Final Social Media Summary

As of today, My twelve days of Christmas only has one more post to do, that I can't do until just before deadline tomorrow. Below, you can see how it's gone so far...

As well as the twelve days of Christmas on the Comic Nest accounts, I've also been working on promo-ing my work and our UniQube exhibition through my personal accounts and the official Staffordshire University accounts that I have access to through work. Below, you can see a post from my personal Instagram story, and a tweet on the Staffs Students account that has been retweeted to the main Staffs Uni page...

Designing a Poster in a Group

With our work from this semester being exhibited in the UniQube, our class split into small teams ro create posters promo-ing the opening night! Katy and I teamed up with Alex (starsinmycoffee) to produce our little poster that incorporated our characters, the uni, comics, and all the relevant information.

Below, you can see what I was sent by Katy and Alex to add my design elements to. I think they did a really great job with the illustrations and was immediately really excited to have a play with adding my work to it!

With my job in marketing, it made sense for me to work on the graphic design and typography. I really liked the plain background with the portal, so I just added a wall texture to it, and reduced the opacity of the portal over the top. As for the font, I chose a very stereotypical 'comic title' font, added harsh shadow and outlined it by hand. I also added a thick red border to tie the colours together more with the university branding.

Something that I personally really wanted to play with in this was closer, more clustered text, as my typography is usually quite spaced with wide kerning, so I wanted to go out of my comfort zone a bit. I'm really happy with how this worked out! As well as this, I wanted to go with the magazine masthead style of putting the characters in front of the text, but the rest of the image behind. I really love how our poster worked out in the end!

UniQube Exhibition Progress

While Katy was finishing up her animation, it was my responsibility to organise the exhibition layout. Initially, I had lots of discussions with Claire about what was and was not possible to include, to ensure our exhibition space was in keeping with everyone else's. For example, as our comic is set in a museum/art gallery, we wanted to use real frames, but Claire advised against this. To combat this, we decided to create frames out of foam board, so it was still technically in-keeping.

Initially, I drew up a plan of the layout I wanted for the work, to send through to Claire to get her approval and ensure it would work in the UniQube...

Once our layout was signed off by Claire, It was down to deciding on the content. For the script + matching page, I chose page 14, as this page wasn't changed too much from my original script, and was short enough that the script all fit on one page. This was also the time when I wrote the blurb, which I actually found really difficult! While writing the comic description was easy, I found the paragraphs about Katy and I really difficult to work with and add the right information into.

Once everything had been decided on, I wanted to retest the layout with the actual images, which you can see below...

After this, it was just a matter of printing and mounting on foam board. As we'd already planned to prop out the bulk of our content with one extra small prop of foam board below it, Katy and I discussed it and decided to use two layers of little prop pieces on the frames, so that they stood out more, like actual frames.

You can see the final, fully mounted display below...

Other Design Elements

Katy and agreed at the start of the project that I would cover graphic design responsibilities, as well as sorting any little elements we forget to mention in the initial plan. This lead to me being responsible for the inside covers, extra pages, and back cover.

For the extra pages and back inside cover, we utilised the other cover ideas Katy had had initially. The original plan was to have matching inside covers, front and back, but when I was experimenting with Katy's alternative covers, I found the wraparound idea she had would work perfectly across the back page and inside cover. I then added a little of my altered typography to the other idea to make it into a sort of final page (below).

After this, I focused on the inside cover design. I knew I wanted this to be fairly simply, as it lead straight into the first page. For this, I thought of the key imagery I could associate with our book - portal, Gord's coat, paw prints, frames - and started playing with ideas. Firstly, I made a tweed tartan texture (below).

 From here, I wanted to try setting a paw print into the texture. So I drew up a basic print and used a gradient tool to give it a bit of depth (below). After this, I found I really didn't like the final result, and it didn't at all line up with the idea I had in my head.

I then came up with the idea of using this page for dedications. I had a think of how best to approach this, and decided to work with the idea of it being Gord's coat, and add a label. For this, I searched for some free for commercial use, no credit textures and set them into my initial layout. I then added little stitches and a bit of tone to make the label stand up. This led me to the final inside cover that you can see below. I'm really proud of this, actually, and think it really works with the theme of the comic.

After this, I focused on the back cover. Initially for this, we had just planned to have it mainly blank (probably black with our contact information at the bottom). But I decided to have a think before settling on this and came up with the idea that - because the from cover is 'framed' - the back cover should be the back of the frame. For this, I had to do a little research into what vintage framing looked like. I used Katy's frame, drew a paper layer over it slightly (and added a royalty free texture), drew in and hand textured some rope and metal fixtures, and then had to consider where we'd put our contact info. I decided it would be cool to have it on a sticky label that had been partially removed, to make it look old. I drew this us myself but using a white rectangle and using an airbrush eraser and fiddling with opacity a bit. Finally, I added the text and a royalty free Instagram logo. You can see the final back cover below.

Cover and Masthead Ideas - Final

This is our completed cover. I used the same font throughout (something I hadn't originally intended to do), and outlined it by hand each time to give it more character. All in all, I'm very happy with how my typography worked out in this cover and I think the masthead works well with the cover, but also stands alone quite well.

Cover and Masthead Design - Development

While I stated in my previous design post that the font used is too 'spooky', I came up with the idea of using this font to make it look like the painting was torn away to show the wood below. You can see the variations of this below. While I can sort of see how this idea would work, it really flopped with the cover we chose. It blended in far too much and just looked really unprofessional.

After this, I chose a new free-for-commercial-use font and started experimented with this. I personally found this really flat. To combat this, I decided to try playing with the texture and colour of the shadow, and integrated some brighter colours (specifically the colours of the time portals). While I loved the use of extra colour (below), I still felt it was really lacking.

Because of how long I'd worked on this with no success, I decided to go back and do some research into how other people appealed to the same, young demographic as ours with their logos. I noted a lot of them had a large, block background that the text was set over. There also seemed to always be a lot of movement in the mastheads/logos too, as shown below.

I then utilised this research and applied it to my next designs. For these, I asked Katy to doodle me some portals, selected the one I felt fit the best with the balance of the cover, and then overlayed my text and lined it in the same green as the base portal (you can see this initial design on the left). I then flipped some colours around to see what worked best and settled on white text with a black border (bottom). I also consulted Katy at this point, who agreed with my decision.

Despite being really satisfied with this design, I wanted to test a few more things out to make sure I wasn't missing out on a potentially better design! For this, I started to have a play with gradients (below). I eventually decided that these looked a little too generic and stereotypical.

App Finalisation - What Went Wrong

At this point, as stated was a possibility at the start of the semester, I am having to push the app to the side. While it was a nice to have a play, due to how small my budget was and how little time I had to learn coding/app building, it wasn't a very realistic expectation that things would pan out flawlessly.

The main issue I encountered was actually privacy issues with the app builder I used. Though it sold itself as being quick and simple to publish your app once you paid the subscription fee, it was the opposite of this. Upon subscribing (for £15 for just one month), I found that there was no way I could download my app and publish it in the Google Store myself (despite them advertising this), and instead I would have to provide all login and access information for my personal Google Account, which I was understandably uncomfortable with.

However, I did manage to download a test of my app before cancelling my Appy Pie subscription. It worked exactly as intended, meaning that when I have the time, money and external assistance, it's immediately ready to publish! You can see a video of this below (click the video title for better quality)...