Studio Brief 3 - final design

My final designs for brief 3 have a similar look to my design layout for brief 2. I was initially going to use the same design but when researching about different layouts and set ups, i decided to adapt and in my opinion improve on what i had previous. With the front cover, I wanted this design to be as simplistic as possible. I wanted the front cover to communicate stamps in one image or one glance. Nothing sums up stamps better then the portrait of the Queen’s head. This along with the title “A book about stamps” sums it up pretty effectively. There wasn’t any point in making an over powering front cover. My target audience was aimed at stamps collectors who are mostly the older generation, so the tone of voice would be subtler and to the point. The back cover again i was trying to go for the same style. This time i used the stamp placements marks that are in most stamp books around. So any stamps collector will look at this symbol and have a connection. The front and back covers have a background colour of red to link in the connection with the Royal mail.

Front cover

Back cover

Moving away from the back and front cover. The double page spreads are all the same grid and layout systems throughout. The spreads are all one-column layout, with the text and title, centered on the document. All the information is positioned on the left side of the page. When choosing a typeface for the title, it turned out to be a tough choice. I wasn’t sure whether to choose a serif or sans serif. My decision was based on my tone of voice and target audience. I wanted in some way to make my publication more modern but then again, my audience was people who already collected stamps, which are older, more mature people. Also other influences like the royal mail and the Queen influenced my decision into choosing a serif typeface. I also questioned who would pick up a publication about stamps.

The body text was Gotham book, which is a liable and visually pleasing body copy that works well in most situations and is one of my favourite fonts. I decided to add a big picture of the Queen’s portrait in the background; this was to keep with the theme of the front cover and also to add some visuals to the background. I also added a colour overlay of blue, this made the queens head not as harsh and the colour allowed the white text to pop and not have to clash with the Queen’s head.

On the right hand side of the page i decided to have an image to represent a stamp book. This image was the same as the image i had for brief 2, but it worked for the purpose of the publication so there wasn’t any need to change. Having this allows the audience to connect with the book and instantly recognize what the book is about and maybe even have flashback of their time as stamp collectors. 

All together the books works well across all pages, having the same layout and grid system for all of the pages, allows the whole book to flow from one page to the other efficiently. It’s also visually pleasing but without an overkill of images which would put of my target audience. The book is a great representation of my target audience and is fit for purpose and is easily relatable to stamps.

Below are the images of the finished book.

In the end, I was very happy with the book. After looking through it there probably would be a few things i would change. Maybe i could of had different colours pages through out the book to give each page it's own look. I could of even change the colour all together from blue to another colour.