magazine, cover finish- spot, embossed. The barcode has been embedded into the logo, they have taken the ugliest part of any magazine and turned it into one of the most appealing an beautiful parts of the magazine.
Exclusive for “In The Know” Knows what its about, not trying to sell to the mass market: Confident alternative design to match the alternative movies they are reviewing.
Alternative Culture Alternative films, doesn’t try and sell itself too much. Doesn’t look like an ordinary film magazine. Design is quite challenging.
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Collectors Blends same layout (use of logo + portrait) but each design is unique in treatment. High quality product, high stock paper.
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Total Film Evaluation
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“It’s time for a change” Man Of Steel. Title stands out and eye catching. Font is cleverly done in that classic superman style font.100 Greatest Heroes and villians of
all time! Increases the value of this issue. Not every issue do they do a top 100 something of all time.
Additional information about other films, along the right hand side provide a very clean structured look to the cover. These additional tag lines could be dotted about all over the cover.The top of the cover provides an
example heroes and villains in this issue. Gets the audience hooked, hopefully enough to make them buy the issue and read on.
Additional information uses to hollywood stars names as a means to draw readers to the issue. E.G if you look Ryan Gosling there is an article about him in the magazine.
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Discount Code LeafletEvaluation
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One thing that is apparently obvious from researching various discount code leaflets for games etc. Is that they appear to jus re-use a lot of assets form previous graphic design products. In some cases I've just seen them use the cover image, much like the Call of Duty : Ghosts discount code, and put that on the poster. This seems to be a good way of getting your message across, making sure that your brand is identifiable from its recognisable artwork, in a cost effective way. Which if you are a small company, like us, then that is always beneficial.
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Web BannerEvaluation
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Web Banner Research
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I first went about finding out about the different web banners and the official dimensions they had to be. It was when I then stumbled upon this image that basically told me the dimensions I should use. As you can see there are a lot on there so I didn't create all of them.
From then on the basis for all my designs were started in one photoshop file then once I had all the elements in the photoshop file such as the logo, the texture and colour I would transfer and resize it on another psd to create a web banner with the desired dimensions. The screen grabs below show my initial design and the layers they were on. s
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T-shirtEvaluation
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These two t-shirt represent very similar things, However one reaches more of a wider audience than the other. The T-shirt on the left is more recognizable as it is really the most known record label in worldwide Dance Music. Even people who don’t listen to dance music recognize this logo due to extensive TV campaigns & adverts from the company. The T-shirt on the right is more niche as it only represents a smaller genre within dance music. One that is only really popular in the UK. Only smaller audiences worldwide will know this logo.
RAM RECORDS T-SHIRTMINISTRY OF SOUND T-SHIRT
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T-Shirt Research
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App Icon Evaluation
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App Icon Research
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Looking at a fewiphone screens ofpeople in my class Ithen came to aconclusion aboutwhat sort of appspeople, in my targetaudience for mygame, would buy.You have youobvious socialnetworking appsand fast food apps.
I feel like these appsthat I have chosenare a fairly closerepresentation ofwhat my targetaudience wouldalready own interms of Apps.
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SAS Zombie Assault 3
One of the games in our ven-diagram was SAS Zombie Assault 3 and it was the only one of the games I could find on the App Store.
This is the actual thumbnail image that is used on the iTunes store to promote the video game. Things that I have noticed from the thumbnail is that it is not gameplay and instead it is purpose made graphic image. This is conventional in video games the cover art for the game never is a still image of gameplay taken from the game. For obvious reasons screen shots of moving imagery wouldn’t come out at a good quality. Whereas you can make a 4k
standard still image in Illustrator or Photoshop.
Image Without Colour Saturation
Image With Colour Saturation
The image with the colour saturation has basically narrowed down the range of colours in the image to 12. So you can see the image begin to take shape with only 12 of the original colours in there. You can see the detail begin to take shape on the SAS Soldier. Whilst it may seem the detail is all there if you zoom in on the soldier you can see pockets of where colours should be.Then the background layers are a lot rough looking. However you can still see the raw image is fairly similar to full image on the left.
Here is the colour table which i have narrowed down to the 12 colours that you see. The proper image contains hundreds of colours as it has the full gradual gradients in them that.
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App IconDesign Process
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5 Rough Ideas
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Feedback Idea 1
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Feedback Idea 2
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I wanted to create an app icon that would convey the general mood and emotion of the game. So I began to mock up some initial ideas in greyscale. From there I test out some adding some colour to the image. I thought the idea was okay but I knew that the scary mood of the game wasn’t being convey enough through the colour sketch. Here are some design screenshots where it shows how I made the 2 Initial ideas.
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Here you can see a few ideas that I have tried. Below are the two initial ideas that, pending on feedback from peers, one will get developed into a final idea.
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Feedback:
Mel Ruvolo: “The dark theme is better than the colour as it says more about the games themes, having played the game myself I know its a dark game. Only thing I would like to see is slightly more of his face”.
Beth Farrington: “I prefer the black and white version because I think that it fit better with the theme of the game. The smoky effect makes the aesthetic look more gloomy. SO THE BLACK ONE”.
After looking at the feedback I knew that that darker idea was the one to go with, it hooked them more than the other idea and was more in-keeping with the themes of the game.
As you can see from the final design I have made a few changes to the design. I would only consider them minor changes though as the development idea for this was pretty good as it was. I have moved the eyes & eyebrows up further so we can capture more of the emotion and expression on Jimmy’s face. The logo was hard to place but I settled on the placement above as it doesn’t distract from the rest of the image too much. We know its there yet it blends enough into the design that we are still drawn into the centre part of the design, Jimmy that is.
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Final Design
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T-shirtDesign Process
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The images above will give you a fairly good idea about the main design processes and techniques used to create the t-shirt. The end result follows the same style as the app icon logo and the web banners.
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I started with trying to make a simple design with an element from the game that only people who have played the game will understand. My initial idea was take influence from fashion and create a small logo, to try and create a sort of Lyle & Scott Tee. And this was my initial idea.
I then received feedback which basically suggested I change design direction to fit more in-line with my logo and web banners
Feedback:
Ryan Worcester – “It is clear that the dark, cloudy texture fits well with your other marketing products such as your website banners and the app icon itself. I would suggest keeping the t-shirt design greyscale, as i feel that the website banners that use little colours work better and also links your marketing products to your app icon design. I feel you should continue to use the cloudy texture on your tshirt design.
I basically after this point started from scratch. As the app icon was such a strong design for me, I wanted to carry the theme of that a long. So I began work on the T-shirt. I only wanted to do one T-shirt as variation in T-shirt designs are so common and so I wanted to refrain from creating so many different styles and just put all my effort into one. The reason why was because I though If i create similar advertising assets because it would make my brand more recognisable and uniformed. So I began to implement my app icon, with some obvious
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Final Design
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Web BannerDesign Process
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Feedback Mel Ruvolo : This theme is good you should carry this theme on as the foundation, but maybe add some variations depending on the dimension of the web banner you are creating.Beth Farrington : The design is good, create various sizes.Keeping with the feedback I stuck to using the same theme, but as you can see from the designs below I added Jimmy’s head to some of the web banners, so that the themes from the T-shirt & Logo were recognisable too.
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Final Designs
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Discount Code LeafletDesign Process
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I wanted to create something that in practical wouldn’t be a huge leaflet, as I believe that puts some people off when your handing them out. So I created I thought that a good dimension to follow would be the 720/300 (w/h) that I used for the web banner. I wanted to try and keep a theme going with the discount code design. As its a form of physical marketing and something that a potential customer can hold in their hands. I thought I would make it very accessible for them to get the game but I just didn’t know how.
With that in mind this was the initial design that I created, following the same theme as the web banners. Its visually striking and catches people attention.
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Feedback
Ryan Worcester: “I like the design, its going to catch peoples attention. But you need to also link them to the game as well. I don’t know how, but a web address may be to long and overcrowd the design.
Mel Ruvolo: ‘ The design is strong but I think you should add a QR code to make it simple for audiences to view the game and get the discount there and then.”
Action taken:
I took what Mel suggested literally and added a QR code to the design. WIth internet now being pretty much a neccesity for most smart phones. Its a quick and easy way to link audience to the game directly. Here is the finished design.
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Final Design
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Production Schedule
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Week Scheduled Design Process Desired Finished Outcome
Week 1 Initial research: ResearchApp Icons, T-shirts, web banners etc
To produce detailed sheets evaluating research and linking it to my task
Week 2 Use research to to come up with draft design ideas. come up with a range of ideas for each marketing asset.
Take screenshots and put together a production process, showing how you made them. Week 3
Use research to to come up with draft design ideas. come up with a range of ideas for each marketing asset.
Take screenshots and put together a production process, showing how you made them.
Week 4 Submit developed ideas for feedback from client and focus groups.
Constructive feedback from clients and properly organised
Week 5 Make required changes based on feedback and finalize assets
4 Finished Marketing Assets
Detailed Production Schedule for Marketing Assets
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Graphic Design Evaluation
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My Design Comparison Professional Design
In terms of comparing my app icon to the
icon of a very successful indie game, I
would say that the end result is pretty
good and emulates the look well. It fits
the purpose. I chose to compare my app
icon to the super meat boy icon because it
has, co-incidentally, the same style of a
close up of the main character. Both have
a strong look and both convey the themes
of the game. The feedback from the client
stated that it need to be rounded off at the
edges, which I have done here.
The t-shirts both have very bold and very
identifiable elements in them. The head of
Jimmy and the head of Ghost. My design
has more of a tye dye pattern on the t-
shirt then the design implement on the
top. I would say that after comparing the
two, the COD Ghost T-Shirt certainly has
a more professional look to it than the
Snake Escape t-shirt.
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The banners both have again the themes of the
game running through them. Once again I
believe that this design is a very accurate
representation of what a web banner should look
like. My design even has explicitly given the
audience a way of finding out more about the
product. My research of web banners helped me
a lot in achieving this desired look. The feedback
from the client indicated that my designs fit the
purpose and that the overall look of them are
good.
I will admit I could of made this a lot better and
maybe of brought in some new design assets.
The feedback also re-enforced this idea and also
commented on the lack of creativity in the font.
In all honesty this design is weak and now state
that this is a marketing asset that can definitely
be improved. One positive is the ease of access
to the game, The QR code. This means that
consumers can access the game and activate the
discount straight away.
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App Icon
My initial ideas for the app icon were colourful and bright. Then it was
pointed out to me in feedback of my first 2 designs that they weren't
frightening enough. This was where I took this advice on board and came
back with 2 designs that I knew, one of them would be the one I develop
into a final idea.
The final amendments were easy to place after the second lot of feedback
stated that I should go with the darker design. The font was the problem. I
didn't want people to be instantly drawn to the font, yet I didn't want the
icon to not have a title etc.
The font and colour I think matches perfectly
with the icon due to the very subtle nature of
it. Overall a good design and the feedback
was the key that led me to creating a good
design.
Graphic Assets
Suggested Improvements
& Amendments
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T-shirt
The t-shirt is very bold in colour. I like this because it makes it eye-
catching therefore more people are going to lock onto the design and want
to find out the meaning behind it. If I had one thing that I would do
differently is not change the design but to design more than one t-shirt. T-
shirts that suit different age ranges. So maybe a polo shirt with a Jimmy's
head or pocket tee with a nice design would be good as it would create a
more varied t-shirt line. This means that I am more likely to have more
than one good design.
The actual design process was good as I achieved everything with the
design that I wanted to. The feedback on the initial ideas seemed to show
that my design was heading in the right direction and that my final design
definitely achieved this.
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Web Banner
The web banners were a highly pleasing to make and something that came
about very quickly. After creating one design I gave it over for feedback
and the feedback was explicit in saying that, depending on size variation,
there needs to be changes in designs to fill the whole web banner space.
I wanted to get Jimmy's head in there so I can keep the recognisable theme
of the brand stretched out across many different design platforms.
The client feedback of the final marketing plan, of which all web banners
were included for display, seemed to like the designs and more importantly
the variation in the designs.
Discount Voucher (Leaflet & E-mail attachment)
This is the design which I believe could have had a lot more work put into
it. The group feedback and the client feedback both suggest that the design
looks rushed and could have turned out better. The font was what the client
seemed to think brought the overall appeal of the design down.
Amendments
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I'll start off by saying that none of the design process involved producing anything,
physically by hand, as in no rough ideas on paper first etc. Whilst some of the designs
ended up as physical products there was no hand drawn sketches or ideas. Even all of
my research came from web sourced images and designs.
The main tool I used to create all of
my graphic design assets is adobe
illustrator and photoshop (CS5).
Since Jimmy is very vector looking
artwork you can probably guess that I
made him in illustrator. This gave him a nice
polished look, which was the aim.
A lot of the actual graphic assets simply took
Jimmy's head design and implemented it into
photoshop where I used the asset to create
other the web banners, t-shirt and the app
icon. All turned out very well and was by far the most useful tool throughout the
design process.
Graphic Assets
Production Tools
The Bamboo graphics tablet alos
played an important part in giving
me more control of the software.
The mousepad is not always the
best instrument to use sometimes
as it can be in-accurate. The tablet
allowed me to accurately place
colour, line segments and just
generally anything I wanted with
more ease in the photoshop
project.
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I think the app icon fits my target audience perfectly due to number of reasons.
If you look at my marketing plans primary research you can see where I have
asked my target audience whether its suited to their age group and it got a
resounding yes. Over 85% people voted yes. Another thing is that the design is
very fresh, visual and striking. It commands attention from fans and non-fans.
The web banners follow this same idea. Make them visual enough so people
will be drawn to them. Although done in vector style, it fits with many different
age ranges. Younger audiences will be frightened by the design and therefore
want to find out more about the game, and older audiences will
be impressed with the glossy and professional look of the app icon, and by
extension the web banners and t-shirt, that they will want to find out more about
the game. Eye-catching design impresses people these days, its why glossy
magazines sell so well. By this analogy my designs are very fit for purpose.
The t-shirt is the one design which I would say is fit for
purpose, but not universally across the entire age range
of my target audience. Linking back to the suggested
improvements, I think I should have created more designs
to fit more of my target audience. Much like how Harry Potter has sleeve
designs for adults and for children.
Graphic Assets
Fit For Purpose
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