Project 5 Documentation
INTRODUCTION:
The purpose of Project 5 was to create a book meaningful to us. This book had to be short (8 or 12 pages) and had to include both text and imagery. Not only is our book meant to serve as a final project in the class Communication Design Fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon University, but it is also meant to serve as a piece of work to show a potential future employer.
For our book, we had to ensure that our design matched the content of the book. For instance, I chose to make a book of the employment statistics for the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon. Because this book would, hypothetically, be presented to prospective students and their parents, the design had to be professional. Thus I stick to a strict grid structure and clean format throughout my entire book. If, however, I had chosen a more abstract idea, a grid structure would likely not be appropriate for my book.
INITIAL SKETCHES (BREADTH):
Below I have include the various ideas I considered before choosing my final idea, an employment statistics pamphlet.
Baking idea:
When we were first assigned this project, the first idea that came to mind was a baking book. Back home, I love to bake, and I figured I could include some of my favorite recipes. However, I knew that this idea would quickly grow old. Eventually I would get bored of making endless pages about cookies.
Grandma’s garden idea:
For my second idea, I considered making a book about my Grandma’s garden. I know that she would love it if I gave it to her, but I then realized it was impractical to get images of her garden, and even if I wanted to do illustrations, I would have a hard time. This is why I decided to scrap this idea.
Airplane idea:
Since I was a child, I have been fascinated with airplanes. In fact, when I was younger I had a flight simulator on my computer; I used this software to learn how to fly jets (only to a certain extent). The only downside of making a book about airplanes is that I would need to take images of the planes myself. Unfortunately, I do not have access to various planes. I then thought I could pen tool trace some images of planes; however, these sketches would fail to convey the intricacy and beauty of various planes. This is when I scrapped this idea.
Employment statistics idea:
I then had the idea of making a pamphlet to display the employment statistics of recent Tepper School of Business graduates. When I was touring Carnegie Mellon, I was handed a simplistic black and white sheet displaying various graduate’s jobs. Many other business schools I toured, however, had well-designed pamphlets to distribute to students. I knew obtaining all the necessary data for this project would be easy (since it is all available online).
DIGITAL ITERATIONS (DEPTH):
For my original design, I wanted to include the Carnegie Mellon University emblem on my cover page and back page. This emblem is below. Please note that I attained all emblems and logos from Carnegie Mellon’s official marketing office.
Below is Carnegie Mellon’s official plaid. This plaid was also obtained from Carnegie Mellon’s marketing office.
Putting the logo, plaid, and emblem together, below is my initial cover page. One thing that I didn’t notice until later on was that the emblem is a slightly different red from the official Carnegie Mellon CMYK red. I am not sure why this is, since I obtained both the official Carnegie Mellon red color and emblem from the same website. This anomaly might be due to distortion from downloading the official emblem. Please also note that aside from the logo, the font is consistent throughout. Carnegie Mellon’s official font is Open Sans, and so I decided to use this font throughout the pamphlet to accurately represent Carnegie Mellon.
Below is my first spread. You can see that on the left I have a table of contents, and on the right I have a list of all the employers of Tepper School of Business Undergraduates. To create consistency throughout my pamphlet, I have included a line of plaid across all of my spreads. Not only does this build consistency, but the plaid also brings nice color to the booklet.
You will also see that I included the company logos of top recruiting companies. To obtain these logos, I merely search Google for each company’s logo in PNG format. Please note that while I was aware that we were not allowed to use un-original images for this project, after speaking with Professor White we both agreed that it would be difficult to pen-tool trace or recreate a company’s logo. This is why I was allowed to include company logos directly from the internet.
On my next spread, you see that I display each employer, the job titles of the graduates they hired, the city where these jobs were, and the state/country where these jobs were located. All of this data was retrieved from Carnegie Mellon’s career website (http://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/Stats_2016_updates/One-pager%202016-TPR%206%20MONTH%20UPDATE.pdf).
To display these tables, I created tables in InDesign. At first I struggled with this, but after some help from Kaylee and Julia I was able to figure it out. I certainly experimented with different table formats, as you can see below. At first, I tried making the tables without any lines or dots. This made the information all too difficult to read, and the data looked in some ways disorganized.
Thus, I decided to have some sort of lines in my tables. Below you can see that I first started out with dotted lines. These looked pretty good, so I then started playing around with the opacities. For instance, you can see that on the left page below, I have an opacity of about 50%, and on the right page I have an opacity of about 75%. For the remainder of the project, I elected to use 50% opacity, since the lines were still apparent enough to give structure to the data but were not crowding out the data in terms of hierarchy. Also note that the color of the lines is the Carnegie Mellon red (C=0, M=100, Y=79, K=20).
Once I found the right opacity for the dotted lines, I then experimented with solid lines in the table. These lines were ultimately too aggressive and made the information in the tables harder to read. From here on out, I decided to stick with the red dotted lines at 50% opacity.
INTERMEDIATE CRIT:
Below is what I presented at the intermediate critique:
Here is some feedback I received from the critique:
- Ensure all print settings are correct. I clearly did not test print, and my booklet did not print as intended. After the crit, I immediately met with Kaylee to make the necessary changes.
- Consider removing the plaid. After some consideration, I decided to keep the plaid. While it is ugly at times, it ties the pamphlet together and makes it look more professional.
- Add more graphics. This is something I agree with, and you can see in my later spreads and iterations that I ultimately added more graphics.
FURTHER DIGITAL ITERATIONS (DEPTH):
After the spread above, I created one more spread of employment data and then I moved onto an employment summary spread. One fact that I wanted to display is that 90% of Tepper graduates are employed upon graduation. To do this, I found a logo of a graduate from the Noun project (https://thenounproject.com/) and then pen tool traced the graphic in Illustrator. The traced graphic I used is below:
After I created the graphic, I then copied and pasted it into InDesign. I had to resize the graphic, since I wanted to have 10 columns and 10 rows, to great a total of 100 graphics (so that way I could visually display the 90% employment figure). I figured that those graduates who were employed would be filled with the Carnegie Mellon red, while those who were not employed would just be traced with the Carnegie Mellon red.
Below is the graphic I used to represent an “unemployed” graduate. You can see that rather than filling the graphic in, I merely traced it with the Carnegie Mellon red.
The final illustration is below. You can see that literally 90% of the graduates are filled with red, representing the 90% employment rate upon graduation.
I next wanted to display on the right page how graduates found their jobs. For instance, how many received their offer because of a previous internship, how many found a job through a career fair, etc. I experimented with different ways to convey this information. In fact, at first I tried displaying the different percentages in a pie chart, below:
I realized that even if I labeled the different slices of the pie, many segments still appear to be the same size even though the percentages are different. I also tried experimenting with a bar graph, but this didn’t work either. This is when I just decided to list the percentages out, as below:
You will see that I also obtained another graphic, a suitcase, from the Noun project and pen-tool traced it in Illustrator.
I next wanted to display the salary statistics for Tepper graduates. I knew a table wouldn’t be best for this, so I decided to keep my style consistent and list out the different salary statistics, just as I had done with how graduates found their jobs. My first iteration is below:
A couple of things: (1) I once again traced a graphic from the Noun project in Illustrator and then copied and pasted it into Indesign; (2) Above, you see that I try two ways of displaying the salary data. The first is very simple. The salary is the same size as the calculation associated with it (i.e. “Average”, “Median”, “Range”). I did not like this because the salaries were not popping out as I had wanted them too.
I then tried creating a paragraph describing the salaries, and then enlarging the salaries themselves within this paragraph. This looked very strange, as you can see at the bottom of the right page above.
From here, I had one more idea. I figured I could make the salaries themselves large and then just include “Average”, “Median”, and “Range” below each respective salary. This idea is display below:
I then made one last change. The “to” in “$50,0000 to $100,000” looked weird, so I replaced it with an em dash, below:
You will also see that on the left page, I have included the text “90% of graduates employed upon graduation.” I made the 90% much larger to flaunt this statistic. Please also note that I also aligned graphics on the left page with the top of the graphics on the right page.
I next wanted to explain why Tepper is unique and how it differs from other business schools. I labeled this spread “The Tepper Difference,” below.
I then went to the Tepper School of Business’s website and used information from their website for my content:
You can see that I include information such as how the Tepper School is different, the advantage of having small class sizes, as well as the top concentration areas within the Tepper School of Business.
I then wanted to include a graphic to display and emphasize the small freshman class size of 125 within the Tepper School. This is a distinguishing trait of Tepper when compared to other business schools, and I therefore felt the need to stress it. I once again use the Noun project to find an appropriate graphic. This graphic was traced in Illustrator and then copied and pasted into InDesign.
In addition to adding this graphic on the left page, I also wanted to include that the Tepper School of Business was recently ranked 6th in the country for undergraduate business. I explored various graphics on the noun project to represent this; however, I was unable to find anything worthwhile. I therefore just made “6th” very large and aligned it with the “125” on the left page.
For my back page, I initially was unsure what to include. I wanted the back to have helpful but limited information and still look professional. To get this look, I went to Carnegie Mellon’s admission website and used the following as inspiration:
My initial back cover is below as well:
You can see that I displayed the contact information of the admissions office just as it was display on Carnegie Mellon’s website. The only issue with my back cover is that the emblem in the bottom right still has a slightly different shade of red from the rest of the booklet. Because of this, I later removed the emblem from my back cover.
From here, I then changed the order of my content around (e.g. moved “The Tepper Difference” to the beginning rather than end of the booklet), created a consistent grid throughout the booklet, and added page numbers. For those companies that employ multiple graduates, rather than having empty red boxes below the company name, I made white boxes and placed these over the empty red boxes. This improved the readability of the data. These changes are reflected below:
From here, I made a few final touches. For instance, on page 3, I made the “125” aligned with the top of the graphic. This just looked a bit nicer than before. This change is below:
I also decided to center the “6th” on page 4. This looked much better than having it left-aligned, as it was before:
Finally, when I did a test print of my pamphlet, I realized that the plaid on the front page did not align with the plaid on the back cover. I then revised this in InDesign. This change is reflected below:
FINAL PIECE:
Below is my final piece:
FEEDBACK AFTER FINAL CRIT:
Some of the feedback I received from the final critique is that some of the content in the tables feels a little overwhelming at times. Some people suggested that I play around with the font size a little bit. I tried doing this, but it sort of threw off the hierarchy of the content.
Another thing people really liked were the graphics. One good suggestion I received is that for some of the text heavy pages, particularly those in the beginning with information about Tepper, more graphics could have been included. I definitely agree with this, but unfortunately I was short on time and was unable to include more graphics.
Someone also wished that the pamphlet was longer and included more information. Again, this is something that unfortunately would go beyond the project guidelines (since the book could only by 12 pages) and was also infeasible given the time constraint of the project.
REFLECTION:
Above I have included feedback that I would incorporate into my pamphlet down the road if I had the time.
As a whole, this was my favorite project by far during the class. It was amazing and liberating to be able to design whatever I wanted to. I am someone who stresses practicality, and for me to be able to design an employment statistics pamphlet, something that is extremely practical and much needed for Tepper, felt great.
It was also very interesting to see everything we had learned in the course come together. Factors such as font size, grid, coloring, and pen tool tracing played an integral role in my project. If I did not have these skills, I would not have been able to accomplish this project as well as I did.
I am extremely proud of my work, and while there are definitely some things that could be improved, this project will still likely remain one of my proudest design accomplishments.
Thank you for a wonderful semester, and for teaching me all that you did. Although I struggled in the beginning, it was wonderful to grow as a designer, and I could not have reach this level without you guys. Once again, thank you so much, and have a wonderful summer!
