C Studio: Design Hero Booklet
We were tasked with creating a booklet for our design hero in InDesign organizing information about their life and work using a table of contents, portraits, a timeline and more designed elements.
Flatplans
Starting off with the booklet, we were assigned to create a booklet and subsequent mobile experience that correlates with our design hero, using our written essay to tell their story with designed elements. The first step was to create initial flat plans of potential spread layouts. I struggled a great deal with creating something with an overarching story attached to the spread, especially when I had so much content to explore and flush out. I started by verbally organizing content based on my essay and then trying to place ideas as they correlate, but a lot of my ideas felt stale and forced almost as if I was trying way to hard to translate motifs from my poster. There was merit in some of my choices:
- having the overlapping S motif as a cover potentially
- using the ampersand as a table of contents
- playing with imaging and a ripped paper effect for the inspiration page
but for the most part it was back to the drawing board after this step.
This was flushing out a bit more thought and some precision in a flat plan and taking what I had done before and abandoning this mindset of curating an overarching story and making each spread a story of its own. I placed some color because I felt confident about using a scheme like this and started thinking about organizing information through better visuals. This is the more final sketched-out flat plan that’s been organized the best possible way to distribute information and have it maintain flow.
Initial Drafts..
I then started working in InDesign placing in information and image. This meant thinking more about color in certain places and how the visualization of information differs per page.
Breaking it Down : Spread 1
The first spread details the table of contents and some introductory information about Walsh:
Walsh was born in 1986 in New York but was raised in Connecticut. She made her first website at 11, discovering coding and a love for design at an extremely young age. She received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, then moved to New York to intern at Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy, turning down a $100,000 position at Apple.
With this spread, I had the idea to use Walsh’s classic ampersand logo fixture and employ it as a way to show the section numbers I had organized: 01- intro, inspiration and process, 02 - sagmeister and walsh, 03 - the creation of &walsh, 04 - client work, 05 - waves of impact. I also extended the ampersand across the spread to provide a place for masked-out sitting Jessica Walshes. It was the first spread I could flush out as the idea came instantly, and I like how the spread is laid out and how the elements balance each other and tell a cohesive story. Obviously, there needed to be live text and other elements, but the idea as a whole held.
Breaking it Down : Spread 2
With the second spread, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to talk about Walsh’s process and how she acquires inspiration for her projects and life in general.
As a whole Walsh practices in print with graphic, photography and illustration design as well as branding, typography, website design, and art installations, blending all formats seamlessly. She speaks of her design process and creative curative tendencies as organized folders of collected ideas. Walsh once stated in an earlier interview “Growing up, I was inspired by my grandmother’s crazy fashion. She didn’t have much money, but she was able to put together these amazing colorful outfits that were so inspiring. When I come across something I find beautiful, I collect it. I take a photo or video of it, tear a page out of a magazine, or copy a passage from a book. For photography and videos, I use Pinterest to organize all my inspirations. I also collect things into an inspiration folder on my Dropbox and organize them by field: sculptures, fashion, psychology, photographs, paintings, nature — as well as by themes: colors, shapes. For writing or text-based inspirations, I organize them in Evernote. I prefer to collect inspirations from fields outside of design: art, film, furniture, or literature. The more varied and obscure your inspiration is, the fresher your work will feel.”
As she talks about ripping from magazines and also organizing digital information through folders I planned to experiment with collage effects that layer ripped paper with maybe magazine covers of hers or other forms of her more editorial work with labeled folders either underlaid or scattered around.
Then I brought it into InDesign and started placing in text and imagery as a whole, bringing basic visualization of my ideas to fruition.
Breaking it Down : Spread 3
The third spread will be dedicated to her time at Sagmeister & Walsh, and I wanted to use a portrait of theirs in accompaniment with many of the projects that came to fruition at the agency.
After a year at Pentagram, she then moved on to Print Magazine, where she had her work featured in the New York Times and The New Yorker. She then met Stefan Sagmeister in 2010, a very well-known and eccentric designer and typographer based in New York, who founded his own firm Sagmeister Inc. specifically curating design for the music industry. After seeing Walsh’s portfolio, he offered her a job, and within two years, she became a partner at 25, changing the firm’s name to Sagmeister & Walsh.
Her bold and provocative, often surrealist style took on new waves when working at Sagmeister as she continued to prove to clients her daring and modern approaches had a great deal to offer. With Sagmeister, she collaborated on Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh, a five-month exhibition that explored the concept of happiness, at the Jewish Museum in March 2013. During this year, Walsh also worked on a project called 40 Days of Dating, a social experiment involving dating a fellow designer for 40 days documented on a blog then turned into a book, and it went viral. Prominent clients also included, Parle Agro, Izze, and Bombay Sapphire.
At the agency however, Walsh was met with misogyny in the workplace and consistent underminement by clients and other designers. “When I was named partner with Stefan at the age of 25, many men and women said (publicly!) that I only got the position because I slept with him. Can you imagine them saying that about a man? Then as a partner, I was ignored and talked down to by older men in more meetings more than I care to remember.” She was adamant to expand beyond the boxes created for her as a woman in the industry and only saw one means to accomplish it.
I was starting to think about how best to showcase the work in a way that would be different from what was to come in spread 5 (the &Walsh client works section). I was thinking about using a gridding system that had masked out work within it to show the restriction Walsh felt working at Sagmeister & Walsh compared to the freedom she felt afterward.
I then brought it into Indesign and experimented, incorporating basic image, section folios and pages, as well as positioning of type overall.
Breaking it Down : Spread 4
With this spread, I wanted to introduce &Walsh through branding Walsh created in conjunction with the founding of her agency. She had very punchy, experimental, and three-dimensional approaches with the branding as a whole, and I wanted to showcase that.
Walsh left Sagmeister & Walsh to form her own firm in 2019, &Walsh, something she had dreamed about since she was a teenager. Speaking about the transition in a personal article published with the launch of her agency, explaining her insecurity over the venture on her own but also excitement and gratitude for being in a position to head her own firm, given that 0.1% of creative agencies are women-owned. “I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for this privileged position I’ve found myself in. Very few women make it to creative leadership positions and even fewer have founded their own creative agencies.. I’m excited to build an agency that provides mentorship and equal opportunity for all to learn and grow creatively and climb the ranks towards leadership.” At it’s core, this was Walsh’s dream, and she actualized it in record time for any designer, but especially a woman undermined at every point in her career. “Even when we achieve success, our legitimacy is doubted… However, this is a dream I’ve had since I was young, and I worked my ass off non-stop, round the clock to make this a reality.”
I was playing around with some of the imagery I had used in iterations of my poster, trying to place in certain elements that felt representative of the brand and the agency’s overall branded aesthetic.
When bringing it into InDesign, I started working more with actual imagery, masking out some of her branded works. But that led me to reconsider some of my choices, specifically this breaking of a frame imagery I was playing with as my centerpiece and how the spread lacked the oomph needed for a center spread.
Breaking it Down: Spread 5
With the client work spread, I wanted to expand the idea of displaying a breadth of work and provide a more fun way of showcasing it, almost resembling this idea of breaking free of constriction and liberating oneself, like Walsh seemingly did.
&Walsh is relatively new but already boasts clients such as Parle Agro, India’s largest beverage company, Ted for 2020’s TedCountdown, Google I/O, Netflix, and more. The work her agency provides for its clients is beyond innovative, with refined modern themes, using color and typography in refreshing and thoughtful manners. Her work has inspired a new wave of design that uses metallic 3D renderings, giving a certain quality of modernity and contemporary flair to newer design works. There is always bold and expressive use of color in her works that maintain thought and precision to the client it’s for. She doesn’t shy away from color when it may not always be expected, exemplified in her work with leafy greens company Plenty that uses bright reds, purples, and yellows for its branding. Her thought process was “Imagin(ing) fruits and veggies replacing chips and soda…Rather than sticking to typical healthy green visual cues, we took inspiration from desirable food categories, which reflects in both the identity and packaging work,” a refreshing and smart choice and tactic.
The overlapped placement of combined masked images of &Walsh work was the idea for the spread in terms of the visual effect I wanted to create, to provide an almost collage like feel but not the exact collage effect thatw would be created in spread 1.
Bringing it into Indesign, I placed out areas for type and image as well as section number. The masked effect was planned to stack on top of each other in this format.
Breaking it Down: Spread 6
The timeline section was one that came later in terms of ideating and was only initialized past the flat plan stage. Walsh’s website uses a series of varying handcrafted ampersands throughout as identifiers and ways to label works, as well as in her agency’s branded materials. I thought this would be a great element that could be replicated and used as a piece of a timeline that would come together, each ampersand being a distinct moment in Walsh’s life and career.
I did this through Illustrator, tracing and then inflating the ampersands through 3D materials because the ampersands themselves taken from teh site would be too low-res.
I then brought these elements into Indesign and started thinking about how they could be placed without really finessing too much at this point in time.
Breaking it Down: Spread 7
Spread 7 felt like it had the least nailing down of ideas early on but the section is called waves of impact so I knew it had to have some sort of wave feature that would highlight her most impactful works and her significance to me; ie why I chose her as my hero.
Walsh’s ethos implies the creation of design and creative work that makes a positive impact, including the environment the work is created in. She has curated an environment that supports all individuals and causes of the utmost importance. She founded Wine & Design, a nonprofit organization that brings together women and non-binary creatives together to engage in discussion of advice and encouragement.The organization has 273 local chapters around the world.
Walsh has designed covers for The New York Times Magazine, specifically for pieces on the women’s march movement and the protection of women’s rights. She brings social advocacy to her personal social media platform, through inventive designed messages that advocate for important and relevant causes. Walsh supports the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, working for clients that do the sames such as Milly, a fashion print magazine that created an issue, creatively directed by Walsh, celebrating inclusivity and queer joy.
When founding the agency a guiding principle she mentioned was, “Using (my) privilege to continue to give back to the world and to our amazing community in bigger ways. This means putting a focus on social initiatives that champion and amplify underrepresented voices, to pass on what I’ve learned to others and to give back to those less privileged.”
Walsh’s work is bright and inspirational, not just because of the design choices made but because of what it stands for. She is my design hero because she is authentic with the advice she gives, and encourages women to pursue their every dream because they deserve to accomplish them. She has taken modernity past the canvas actively working to design for and uplift groups that have been cast aside.
This led to the creation of a wave pattern and a general idea of where that would be placed.
This more or less translated into a similar image for the Indesign version but just with text and the section number.
Breaking it Down: Covers
The cover originally came to me quite fast, as I immediately wanted to use the SS motif I had created in the poster with the ss’s in Jessica. I also was able to come up with the color scheme for that pretty instinctively and curate something that felt like a direction I could move forward in.
We are definitely getting somewhere..
So with all of this planning I had to actually get image onto the page, which was generally the hardest part. It required a MASSIVE amount of masking that took hours on end and made me generally pretty adept with Photoshop because of the sheer time I spent using the different selection tools and the little dotted ant lines that would line my sectioned-off images. Here are some pngs I created in this process.
With all of this though the hardest consolidation was that second spread, first section, because it required the most experimentation and learning curve on my part.
Section 01(inspiration+process):
It started by finding the proper mockup that would allow for the ripped paper effect I wanted to provide with the magazine rips. I found one that would work well and allowed me to manipulate the internal areas as smart objects. I then went to Jessica Walsh’s Pinterest to find her real inspiration and things she’s curated for her projects as a source of inspo.
So I gathered some of the more interesting ones and started collaging.
I then went into my own computer and made folders that correlated with the exact method of organization Walsh details in an interview creating mac desktop folders for paintings, sculptures, typography, literature, etc. and screenshotting them to mask out in separate photoshop files and place over the collage, assembled in the “edit smart object” section of the file. I placed them to somewhat correspond with the subsequent inspiration.
I then took it into Indesign and started placing color and type as well as the pull quote that tied the concepts together. I lastly had a stroke of inspo that led to adding dots colored the same colors as the file color-coded organizational circles. The background color lined up with the mist prominent inspiration piece “the f*** you cancer” spread and I though an eggplant purple would contrast that nicely without detracting from the circle elements. This landed as a decent spread on the first go and required minimal touch-ups along the way with no real stark changes.
Section 02 (sagmeister & walsh):
I then started to put in image in a more systematic gridded way that used similar sizing of the masked objects to imply the rigidity Walsh felt working for men who constantly undermined her leadership capabilities. Overall though background wise and the spacing felt off, like it was missing something but I decided to move on to the center spread which required an entire overall in idea. The hot pink accent felt in line with the colors in the work but I was still reworking the background color; it didn’t quite land.
Section 03 (the creation of &Walsh):
So with the center spread I decided to rethink it as a whole and was brought back to something Francis said to me during the very first flatplan discussion, it was generally that Walsh has really theatrical dramatic presentations with the work she creates from a photographical, color-based and overall design perspective and it would likely serve me well to highlight that in a more distinctive and spacial manner. This led to the third spread, a dedication to one designed photo Walsh created as a part of her agency launch. It’s dramatic and powerful and had the potential to impact really well as a central spread.
I positioned the photo across the spread and incorporated the quote that spoke the most to her transition into this stage of design freedom. “Have you ever felt a deep voice inside telling you that it’s time for a change.” Something she stated in an article she wrote announcing &Walsh’s launch, a fitting quote for the spread. I masked her out and placed her on top of the image to incorporate image with the pull quote in a more interactive way and placed text to bring it all together. I also added a small blurb describing the photo and its relevance. The blue accent color was taken from the blue in the shadows of the metal ampersand, and felt like it went with the spread without detracting attention from the focus.
Section 04 (client work):
The client work section required the most work to get really right. There was a great deal of trial and error in the placement of the masked images, cutting down and scaling etc, in a more difficult manner than section 02 had just because of the additional levels this required. The masking for this also just took absolutely forever for certain images like the stompy one and the Jow and Kathrein ones. I wanted a darker color background to pack the punch the spread provides, in contrast with some of the lighter colors from before and I settled on this muted but dark mauve color. The accent color was subject to change though.
timeline:
The timeline was a huge section to accomplish so I really just started figuring out placement and decided dates could come later. I wanted to create a dynamic composition with the layout and change scale to differentiate between important dates in her life versus a little less big ones. The vision, though was to have the ampersands represent moments that were significant, at least moments documented on the internet. I also knew I wanted an orange, warm toned theme to contrast the cooler tones I had previously. There is still some reworking to be done overall though.
Section 05 (waves of impact):
Waves of impact at this point was the most unfinished but I knew I wanted to incorporate a bright green, with waves on the bottom and text on top. The yellow was subject to change though and I think placing image in was the only way to get this done. I started collaging with some impactful works she’s done but it felt too similar to 01, and I had to figure out a way to include images of the work that has social and political impact without having it be too similar to the spreads past.
table of contents/intro:
Developing this spread, I incorporated section numbers and names as well as corresponding colors, introductory text and a quote above the little sitting Walshes. I also added a bigger Walsh at the bottom to tie the whole spread together and leave a little less negative space because it felt like something was missing from the bottom especially after incorporating introductory text.
covers:
The covers had little change other than the moving of elements but as a whole the idea still stands, it just required more development from this point.
Pushing it further..
So now, with general ideas placed, I just had to kind of push spreads further (some more than others). At this point, I came up with an overarching theme and motif of a double-stroked line, inspired by the line I used in the idea for the timeline, that connects certain elements together, used differently in each spread.
Section 01(inspiration+process):
Section 01 generally stayed the same other than a simple addition of a wavy line across the spread. I also changed the vertical section name positioning in the corner of the spread and made it match the section number color.
Section 02 (sagmeister & walsh):
Section 02 was again a very similar structure but I thought now I could actually implement gridding like as line-work using the double line strokes. It allowed for little moments where the images spill over the lines but overall have that restricted quality and I think it was largely successful. I also tried the inclusion to provide more depth.
Section 03 (the creation of &Walsh):
This change was again just the implementation of line to tie the motif across all spreads, and I used her masked out version to have the line go behind her and create even more interaction with the subject and the background.
Section 04 (client work):
With this spread I pushed it further by using line work to outline projects and sort of connect them together. I also went in and labeled certain works of hers with the labeling system that she implements on her website mentioned earlier. However, I don’t know the meaning behind the labeling so I did question the inclusion of them at all. After the first critique I was told to reconsider placement of text in order to further differentiate from section 02.
timeline:
With the timeline, I implemented some dates and incorporated a gradient to create more depth as a whole. I thought there is a great deal happening almost to an overwhelming extent and after the first critique I was told to maybe reduce some of the ampersands and dates as well as font size.
Section 05 (waves of impact):
I was able to put together the spread idea for waves of impact using minimal image relevant to the discussion of impactful design work. I moved text to one side as well as implemented a pull quote. I think overall there are too many circles so I had to think about reduction in that sense.
covers:
With the covers I had the idea to create a continuation between the front and back cover (not successful here) and using the circles as something to include in the SS’s to connect them through movement.
I also tried to implement an idea Brett had to have the je ica of her name connect with the ss pattern but it didn’t really work. I also implemented the background element of the ampersands but came to the conclusion that it was overall distracting and not really necessary.
After crit and a bit more feedback I was able to head into the home stretch of the project, refinement and finessing of ideas.
Home Stretch.
First change was making type one pt larger 8->9. Then in the table of contents removing the quote and figuring out which elements were necessary/restructuring the space. I also removed color in the numbers to avoid distraction and overall too much use of color.
Restructuring the quote a little bit on 01 and placing the section name in a new location, the center margin, facing inward.
Then moving the portrait down in section 02 to account for the new pt size on the type, also centering the section name.
Next the orientation change in section 04 moving text to the other side to create more variation between it and 02, and then the removal of the little labels.
The removal of ampersands in the timeline and freeing up more breathing room. I also intertwined the line work with the ampersands themselves by creating copies and layering them under and over the lines which took forEVER but was really worth it. I also implemented more color and more consistency.
With waves of impact, I decided to make a more impactful back cover by providing an image of Walsh looking into the distance at her computer, a fitting way to say goodbye in a way, an idea courtesy of Brett, which definitely enhanced the ending of the booklet for sure. I still maintained color scheme and most of the imagery though.
Now for when I start to spiral slightly. Cover. I wanted to keep my original idea but the ss motif was my thing, it was a type moment I created in the poster and without anything other than the ss’s there would be no indication of Jessica Walsh being the center of this project.
I like didn’t know what to do. Brett thought that the implementation of a portrait could be really impactful, so I tried it and I don’t know I just didn’t really like it.
So I started thinking about the pattern I established and made some iterations. But ultimately I didn’t like any of these either. The first felt so horribly overwhelming, the second just ugly, the third too try-hard it just wasn’t right.
In the end though I just went back to the truly very first idea I had but just incorporated some of the growth I had along the way.
Final Spread!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some minor adjustments in the table of contents with the addition of stroke and double line motifs to create cohesiveness and some italic changes in little captions (not attached to her work), and I’m done! At least until we print them out for real in Smillie for the showcase. The craft on my 8x12 C studio printed version is so bad; I can’t wait to make the real thing but I’m really proud of the final product. Overall, this project taught me what good use of time management and organization could accomplish. Although I did have a few late nights with the project, overall it was a generally smooth-sailing process, aside from the first flat plans. I had a very simple process structure that allowed me to complete the project within the necessary time restraints and with some time to spare, but at it’s core I made something I know reflects my design capabilities and stays true to Jessica Walsh and celebrates her large and varied breadth of work and her impact on me, the true purpose behind every deliverable I’m providing in this process.
