THINKING PROCESS

a few print and web design projects showing some steps of my thinking process

Case Study 1 | Case Study 2 | Case Study 3

CLIENT

The Post Secondary Support Staff Conference Committee

BACKGROUND

The Post Secondary Support Staff Conference is a platform for post secondary institutes of BC to showcase their institute and get connected with other institutes. It was held for the first time in 2001 at Langara College. Each year a different institute hosts the conference in order to showcase their institute. Although delegates come from all around the province, the majority is from the lower mainland. They are college/university support staff working in a variety of departments from Library, IT, cafeteria, bookstore, Registrar’s Office, Administration and many more. This year the conference will be held at Vancouver Community College in June 17, 2010.

DELIVERABLES

Conference program booklet.

Mindmapping to explore the theme

Sketching thumbnails

Choosing the right font

Reading about grid structure

Doing some research about golden section

CHALLENGE

Since it is a program booklet, the guide would be heavy on the text and tell the audience what the conference is about while giving lots of information supported by imagery. So the design had to be well balanced with the content by giving audience enough room to breath. My challenge here was to develop a concept, which is simple, mature, (target audience is ranging in ages from 30-60), continuing, well-structured, easy to follow.

Visual

I studied golden spiral as my concept. As Gyorgy Doczi stated in The Power of Limits, 1994: “The power of the golden section to create harmony arises from its unique capacity to unite different parts of a whole so that each preserves its own identity, and yet blends into the greater pattern of a single whole.” So, the squares in golden rectangle represents different colleges/universities on one level and different departments that support staff coming from, such as Library, IT, cafeteria, bookstore, on another level.

Type

Since I decided to use golden spiral as my concept, which is something very classic yet timeless, I decided to use a classic, old style serif typeface for my body type. After all research, prints and decision-making process, I chose Bembo for my body font. It was a typeface with a minimal variation in thick and thin stroke weight and had a small x-height. It is a very legible type and a good choice for expressing classic beauty and formal tradition. It was reading well in large amounts of text and was an excellent book face.

In such a classical concept like golden spiral, Bembo was a good choice for body text but the one for headings had to have a good type contrast with such a classic typeface. To be able to go well with a classical typeface, a sans serif font had to have some geometric qualities in it. Avenir was a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988. The name ‘Avenir’ was a French word for “future” and was taking its inspiration from early geometric sans-serif typeface Erbar (1926) and Futura (1927).

While my body text was representing the past written with a classical old typeface, my headings would be referring to the future written with a sans-serif typeface. And golden spiral involved both qualities: very classical yet it also belongs to future.