Week 4

This week was all about continuing to refine and develop out posters, to get our design styles decided and hopefully start to move onto the other transmedia touchpoints.

Class 1 we started with a lecture on plagarism. Then when we went back to class, we got into groups of 2-3 pairs to do an exercise with coloured cards, each colour being a question that the other pairs would answer about our poster. The colours were
Red- Gut reaction
Yellow- What works
Black- What doesn't
Green- Where can you go from here
Blue- Plan to move forward


Gut Reaction- They immediately thought zombie.
The gnome could look more scared.
The gnome is seen first rather than the hand, your eye is drawn to him because of his colour

What Works- The hand coming out of the ground, it is reminiscent of old zombie movie posters.

What Doesn't- The text placing could be better.
The hand isn't the central focus.
Could be more neighbourly related, something extra that adds in another element of neighbourhoods.

Where Can You Go From Here- Try some other ways of showing a neighbourhood, maybe a dog in a kennel or someone mowing their lawns.
Different text iterations, different text fonts, find something more zombie related.

Plan To Move Forward- Our plan to move forward is to keep playing around with the text and testing out new fonts.
We want to test out some new compositions where we replace the gnomes with a dog in a kennel getting scared by the zombie hand, or maybe have someone gardening?
We also want to play around the colour of the gnome, we do really like the gnomes so we want to find a way to incorporate it without it pulling the focus from the hand.

We also started coming up with some more potential website ideas.

At this stage we also considered changing our approach slightly. The picture above is an idea for a poster header/first page image, which is more centered around the gnomes than the zombies. Its showing a community of gnomes with mushroom houses and then theres a hand popped out the ground next to them. We pitched this idea to Tim and he said that while it was a good idea we needed to decided if we were going to move forwards with the zombies being central or the gnomes. We were starting to lean more towards gnomes and a more happy theme, with them being a community and making people want to have a community like they do but then after also talking to Fay she urged us to stick with our original idea with the zombies. After-all if we had the gnomes as the central aspect and then why would we bother to have the zombie hand terrorising them. Which would mean redoing the overall idea for our poster, which at this stage we probably don't have time to do.


Class 2

We started with a critique with the full class but the first poster we were going to put on the wall ended up getting a critique from Fay before we even put it up.

Fay had some good points about it looking quite aggressive which we don't really want if we want the neighbours to want to get together, we don't want them getting turned away by an unfriendly poster. There also isn't a good relationship between the people and the zombie hand, they don't look like they relate.

We did end up putting it up on the wall anyway with two others.
 
The first one was testing out having a white gnome, based on the white ceramic gnomes that don't get painted. We wanted to have the hand as the primary image and the colours of the gnome kept drawing away from that in out previous trials. The second one is also trying to do this so we desaturated the colours so that the hand would stand out more.
With all three up on the wall we thought that the gnome with the desaturated colour was the best, which the class agreed with. Someone did say that we should try making the hand blue and more zombielike so that it doesn't look like someone has been buried by a land slide or something. Also the leading on the "get prepared" is really bad so we need to do some more fiddling with the font and legibility.
We also had a few other options which were based off the feedback we got last class about adding in more stuff related to neighbours.


After those critiques I (Evie) kept doing a few more variations of the posters while Jennifer continued with the website.

These are some of the new options I came up with.


I wanted to get them as good as I could before Fay's critique session on friday so I decided to ask my sister her opinion, shes a recently graduated designer so I thought she could give us a few good pointers with fresh eyes that don't know the brief. Her initial reaction was that the last poster was working the best at the moment, the white box makes the text easier to read, although some of the smaller text (the date and address of the get together) should be bolded so they stand out more from the rest of the body text. Also after looking at some of our earlier posters she thought that having the hand on the right and not quite so cropped off the page was a better layout. Having it on the right created a better left to right flow and having the hand not so cropped means that if you don't originally know what it is you still know that its a hand. Other than that we also needed to make the hand look more zombie like which we already planned to do with our final illustration once out layout is fixed.


The first one is the one I made based on the last critique from my sister but I do like the more drastic scale difference between the gnome and the hand.

At Fays critique on Friday she had other opinions. She didn't like the white box on the bottom so we continued to develop a version where the text was still within the dirt bottom. She also wanted to see our resolved illustrations so that we could get a better idea of what our posters illustration style would be.

I also started on the brochure this week, while Jennifer worked on the illustrations that are pictured in the Illustrations post. One idea I had was to have it folding as a sort of double door thing, where there was also a cut out of the hand so that a picture of the hand was actually printed on the inside pages and showed through where the cut was. There were a few problems with this as it left little room for text and if we wanted people to be able to print these out for their own events then a lot of difficult cutting would be involved, which isn't ideal.
 

This is another idea I had, all the pages would fold in so it ended up just being one CD sized brochure. Again this would require some cutting and glueing aswell so maybe not ideal for people wanting to print off a large amount for their events.

From there Jennifer had the idea of an 8 page zine fold where all you have to do is fold it up with a few simple cuts. We also wanted to have it on an a4 page as people would be more likely to have access to a printer that size. I came up with this as the layout, it was difficult to come up with different layout on a page as small as a4 once its folded so I was quite limited.