Brief 01 Design

ILLUSTRATIONS

I wanted for my book two different illustrations to represent SGXV and Leeds. Then I discovered the graphic designer George Greaves who only works with simple shapes and colours. It’s a minimalistic design approach, this style is extremely affordable in all possible ways.

1. It is accessible to people with even limited skills and training,
2. it is easy to understand (and this would be the reason we use extremely simplified images as pictograms and signs for universal navigation),
3. it is affordable in production (less decorated the object is, less details it consists of, cheaper it is in design and production),
4. and it is simple to reproduce (to produce multiple copies without loss of quality).

I thought it will be interesting to symbolise each place with this method. The reader must be able to recognise the areas through the shapes. Indeed, the audience is young and the art students so they can be attract by this kind of design. Plus I needed a simple illustration design to suit with my pictures.

I decided to use my own pictures to colour my shapes. It was important for me to associate the colours and the material that I could find in these two specific places with my illustrations. Indeed, I selected zooms of my pictures and I did a clipping masks with my shapes. 

I finally did a selection of shapes which symbolises the city and the coat as well as possible. 

ILLUSTRATION POSITION

Also, I wanted to help the reader to understand in which way they have to read each story. That’s why I put the shapes in a different place for each page. They move from left to right for SGXV’s shapes and conversely for Leeds’s shapes.

TYPEFACES

After a research on the internet, I realised the fonts for books are generally unobtrusive serif. Indeed the typography must be clear and legible to permit easy reading. Therefore I chose Garamond. In such way sans serif fonts are more difficult to read. For this reason, they are used most often for short text such as title, then I used Aller for it. It offers all of the sans serif's function, I mean: geometric, legible, simple.

I could have chosen Times new Roman for the unobtrusive serif, but I think it's overused and we're becoming bored of this type.