Tag Archives: Idea development

Exercise: Chance Housing Association

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Exercise: Chance Housing Association (Graphic Design One: pg. 119)

The Chance Housing Association has been set up to try and help first time buyers get onto the housing ladder and they want a brand image for their stationery. It is important to them that the Association is seen as being different from the other local housing associations – more modern, more helpful, and definitely welcome to young people wanting to buy a home.

They want to use their logo on their letterhead and office stationery and it will also be used somewhere on the sheets that hold the property details. It also needs to be reproducible in the local newspaper and professional trade magazines.

mindmap for a housing association logo

Chance Housing mindmap

I started the process by mind mapping and doing some research. Research into first time buyers brought up a number of characteristics:

  • 65% of first time buyers come from the top 40% of earners (2015/16)
  • First time buyers tend to be older as a result of the rising costs of housing
  • There are a range of schemes on offer to help first time buyers:
    • Shared ownership: Household income of less than £80k
    • Help to buy: starter homes (under 40s), get a minimum discount off market price
    • Rentplus: rent to buy

The brief for Chance Housing Association (CHA) suggests their client range is likely to fall within the Help to Buy age range. Younger buyers who are probably struggling to get on the housing ladder.

The mind mapping threw up two areas that I wanted to think about – the physical structure of buildings and the emotional aspects of buying your first home. A time of excitement but also of anxiety, marking a milestone. This reflects CHA’s brief about wanting to be seen as supportive and helpful.

I also researched the logos and brand identities of other housing associations and organisations involved in social housing, and several characteristics emerged:

  • Many use acronyms, usually where they do their name in full is also included
  • Some are just text but most include a symbol
  • Most are sanserif
  • The most common symbols seems to be a house or roof structure
  • The predominant colours are blue and green
  • Some include three or more colours, particularly if they are concerned with diversity

The colour schemes are interesting; I think the dominance of blues and greens is about projecting an image of safety, security and trustworthiness.

To be different the CHA logo perhaps needed to include:

  • Bright and warm toned colours
  • Not to include a building structure
  • Serif typeface
  • Be within a bounding box or frame of some sort

I did a lot of sketching, playing with type layout and exploring different symbols. Some of which conform to the sector characteristics and some that are less conventional. There were a couple beginning to emerge for a shortlist, I particularly liked the idea of some the symbols being the shape of arrows and houses, symbolising moving up as well as pointing to CHA.

I wasn’t sure I quite had what I wanted and went back to the mind map, from which I picked up the notion of architecture and structure. I then did some sketches developing the letters into what could be blueprints or floor plans.

That led me on to thinking about square typefaces and I found several that I thought could work that I downloaded from Dafont.

I then moved on to developing some of the sketches in Illustrator. I was really pleased with the ‘Cubic’ typeface (Logo set 1) but felt that ‘Squared Display’ probably looked too much like a nightclub logo. It was interesting to note at this point how much more comfortable I am now with scrolling through lots of typefaces and seeing them as a source for inspiration as much as images and layouts.

Logo set 2 is based on my own designs using the idea of a floor plan. I was pleased with how they developed and that the idea could be worked up. I think they look quite contemporary and are different to other logos in the sector but in the end I wasn’t sure how legible they would be.

Logo set 3 played on the house/arrow idea using strokes and fill and different colourways. Although they are very clean I am not sure these are distinctive enough and perhaps don’t have quite the right tone.

Logo set 4 were just experiments with different decorative typefaces, again playing on the notion of architecture and buildings.

I decided that Logo set 1 was the approach I would develop into the stationery and publicity materials. I was a bit concerned about the yellow and it was problematic when I photocopied the stationery so I added a grey stroke which seems to work fine. I like the way the ‘h’ of CHA echoes a house and they resemble a honeycomb, the hive as a home. I also think it is distinctive against the other housing association logos I looked at.

Chance Housing Association Stationery

 

CHA and other housing association logos

As I developed the stationery it really highlighted the issues that you need to address, the nature of the information to be included, legibility and readability, setting the tone and so on. I knew using yellow might be an issue so I photocopied the results at different points. This led to adapting the logo (without the box) so that it still works when printed or photocopied in black and white.

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Assignment Five: Your Choice, Part One

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Assignment Five: Your Choice, Part One – Idea Development

Brief 1: Book Design

Penguin Books have asked you to design anew house style for a collection of books on design for children and young people. They are starting with three titles: Colour, Typography and Photographs. Produce three covers – front, back and spine. The designs need to be recognisable as a series and at the same time be appreciated for their individual merits. The book dimensions are 190mm wide by 225mm high.

In addition they have asked you to produce the one on Typography, called A is for…Create an introductory chapter of at least four pages.

I started by defining the brief a little further. Children and Young People is a very broad market and it is unlikely a design for five years olds will work for fifteen year olds. I decided the market would be primarily Young Adult (defined as 12 – 18yrs; Young Adult Library Services).

I had already done some background research on Penguin Books, and having read ‘Penguin by Design,’(Baines & Pearson, 2005) I felt like I had plenty of scope for developing the designs. While they needed a degree of consistency, the cover designs could draw on a range of influences. Although Penguin is mostly associated with orange spines, it has used patterns and other colours so this didn’t feel too restrictive.

I then did my usual in terms of sketching ideas and thinking about the themes I might use to develop the designs.

I was a bit put off by the fact that the Typography book seemed to have a double title – both ‘Typography’ and ‘A is for…’ so in my sketches I played with some examples where they all had a title. But this also seemed inconsistent, why would you have a book on colour called ‘C is for…’ when the one on typography is ‘A is for…’? I was also a bit worried that the title might locate it in a much younger age group and could therefore be in tension with the age group I had chosen to work with. It seemed to me that this meant the cover needed to be eye catching enough to be taken off the shelf and explored.

During Section Four I found three books on typography that were both helpful and enjoyable:

  • Typography Workbook (Samara, 2004)
  • Playing with Type (McCormick, 2013)
  • How to Draw Type and Influence People (Hyndman, 2017)

The two activity books were particularly good for engaging me and were a bit more playful than some of the other resources I had found, which seemed to get very technical very quickly and I found a bit daunting as a non-specialist. I decided I would take a similar approach to encourage young readers to play with typography. I did a bit more research and found that Penguin do produce activity books so it would be in keeping with the brief.

I did more research around typography books for young people and found very little, apart from the truly delightful ‘Serif Fairy’ (Siegfried & Mann, 2007) I broadened the research to graphic design and found a few more titles, but not many – definitely a gap in the market!

Layout examples:

  • Typography Workbook – 230mm x 230mm, 3 column grid
  • Penguin by Design – 185mm x 220mm, 3-column grid
  • Playing with Type – 235mm x 235 mm, mainly 2 column grid
  • How to Draw Type… – 270mm x 230mm, layout is varied – single column to three
  • Graphic Design for Kids – 210mm x 230mm, two column grid

This seemed to imply that the dimensions I was working with were narrower than the other activity books I had seen. A challenge, but hopefully not insurmountable!

References:

Baines, P., & Pearson, D. (2005). Penguin by design: a cover story 1935-2005: Penguin Press.

Hyndman, S. (2017). How to Draw Type and Influence People: an activity book. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd.

McCormick, L. (2013). Playing with Type: 50 graphic experiments for exploring typographic design principles. Beverley, MA: Rockport Publishers.

Samara, T. (2004). Typography workbook: a real-world guide to using type in graphic design: Rockport Publishers.

Siegfried, R., & Mann, J. (2007). The Serif Fairy. New York: Mark Batty Publisher.

 

 

Assignment Three: Reflections on Tutor Feedback

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I wasn’t sure what to expect from my Part Three feedback because it has been an up and down section. I have found elements of the unit invigorating and exciting, while other aspects felt like a bit of a slog. It was good to read that my tutor felt that ‘overall your response to part three has been very good, with a number of excellent aspects to your practice.’

My use of Pinterest and other visual diaries were acknowledged, and I have been encouraged to cross fertilise my source of inspiration rather than leave them residing in separate boxes. This is something I will now explore further.

My tutor raises an interesting point about my symbols for ‘Reading Image’ being more like illustrations. This is a distinction I had not considered but having looked at them again I can see what he means. I may play with them further to see if something else emerges. I was pleased that my background research was recognised:

Undertaking primary research into the universality of symbols with the Thames valley Group was an excellent way of going about this project. This sense of enquiry was echoed in your sketchbook, which felt like it was trying to interrogate the subject as much as respond to it.

I find it interesting that my tutor has picked up on my thumbnails and the hand drawn quality of some of my work. I can see that this drops away when I start using the design software, so appreciate his comment that ‘you might want to think about how you bring more of this quality into your final pieces.’

I am delighted and more than a bit relieved that my ‘Abstract Cities’ was well received, as I noted elsewhere I found this exercise difficult so to know the outcome is acceptable is encouraging. I was also pleased that the montage was seen as a ‘sophisticated piece.’ It is one of the pieces I think I was most pleased with.

The feedback on Assignment Three is very helpful in that it has encouraged me to keeping testing, playing and exploring options.

The sense of fascination with the various permutations is evident in the work, and is pushing you towards a much more playful way of designing.

I do enjoy playing with different options but recognise I have to keep a balance between multiple iterations and finishing a piece! My tutor has also encouraged me to use my sketchbooks more to develop my work away from the projects, which I am sure will be helpful.

I am grateful for the suggestions to explore areas of interest in more work and to look at other designers, such as:

Particularly helpful are the pointers for the section on Typography, they encourage me to keep experimenting and to bring together my areas of interest to date. I appreciate this because I was concerned the next section would be quite ‘technical’ and therefore have a different feel to it.