A Designer Dossier

Well another semester of school is over. I feel good about it and I'm ready to take a break over the summer and go back refreshed in the Fall. In the mean time I still have some designs to post.

I realized that through out the semester I've posted several of the project that we did in Typography but nothing from my InDesign class. So today I'm going to post one of my 3 InDesign projects. Over the summer I'll try to get them all up here but for now I'm going to start at the end. Our final InDesign project was to do a Dossier for one of our fellow students. We were assigned a client (the student we were working for) at random and we needed to get to know them and put there work and the qualifications into a document that represented them. So it would basically be a resume but it would very visual representation of their skills.

This was hard at first because there is a very conventional format for a resume but for this kind of dossier just about anything goes. It is all about representing the client and their work the way they want to be represented. So Linh Ly was my client and that worked out really well. We didn't really know each other when we started but she was very easy to work with, she was open to my ideas, and she had a wide variety of really good work for me to use. The first big thing Linh told me about herself is that people usually think she's shy and she wanted me to do something that would show her fun side. I drew up a lot of ideas for her with that in mind but the one I really liked was the idea of making it look as if her she had set her images out on a sheet of notebook paper and then written some notes.

I was thrilled that Linh seemed to really like this idea as well. As soon as I pitched it to her she decided it was what she wanted to go with. From there it was just a mater of bring together the right elements to create that illusion. I started by creating the 'notebook paper' in Adobe Illustrator. It worked out pretty well although as both Bryan and Tom (my instructor) pointed out the 'holes' are a bit large. I meant to go back and fix that I just ran out of time. I placed the Illustrator document on the InDesign master page so it would appear on both pages of the dossier. Then I placed Linh's images in the InDesign document. I had them overlap each other and run off the page as if they had just been set down on the page. Also I made her two favorite pieces quite large to emphasize them. Then I added the text to the gaps between the pictures trying to make it look as if notes had been written in where they would fit. Part of creating this illusion was wrapping the text around the 'holes' and never letting the text run over a picture, although it does sometimes run into the shadows that I added later.

I rearrange the pictures and text a couple of times to give Linh some choices about how she wanted thing laid out. After she picked one I added some finishing details. I created an arrow in Illustrator to point from her Myspace address to the picture of her Myspace page. I scanned a paper clip and adjusted it's image in Photoshop. Then I imported that and made it look as if it was clipping the picture of Linh to the paper. Then finally I added a small drop shadow to each of the pictures to make it appear as if the pictures were sitting on the lined paper and not printed on the lined paper.

My biggest struggle with the whole process was sticking with just what was called for to create the impression that both Lihn and I were looking for. It was tempting to use a lot of fancy InDesign functions just to show that I could. However doing that would have detracted from the design rather that adding to it. I was extremely pleased with how it turned out and Linh and Tom both seemed to be as well. If I can brag just a little (not some thing I usually do) I think this was a great concept and it really highlighted Linh and her work. In his review of the project Tom said "The design is just so unified. I think it is your best piece in terms of design." I agree and I hope I can keep doing work that I feel this good about.

Linh Ly has given me her permission to use her work on this site. It is her copyrighted work and can not be reproduced for any other purpose with out her permission. If you are interested in Linh's work you can visit her Myspace Page @ www.myspace.com/linhypoo

Creating a Book

Yesterday we turned in our final projects for Typography. It was a challenging project but it was also very interesting. We were given text for a book about Giambattista Bodoni (a famous typographer) and we needed to layout the text into a 6 page book. We had to add pictures (some of which were provided), chose our fonts and use all the typographic conversions that we had learned through out the semester to make an interesting layout. We also needed to keep in mind the audience. A book about Bodoni is most likely to be read by designers and designers are more likely to be open to non-standard page layouts. This allowed us to be a little more bold in our designs then we might be other wise.

When I read the text one of the biggest things I got out of it was that Bodoni was more interested in the beauty of his pages than the readability of his type. Well I definitely wanted my type to be readable but with his philosophy in mind I set out to create pages that were attractive but modern. I also wanted to make use of at least a few of the ornaments Bodoni created. I used one very large on the front cover and then repeated it through out the pages. I also used one to separate the images. What I'm showing you are the front cover, the first page (which would start on the right), and a spread of the second and third page. The pages that followed were set up the same as pages 2 & 3, including page 6 which ended alone on the left.

We had to present it in the form of a book and getting the construction down was tricky. Over all it was a great project though. We got to show off a lot of the things we had learned over the course of the semester. I was pretty happy with the way my design turned out. I thought from the very beginning that this class was going to be hard and it was. I learned a ton of stuff though and I'm really glad to have taken it. I'm sure it will help me improve my work a immensely.