Flat Earth Society Certificate

Ok so using the membership card and everything else I've been looking at to inform the design decisions that I've been making, I looked at the standard formats for certificates at this website and decided on 10 inch x 13 inch, because it's not A format and its quite big, yet will still fit on an A3 printout. I had to include a space for the name, the date and the signture of both Daniel Shenton's signature and the new member's signature. Unfortunately I forgot about the date section till the last design, which is incredibly stupid. But the last design is where I want to be with it anyway. It finally gave me the chance to put the flat earth vector in, in a way that works too. I thinkit works better this way rather than reversed out too, which becomes too complicated to look at. I made sure everything was centrally aligned, which suited the logo's centred format well.

Order Of the Magi Membership Cards

Here's some development for the membership card. Simplicity seems to be the key with trying to create an aura around your symbol, so I've tried to make it as clean as possible, experimenting with different fonts before deciding on futura, tracked 240 to create a very spacious and minimalist feel to the card.

I'm thinking of a special finish for this, but I realise there probably won't be enough time (especially with the large amount of print process I've only just managed to complete on my 'cults brief'. So I'm tempted to either mock up fluorescent yellow or a metallic gold finish for the boards, the finish, especially if it's metallic gold would emphasise the prestige of a long running 'order'.

Flat Earth Society Membership Cards

From the logo I developed, here is the progress of my membership card, I worked quite quickly on this, because I'm aware that I'm beginning to run out of time. I tried to bring in the flat earth model vector that I'd tried to encorporate directly into the logo, but it still wasn't working in this context, so I'm looking at trying to make it work in other elements as a more subtle part of the societie's identity. Looking at the colourways that I've explored, I got some people's feedback, I was trying to explore earthy colours of blues, greens and greys/browns. All very muted. I asked 5 people and the answer was almost universally the greyish colour. I thought this one seemed to work most effectively too, so this is the direction I'm going to go in with it.

Guild Of Taxidermists Membership Cards

Here's a few proposals for the way the membership card should work, exploring both double sided and a single sided card. I looked at the two vector based directions and how they could be employed. I looked at laying out the tools around the words as a central focus to make the membership card fit in with the general direction that I want to head with this. I would rather do a single sided card, because I think it works just as well as double sided, and it would be much cheaper, both for me to manufacture for the sake of this project, and for the guild to manufacture as a whole.



I then put it through a variety of different colour ways, I wanted to look at a sort ofoff white/cream coloured background to make it feel a bit more vintage and feed into the Victorian element of the tool-based craft design. The website uses a colour scheme of dark red and a cream colour, so I figured that this might be a nice way to tie the design in with what they already have. Though, I do quite like the way the turquoise looks aginst the dark cream colour as well. For now I'm going to carry the dark red through though, but (when I can get into the print room, it's rammed) I will print the colourways and ask a few people's opinions.

Different directions Guild of Taxidermists

Leading on from the very vector lead imagery of the last direction, I took that style and applied it to some mounted horns that symbolise the end result of the trade. I think this is a little more twee than the other direction and doesn't have as much significance, though it maybe symbolises more to the outside world than the last direction. However, this is a membership pack directed squarely at taxidermists and taxidermy collectors who will know about the process, so I'm not as worried about it.








I then tried this photographic direction, creating a half tone to make the image big enough to apply across a range of formats. I don't think that this is right tonally, it seems very current and very youthful, but probably doesn't speak to my target audience in any real and meaningful way. I see the tools idea I had in the last post as having the most legs, so I'm going to apply this to the range of products I need in my membership pack: Certifcate, membership card, welcome letter and a book of rules and regulations, as well as an envelope to hold them all together.

UK Guild of Taxidermists

OK so i googled Taxidermy to try and get some interesting visuals and immedietely the following images of all their tools came up, I thought this was a unique way to go, and considering that my audience is going to be taxidermists already, there isn't really a reason to have to explain what these tools are, they can just sit there as signifiers of the taxidermist's craft and be instantly recognised by them.




I immediately thought that turning these into a series of intricate vectors that are laid out well could create a very unique and interesting identity for them. SO I set about tracing the mot interesting of them, I left a few out because they were very similar to other tools I'd already done, or they didn't lend themselves well to becoming a vector. I played around with a few different typographic approaches and had Craig on hand to give me a few different ideas about typographic approaches, I looked at condensed fonts and deco style fonts because they always spring to mind with these very simplistic almost screen print style 2 colour imagery. Something wasn't working about them, so I looked at goigng the other way, with a very thin weighted font, with a very large leading, so I looked at Gill Sans light at a leading of almost 300, using lines above and below the word taxidermist to anchor the widely tracked lettering together, without it looking too sparse and disparate.













I looked a little bit at colourways but I obviously need to explore this further, but this gives me one really strong direction I can go in, because it says craft and skill, it speaks directly to my audience who have a special understanding of taxidermy tools and it's a lot more inventive than what they seem to have: http://www.taxidermy.org.uk/

Anyway, on with more design directions.

Reprinted Cults Brief and evaluation

OK so here are some photos of the finished products for the cults brief. I think an unfortunate side effect of doing a project that involved a lot of print processes is the time it took compared to the amount of blog posts I can make about the time it took. Anyway these are the reprints, as oyu can see they're only marginally better than the ones I did before, but they'll have to do. In terms of evaluating the project, I'm very happy with the layout of the typography, how unusual it looks, how tightly gridded it is and how it works with the fold. I think ti has a strong message and concept too. My main disappointment comes from my poor printing skills, which I assume may get better with time but it's made me realise that I can't wait to find a good printer to collaborate with on projects like this. So I guess that will form part of my PPD development as I go on.