JKG Designs

Over the course of this 16/17 week project I didn’t expect to end up having to create a piece of work so complicated technically within the design. It has made me as a designer push myself outside the box in area’s I didn’t intend to do at all. The start of project was a haze, this was the last brief we were given as vis com students and was a project we were told to start thinking about at the start of the academic year due to how it is 60% of our grade. There was a lot of experimentation and a lot of thinking outside of the box. I found myself having to think of the most bizarre idea’s possible, it was probably the trickiest projects to get going seeing as I was starting with such an open brief, with minimal direction from the brief given. When it came down to what I wanted to do, I for certain knew that this wasn’t going to be a very straight forward pathway all the way to the end. Once I had looked back at what I favoured producing over the years, I picked out my favourite projects and broke them apart bit by bit to see if I could get anything out of them.  The one project that sparked off the concept of information design and wanting to go down that route was the Translate and transform project we did at the beginning of this final year. I have always had a passion for the mountains and over the years I have become more attracted to information design more than any other areas of design. I could relate to a little bit more due to how it was a field of practice I am fond of. I love working with data and creating into a piece of work I can put in my portfolio is promising. This project was the longest one I have done, the project was structured well, but I found myself at end struggling to fit everything in in terms of getting my book printed and finalised. Due to the amount of departments that had a handle on my book, I found myself running out of time therefore needing an extension. In terms of the write ups and back checks, I managed to keep up with my main check points on my less descriptive time plan like the one in my learning agreement. Comparing research to development, looking back at it now it was for certain a 70/30 situation, with development taking the 70% of my time. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, my problem was, was that I kept changing my mind on what I wanted to produce (and editorial or a design piece) and this cut into my production time of my final piece. I learnt a lot of new things whilst doing this project. I learnt how to properly set up for a laser cut machine and educated myself properly in how to bind a book with a hard cover on it. Looking back over the course of the weeks, I have thoroughly enjoyed this final project at AUB. I have learnt so many new things technically, and logistically. I managed to intertwine a chosen theme has come very much from the heart, and managed to transform it into a form of information design, my favoured area of design. There were however, some areas of my design process that I would work on for future projects but compared to past projects I feel as if I have improved it by bit in each aspect of a design process. Like any designer, with more practice comes more skill within the process of a project.

These are the final images of my design piece. I am delighted with the outcome of it all and how its come together. The process of it has been longer than expected but was all worth it as I am extremely pleased with the way it looks. I took thee photos in the photography studio and because I am limited with how many photos I can upload I have chosen a couple of my favourites for this specific post. These images reflect on how the book works and show off the main aspect of the book which is the laser cut in the middle seeing as it is the topography of the location. I ended up giving it an open spine due to the thickness of the book and a harsh grey fabric cover to match the theme of the book. 

This here is a virtual mock up of one section of my book. I thought it would be a good idea to start printing off now to check everything can be read clearly, especially how i am planning to print white onto black which is uncommon. 

Just a couple more images of the process.

I ended up putting my book into a hard cover and binding it with perfect bind and an open spine, These images here show the procedure. I had never created a hard cover for a project of mine before so this was all new to me. It was a lot of fun to create, especially seeing how it was all coming together after such a long time.

This here is an example of one of the pages I had to set up before printing. It shows the alignment of the laser cut dots that I had to set up for the laser cut guy to make sure he can perfectly cut out the hole in my book. I was told to set up at least 3 dots but due to the logistics of the way I'm printing it I’ve had to put 6 dots on each page.

These are my final pages printed on 200gsm white silk untrimmed A3 paper. As you can see, I had to make it very clear for the camera on the laser cutter to find the black dots for alignment

Whilst I was having my final flicks through my pages, I noticed that the introductory of each set of data looked a bit bare. I ended up giving the pages more character, so along side the ski runs I added tree’s to make it look like the the ski runs are going through the trees like on a realsitic ski trail.

As well as showing the data in a more minimalistic way, I thought it would be a good idea to round off everything at the end so I ended up creating a couple of spreads at the back of my book with the accurate figures, per week, per month, per lift. 

These here are all of the ski runs I drew on procreate that I ended up putting into process book. I grabbed them all from the Sainte Foy piste map, sketched over them in procreate and then put them into indesign to play around with the placement of them all. I wanted the backdrop of some of the pages to have more to them as I thought originally they were too bare. 

After having a lot of discussions with mulitple people about the logistics of my book and what would be the best way to go about it, I updated and finalised the important figures for my book. I upped the weight in my pages because the amount of pages I and changed from 100 to 72 and I wanted to keep the illusion of the topography strong throughout the book. 

After leaving my content for a bit, I came back to it and rearranged it all so it didn't look so much like a graph. I also changed the icons and made them bigger so it can be read and understood more clearly. As you can see I have also change the body text font. I did this because the coded font was a. bit heavy on the eye to read so I switched it to a much lighter font - Omnes.

This spread here shows the first attempt at plotting in my different sets of data around the laser cut hole. As you can see I switched from the basic graph look to a more cut down minimalistic look of a graph. I have used dots to represent the data throughout the book to make it more simplified.

This is a trial of how I could fit my content around the laser cut hole. I quickly learnt that this would come with many problems if the laser cutting didn’t go to plan. This idea stemmed from the digital layers of the physical sculpture I did. Unfortunately I didn't want to risk this configuration just in case the laser cutting didn't go exactly to plan.

This here is a mock up of the introductory page for my book. This stemmed from my first couple of visuals that I did weeks ago. I used the same format but just edited it to fit the factual information about Sainte Foy. 

These here are the logistics of my book at this current date. I regularly kept note of all the changes in the logistics of my books I didn't get lost.

These here are a couple of mock ups I came up with that involve the ski runs with Sainte Foy. The idea behind this was because I wanted to give the illusion of the inverted topography within my book, there had to be a fair few pages to get some sort of thickness to it. So by adding in these pages it would effectively bulk the book.