Week 3: Welcome aboard the (love) train

Now entering my fourth week at Shillington it's hard to believe that I'm already a quarter of the way through the course. Since I neglected the blog last week I thought I'd give an update of week 3. Last week we began working in colour, which was exciting, but surprisingly hard to get in to full rhythm having worked solely in (shades of) black and white for two weeks.

More importantly we learnt how to customise paragraph styles in InDesign. This means that you can set fonts, size, type etc. to allocated types of text (e.g. to headings, sub headings, body copy) allowing you to amend fragmented groups of text in an entire document simultaneously and immediately: not only is this good practice but as you can imagine it saves publishers a hell of a lot of time when they're formatting large documents.

We made  use of these paragraph styles in our brief last week. The objective here was to make a DL brochure (A4 folded in to thirds) to help boost membership for the London Transport Museum. A bold type lock up would be the focus of the brochure, making use of simple graphic elements to compliment the typography.

Sketching out ideas

The work in progress

The brief required the text 'All aboard the new museum!' to be incorporated in to the type lock up. I wanted to use the typography to show movement towards the new museum.
Eureka!
Lurking deep in my subconscious, distant memories of GCSE biology delivered the perfect visual analogy to embody the text. You guessed it....sperm. Yes -what better way to symbolise a coming-of-togetherness as well as the pro-creation of new membership. Sadly, after having spent the best part of my day generating sperm, my teacher scathingly attacked my concept. "I'm not having sperm" he said. "It's not a sex museum" ... He wouldn't understand - I'm an artist, man. But that was that and indignantly I returned to the drawing board.

Thankfully hindsight is a wonderful thing. I'm glad I listened to my teacher with his many years of industry experience and disdain for sperm... Here's my final piece taken with my new and most excellent prime lens: