Criting my work

Ok so I printed out the spreads I'd worked on so far and asked for feedback from some of the typography specialists on the course:










I laid the spreads out and then asked Liam, David Gasi, Tim, Ian and Ross to give me feedback and scrawl where there are issues on the spreads.

FEEDBACK:




Liam and David gave me the most feedback/things to work on which is great. The first obvious and most glaring mistake I made was the rather large widows at the bottom of my paragraphs that reduce the readability of the text. Things I can do to alter this: tweak the point size by fractions, edit my body copy to demonstrate. David also felt that the font I'd used for the body copy was too heavy and the leading was too tight compared with the large open title font he had designed, he suggested trying more rounded and open type faces like avant garde (the base font he used to develop his own). I haven't tried different type faces out yet so this is a good starting point once I return to it.

They also suggested that the title to 'Little Green Men' didn't appear gridded like the rest of the page, making it a little unbalanced and odd looking. This is something I need to fix, I realise it does look a little weird.

Other suggestions from them include try playing around with the line spacing. remove the word 'pg' from before the page number, because it's a little self explanatory and trying to work on the assassination and death layout so the word assassination isn't broken up.


Tim was a little less critical, he also noticed the widowing and again suggested I should tweak the point size. Finally he also suggested the pg number bit should be changed, but his objection was that the p was a capital and it would look better lowercase. I guess these things are tiny but they're useful things to tweak and try out.

He, I an and Ross were worried about the widowing on the individual lines of a paragpraph, occasionally the word would just out a little further than most and the eye would be drawnt o that compromising readability. There's a few ways to get around that; play with my body copy (I wrote it, it's not normally something I'd be able to do with someone elses words though), tweak the point size and leading or justify the text. I'll probably try all 3, but I'm worried that justifying it will create rivers of white space down the page. The shapes of these rivers can be quite distracting and compromise readability.

Anyway this miniature has given me a lot to play around with so I'll post that as I go with it.