Rationale

The theme for my brochure is “Places to go alone” in Wellington. I wanted it to have a quiet, refined feel to it, and to convey the (not entirely negative) feeling of being alone.

I did an illustration for each page of a terrarium representing the location, each with their own shape, such as the even cube for the gallery. They also contain something relevant to the place, such as trees or animals, as a more literal element. I wanted these to represent a separated portion of the place, only big enough for one, and removed from the rest of the world.

Each location also has a hatching pattern associated with it, representing the feel of the place; an organized grid for the gallery, rough diagonal stripes for the zoo, and a curving bush-like squares for the gardens. The hatching in both the patterns and illustration was also used to leave an openness to the pages that would have been broken by large blocks of solid colour.

For my layouts, I wanted to keep things spread out and make use of white space to keep the feeling of ‘alone’. Colour wise, I kept my palette to black, white, and the one theme colour assigned to that location. The colours are muted tones to give a reserved feeling. Together, this kept my spreads simple and quiet.

Week 6

It's the final week of working. I talked with Jason for the first time in a while and got some critique on my map, which I hadn't touched since week 2, and increased my leading for readability. I also changed out a couple of the older hatching patterns for some that better fit where the rest of the brochure now is.

I got some final tips from Jason, but overall I'm pretty happy with where my design is, so I'm not going to change it too drastically any more. I also need to be working on other assignments, so I'll have it printed on Tuesday and ready for hand in.

Week 5 Thursday

We had a printing shop come in and talk to us today about printing and how to set up our documents.

Phoebe talked to me about my layouts. I still need to bring it back a bit, open up my designs, and make my font smaller.

Week 5 - Monday (2nd Interim Critique)

We had another interim critique today of our whole booklet so far.

One of the comments Jason made about my work was that it was very busy, and to look at using white space more. Luiz also suggested that I try blacking out a box around the text to seperate it from the background a bit more.

In general, Phoebe and Jason suggested going back to our FDPs and reapplying them to our designs.

Break - Week 2

I've drawn some new hatching patterns to use in my work.

[insert photo when on home computer]

I've also been attempting to create a cover page; not going well. My other pages are working for me because they have body text, which the cover doesn't have. I like my illustration though, so I'm going to keep working with it.

Break - Week 1

I drew up a new illustration to use for the cover and played around with my compositions.

I've been having issues with the layout of the cover, as my other pages rely on the balance of text and image, whereas the cover has no body text to work with. I'm going to make some more textures to work with over the week, as I'm not super happy with some of the ones I have.

[image source]

Week 4 - Thursday

I haven't had much time since Monday to change around my designs, but I have done up my illustrations based on the critiques from Monday, including:

• making the frame lines thinner
• making the Botanic garden illustration look more reminiscent of the location.
• adding some colour

I had a brief talk with Phoebe and made note of what to work on over the semester break.

Week 4 - Monday (Interim Critique)

Today was the interim critique, so we got a chance to look at everyone's work from our class and the others. This was super useful for me to see how other people were handling things, especially others that were primarily using illustration.

We also had one-on-one critiques with a classmate, and then Phoebe, looking closely at our designs and what could be better. We had quite a long time to do this so we really got to break down the designs and what could be better.

Mainly for me, I've got to try out more line textures, play around with text placement and better fonts, and make my pages less grid-y. There's also the map page, but we'll be discussing maps after the break, so I'm not going to focus on that just yet.

Week 2 - Visiting my locations

(Forgot to publish this a few weeks ago)
Over the weekend I visited the locations I decided on in week 1; the city library + gallery, the waterfront, and the Botanic Gardens.

- Library wasn't as quiet as I thought
- Waterfront was super busy and loud cause of weekend markets
- Gallery was very quiet, very empty; good location.
- Botanic gardens were also a good fit; quiet, pretty, people widely spread.

On Tuesday I decided to take a look at the Wellington Zoo as another potential location. It was quieter than expected, and as it is a very big location, it never felt like there was too many people despite there being families there.

After all this, I've decided that my 3 final locations are going to be:
- City Gallery
- Botanic Gardens
- Wellington Zoo
as they're all good fits for my theme (quiet places to be alone), spread out in terms of location, and with different focuses (plants, animals, art).

Week 3 Thursday

- Looked at everyone's work
- Worked on our own stuff
- One on one with Phoebe
- Talked about paragraphing
- Still sickish.

For Monday:
- Two location spreads
- Either Wellington or Art/Culture spread

Week 3 Monday

I was unfortunately very sick all weekend, and Monday as well, so I didn't get anything done from Thursday and had to leave class early. I stuck around long enough for the class critique though.

I've got all the work I need to do, but I need to catch up a lot this week and probably over the weekend.

Week 2 Thursday

Today I had a bunch of photos printed and put together some quick compositions in class and critiqued them. We then looked at a bunch of design books and identified the mood of certain images and why/how that mood was made.

I've still got a lot of work to do on my compositions, since I'm not hugely happy with them. The material I had on me didn't make for great collage.

Week 2 Monday

Today we looked at the design inspiration brought in by the class. We were meant to do collages but not enough of us brought/printed loose material so we did a lot of drawing of our objects in different styles and materials to generate ideas.

Before Thursday I have to print out a bunch of photos from my weekend visits and maybe gather more if I have the time.

Week 1

First week back at uni, we spent the time getting familiar with the course and current brief. We brainstormed different potential themes and locations for our brochures and ended the week with a list of places to go out and research over the weekend.

My final choice is "Quiet Day Out"; quiet places to go alone. I've limited myself to places within the city and my current locations are the Botanical Gardens, Wellington City Library, and the Waterfront, though I also have my eye on the City Gallery as another option. I'm going to visit these places over the weekend to research more, take photos, and get ideas.