Design Systems: Content Planning for a Symposium
Brand design and consistency has always been important to me when it comes to delivering visual designs. When tasked with creating sketches for a hypothetical symposium held by NYU.
I decided to start making sketches that would get the rough content out of my head and onto the page.
When it comes to design, I like to think about content first and what needs to go on a page so my sketches consisted mostly of blocking off certain areas of type.
Poster
I decided that to make this 11x17 poster I would sketch out general content forms. I also played with two and three column layouts as well as some different organizational structures.
Editorial Spread
I decided to work with the essay about Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels in the Middle East.
I thought I would approach the design to look somewhat like a book. I knew I wanted a large image on the main page, and that ideally I wanted the content to spread across two pages. I also included a pull out quote even though I may not use it there.
For the interior page I wanted to focus on the text, but I also wanted to leave a callout for something like other graphic novels, a feature of Satrapi’s works, or a timeline. So I gave that dedicated space and tried to imagine how my text might be arranged around it.
Website
To me, the website feels like the hardest thing to design. I know that if this was an actual NYU symposium, it would need to be accessible so I am playing with some concepts with the idea of how we might convey the information to assistive tech but also use some of the concepts in this class.
It’s an interesting challenge I’m not entirely sure I am there yet with this design, but I think I have some promising ideas.
Thinking About Color
My first thought with color was to draw inspiration from Persepholis, which is a really neutral colored book with a spot of blue/teal. I thought to myself, what might a color pallette look like that leaned on those neutrals and started thinking about adding them to the color palette.
To help me visualize the final look and feel, I made a moodboard that would capture inspirations throughout the week from typefaces to particular shades of color. You can view the board here.
Final Thoughts
I’m actually enjoying this exercise so far. There’s a lot of possibility in how to get these pieces to flow together that I am really liking and I am looking forward to spending the next few weeks on this assignment.
I do have a couple of thoughts:
- Does the background for my substrate matter? If I want to do reverse white text on a dark gray background is that okay?
- Could we consider preparing files for a risoprinter and those specifications?
