The Final Deliverables for the Invisible Designs Symposium
In the final week of this project, I made some more small tweaks and realized a few fatal flaws in my planning process of managing this entire project.
Poster
The poster doesn’t look that different from last week. I made some small alignment adjustments and played with my linework a little bit more to get it looking a little bit more polished.
I am happy with the overall look of how this turned out and I am glad that I worked with a complex grid to experiment with my ideas. I also got much more comfortable with the pen tool which is a bonus on in eyes, and I look forward to experimenting with that in the near future.
Spreads
For my spreads, I made a few minute alignment adjustments and then cleaned up my art. I used the trace tool in Illustrator to get a clearer line for the illustration and then I removed the background. I also played a little bit with alignment and then added a few lines that would emulate smoke to bring in the linework to the cover spread/splash page.
Last but not least, I drew a line in Illustrator that would add some visual interest to my second spread and adjusted it until it felt aesthetically pleasing.
Web Page
The web page was where I had the most work. I admit to having some bad habits when it comes to working on web pages, most of which stem from working mostly in static interfaces.
It’s part of why I wanted to work with Figma. The ability to view it at screen width is very helpful to me and really helps me visualize how something will look after staring at it at 25% magnification.
After desk crits last week I decided to get rid of the itinerary and instead spotlight a keynote. I also made the speaker callouts smaller.
I ended up populating my layout with some graphics from several different images from the Graphic Design Archive including.
- TCB: United Front, Taking Care of Business
- Advertisement for Pirelli Tires by Lora Lamm
- Textile Design for Cretonne Drapery Fabric
- Stealth Installatio by Eddie Opara
- Plaster Relief, Structural Arrows by Chryssa Vardea Mavromichali
- Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel and Anne Burdick
For the speakers' call out I pulled a couple of names from the poster and a line fo copy from the about page on their websites. Here are the three I picked:
I ended up using a few of the photos as backgrounds for larger regions because it felt strange to have this entire website be flat and one-dimensional with solid colors.
Something I would have done with a little more time was use the pen tool to incorporate some line work like I did with the spreads and poster that would travel down the page.
Considering I had limited Figma experience before this I am very happy with what I was able to do, but know that this could have been taken up a notch.
Things I Learned From This Assignment
- It pays to get all your content down beforehand. It definitely helped me figure out where I was going and avoid some pitfalls. However, if I had to do this again I would have started with the web page and worked backwards to the poster.
- Figma is capable of a lot more than I used it for during this project, I want to continue to learn more and see if I can add things like overlays, interactions, and hovers to my webpage.
- Starting with simple things can sometimes lead you to fixate to the point where you forget how complicated the thing you’re designing is.
- The pen tool behaves wildly differently in each application.
