PRIMIS Journal Case Study
Designing with intentionality
If you would have asked me why I designed something the way I did in my past projects from about a year ago, I wouldn’t have had an explanation for you. I used to design without purpose; I did it just to make things look “pretty.” Yes, I’m still guilty of doing this at times but I have gotten better at putting more thought into my designs to create something more meaningful. Let me explain and, most importantly, show you.
PRIMIS Journal Intro
Before I dive into the explanation of the cover that I designed for the PRIMIS journal, let me give you a little backstory. I started volunteering as an advertiser for a club at Utah Valley University called “I Am First”, a club for first-generation students whose neither parent or guardian has completed a further education beyond high school, in the fall of 2017. As the advertiser, I have helped create some posters for their club events. A few months after I began helping out with this club, I was asked to work on a journal that they had been wanting to publish for a while so I immediately took them up on their offer and began brainstorming ideas.
Purpose
The purpose of this journal is to not only recognize the lived experiences of first-generation students at UVU, but to also showcase the work that they have done.
To get a better understanding of what the club was looking for in this journal, I met up with the First-Generation Students Program Manager, Garrett. Right from the start, I was informed by Garrett that they wanted something that was consistent with their type of design style — simplicity. They wanted a design that was not only simple but recognizable as “I Am First”, if someone were to see it. We wanted this project to help publicize the club so that more people around campus would gain a better understanding of the club mission and to potentially attract first-generation students (who aren’t currently in the club) to gain extra assistance on their journey to achieve academic success.
Strategy
Like the many of the projects that I have done in the past, the ideation stage was rough. I wanted a meaningful design but I was lacking inspiration; I had a difficult time conceptualizing an idea that was solid, something I actually wanted to move forward with for the entire journal. BUT, after giving myself a week or two to come up with more ideas, I came up with the following rough sketch:
Designing with intentionality
Designing every little aspect with intentionality is a difficult task. When designing with intentionality, you have to consider why you want to include something in the first place. For this project, I literally spent days coming up with this cover. Even though it’s such a simple layout, it still took me quite some time. As Steve Jobs once said:
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Sometimes, the simplest ideas take a lot longer to come up with than more complex ideas because you have to put more thought into it. At the beginning, I came up with complex, meaningless designs… but once I hit a point of realization that I needed to unbundle the complexities, I started over from scratch to “think clean.”
What’s the cryptic-like message behind this cover?
I was first inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid and thought that it’d be cool to somehow incorporate that into the cover. Like Maslow’s motivational theory in psychology where one level needs to be fulfilled before moving up to the next level and so on, I thought to myself that life in general is like a pyramid with different levels or milestones. Before we can move onto a new chapter in our lives and grow, we have to satisfy the lower milestones. In this case, since I was designing a product for first-generation students, I wanted the goal to be graduating from college. Graduating college is a huge milestone in anyone’s life; it takes a lot of dedication and hard work to achieve this but once it’s done, it can unlock a plethora of possibilities. With the use of negative space, I put the number “1” in the middle to not only symbolize first-generation students but to also make it appear as a keyhole to success.
I also wanted to implement the design of the cover into the different sections of the journal so I did the following:
In the table of contents, I kept the layout consistent with the cover by using triangular shapes and the same color scheme of black, gray, white, and green.
I divided up the journal into five different categories: autobiographical sketches, narratives, poetry, visual art, and staff contribution submissions. For this reason, the cover art also has five levels. I created the following artwork for each of the sections:
As the reader progresses through the journal, each level of the pyramid fills up to subtly show them where they are in the publication.
Style Guide
To help myself keep track of the different fonts and sizes, I created a style guide. Having some type of guideline helped me maintain a consistent theme across all the pages of this publication.
Conclusion
Becoming articulate about your work takes a lot of time and practice. If there’s anything I’ve learned since taking classes for my major and doing side-projects, it’s that process is more important than outcome. I’m no expert at being articulate about every design decision that I make just yet, but I have been practicing to become a better designer. It’s important to have intentionality behind your design decisions, even the smallest details. By having intentionality in mind when designing, it can help enhance the overall product and experience. How? Knowing why every detail exists helps convey the bigger picture of a design and ultimately, influences how people engage and interact with a product. Basically, design thoughtfully.
If you read up to here, thank you! Here’s a fun little fact for you:
Primis literally means “first and foremost” in Latin.
If you have any design tips, please share! :)
