OUGD603 EXTENDED PRACTICE - ARMED FORCES - PUBLICATION DESIGN

Interviews
Using what I learnt from the theoretical research about baseline and regular grids, and the use of character styles and type hierarchy, I formulated a layout for the interview sections of the publication.
M1A1 Abram Prospectus greatly influenced the layout of the subheadings within the interview layouts, and they used an uppercase, bold typeface to great a strong starting point, and this wanted to be achieved in this publication to really signify the start of a new experience. The magazine layouts also heavily influenced the use of quotes within the interview sections, as a way of breaking up the body copy, and teasing the reader with snippets of content to intrigue them and make them want to read on further to understand what they mean. The layout also needed to be really simple and clean, so as not to detract from the content and to make the publication easy to read.

Infographics
The infographics were created using the MTP colours to distinguish between different aspects, especially within pie charts.
Mainly, the infographics were created from existing charts and graphics within official Ministry of Defence reports, as this provided a readily available set of data, which just needed configuring into an appropriate format, as opposed to working out data from text. This simplified the process, and allowed me to focus on the appearance and readability of the inforgraphics, rather than focusing too much on creating infographics with new information.

Feedback
The feedback I received from one of the founders of Venn Creative was really pivotal in helping me to put together this publication on a short time scale but still maintaining a high standard of design. They really gave me so much help with understanding how to use the baseline and normal grids in InDesign effectively, and to make life much easier for myself. They also gave me feedback on how to go about designing the layout for the interviews, and to just design one spread first really well and then apply that to the other spread, as opposed to trying to design all the spreads at the same time.

I also received really essential feedback from one of the tutors at university at the end of designing the whole publication. They gave me advice on the correct ways or formatting the quotes, how to acknowledge people clearly, and made me think about the correct way or phrasing “me” in the in person interviews, to ensure professionalism and consistency across all of the interviews. This lead to changing the interviews to refer to myself and the person I interviewed by the full name initially and then using initials. It also resulted in changing the emailed interviews to the same format as the in person interviews, to maintain a consistent appearance across all the interviews.