Studio Brief 3 - Message and Delivery

Today session we got briefed Studio Brief 3 and this blog post is about our task that will hopefully get us thinking about our main task of the message and research delivery.

So our task was that we were split into 10 groups of 5-6 people and then we got given a story line. With that story line we had to decide and produce a layout page for the story, so basically we had to research the story, decide what factors we will need to think about when designing, either a website article, newspaper front page or anything else in this format.

Our Story line was “Tescos profits plunge 92%” so off we went researching about what this story was actually about. To sum up the story the story is about Tescos profits that have fallen due to a number of factors. A big black hole where money hasn’t been accounted for which has caused a drop in profits but this isn’t the only factor, the other is Tescos rivals like Aldi, lidls and Asdas becoming cheaper and more affordable for lower and middle class families. Also another could be the horse meat scandal that has disabled peoples trust in Tescos on what food their actually purchasing so trusting other supermarkets as a better source.

After this research we all came up with individual spider diagrams on factors we has to consider when design a front page or article page in a form of a grid. 

What paper would be best suited for this topic?

For a story about financial woes for the rich people, this story isn’t best suited in papers like The Sun, metro and any other papers target audiences are aimed at non-professional people and lower class societies. But more so in the direction of the upper-class audience who reads the financial times, Guardian and broad sheets.

What mood are we going to convey?

There are many approaches we could take, serious, humorous, playful.

The topic about Tescos would be quite a serious and formal mood, however our group decided to mock Tescos a bit and convey a humorous approach. In return this can decide what paper we would go for, as the seriousness of the subject goes out the window along with the interest of the upper class.

What typeface to use?

What typeface we will end up using will inevitably come down to what mood we go for. If we was going to take a serious, formal approach then the typeface we should use would be serif but if the mood was more easy going then we could go for a sans-serif. However at this moment it would be beneficial to go for a serif font as this story line would only be a story that would interest business people which would be the upper class.

After we had considered all these points, we decided to take a softer, more humorous approach to the story and make it more adaptable for not just the business and political people. To take a different approach to thing we decided to go for an app design and basing the layout around the metro newspaper app.

The original app, front page

Article page

Here were some of my initial sketches...

So my idea was to redesign metros app. There were some obvious restrictions we had to keep in mind. We couldn't have more then 2 columns as this would overcrowd the design, another aspect was that if we was going with the app idea we should create the front page and the article page in order to show the whole story. I experimented with the headline, playing around with the Tesco branding also i tried to make the Metro logo smaller giving the title a higher importance hierarchy which should catch the users attention. Also the title "Tesco Fiasco" gives the impression of a light hearted article making fun of Tescos woes even though they are still making millions.

As my previous experience gave me much knowledge in designing apps from a user experience perspective, also as it was my suggestion to go ahead with the app idea. I didn't want to get to involved with the digital side as we were working as a group and didn't want to seem like i was showing off by telling everyone what to do. Once we started the digital process it soon all fell apart and the whole process didn't work in my opinion.

These were our digital versions we had made.

Overall I'm not a fan of these designs, they just don't fit or look like an app design, but instead look more like the newspaper version. Also it just looks no different from the original. I could go into more detail of why it didn't work but maybe it was my own thought for not guiding the group in the right direction. However it was a good attempt from the group who had never worked in this area before and I'm sure lesson had been learnt and skills had been gained.

I enjoy working on the initial designs for this task but felt we spent an awful long time working digitally and once we started on the computer there was no group input.