Part 5 – Graphic Design: Core Concepts

Assignment Five: Your choice

This final assignment is an opportunity to consolidate the understanding you’ve gained so far, reflect on the work you’ve enjoyed and your achievements. It allows you to create certain parts of the brief yourself so that you have the maximum capacity to show off your interests and talents. Choose one of the briefs below. Then…

Exercise: The French Hen

Newton and Ridley, the brewers best known for their pub, The Rovers Return, are opening a cafe/wine bar nearer the city centre. The bar is designed to appeal to younger women and sophisticated young men. The brewery has identified a gap in the market and wants to provide a ’sophisticated and relaxed’ venue for the…

Exercise: Chance Housing Association

The Chance Housing Association has been set up to try and help first time buyers get onto the housing ladder and they want you to develop 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…

Research Point: Logos

How many logos can you name? Macdonalds? Nike? Apple? All huge multinational corporations with millions to spend on building brand recognition. Have a look at logos and see how they work – pay attention to the colour schemes and simple designs. You will probably also find that, although you couldn’t recall them immediately when you…

Exercise: Poster and flyer

This exercise is about how you deal with two different spaces to work in. You have been asked to design an A3 poster and an accompanying double sided A6 flyer to promote a singing course run by an organisation called SingOut (all one word). They have very little money so want to print these posters…

Research point: Posters

Posters have a long and rich history documenting everything from boxing matches to Bollywood films, the Soviet Revolution to punk, encouraging young men to join the army to persuading women to buy bras. There are many collections in books in museums and galleries and on the internet. Find out more about your own particular areas…

Exercise: Birthday List

For this exercise you are going to make up a poster list for yourself. It is intended that you keep it pinned to a noticeboard or wall to remind you of the dates and, as it will be there a long time, it needs to look good. Start by collecting all the birthdays of your…

Exercise: Giving information

Find some examples of information graphics. For example bus timetables, city maps, diagrams or representations of statistical data. Look at the way they are designed and try and work out the decisions the designer made. What can you learn from them and when would it be appropriate to use a similar design solution? For this…

Exercise: Judging a book by its cover

Choose a book by an author you are familiar with. You are going to design two different covers for it, one using illustrations or photography and the other using just type. Design the whole cover including the spine and back page. Include the title of the book, the author’s name, a brief description of the…

Research point: Paperback books

Many hundreds of paperback books have been produced over the years. Look at as many variations as you can find to see how different publishing houses designed their covers and how the covers fit together as a series. Select a particular publishing house and describe their design style in your learning log. OCA Graphic Design:…

Exercise: Magazine pages

Choose a magazine, newspaper or journal and work out the grid or grids they have used. You will probably need to look at least four pages to get a feel of the layout. Measure the size of the pages, the margins, the text columns and the gaps in between them. How many columns do they…