How to...

Creating a Problem

'How to...' a design task based around solving problems. The first- creating the problem. In pairs we discussed and listed 20 problems encountered by first year students at the Leeds college of art.

Pairs were then teamed up into fours and the problems combined to create a new list of 20, fours became eights and the process repeated again. 

The first 20 problems we came up with

The list was then condensed into a final top ten consisting of problems we all considered to be the most important.

The revised 20 problems

The dreaded 10

Then all groups joined together, each offering up their 'number one' problem to create a final list of ten. These ten became the basis for the next stage the project.

The final 10

Solving a Problem

The class were divided into groups of six and each group was assigned a problem from the 'top ten' list. The assignment- solve the problem in a graphical way, the problem- How to... keep fit and stay healthy on a budget. We began by discussing different solutions ranging from market stall shopping to cheap gym memberships, local jogging routes and healthy recipes, we listed all of these on an A3 sheet as we went.

Initial ideas sheet

Organising ideas into categories 

As we talked over ideas we considered our target audience (students- particularly freshers) and how we wanted to communicate our information. We felt that we were informing our audience (possibly educating) and that a non patronising friendly tone would work best for our product. We also assessed our content as it stood and realised there was a lot- certainly too much for a poster or pamphlet so it was decided that a booklet would be the most effective way of getting across our information. Our main source of inspiration came from an A6 sized handbook we were all given in the first week of term: The Creative Notebook.

The Creative Notebook

There are a few reasons why the Creative Handbook is appealing, the first being practicality. It's compact, easy to carry around, contains a good amount of information and it's relatively inexpensive to make. Yet it remains visually pleasing, well designed and impressively laid out. 



Gathering Research and Creating Content

After organising all our initial ideas we divided our problem into three groups healthy eating, exercise and budgeting, two people were assigned to research each area whilst taking the other groups into consideration as we did. Tom and I were to research healthy eating and so I browsed the internet for healthy home cooked alternatives to take away meals, lists of super foods and their health benefits, websites with tonnes of student recipes, sites with discounts and food offers and finally a smoothie recipe to cure a hangover (keeping it relevant to our target 
audience).

After sharing what we'd all discovered on each of our subjects we began to gather all the essential pieces of information and wrote out what would be going into the final booklet. 

Gathering research

Organising content

Once we were clear on what was going in, it was time to decide the order in which it would read. We drew a few simple boxes and labelled what would go on each page whilst estimating how many pages each subject was going to require- the flow of the book began to take form.

Putting pages in order

Finally we had to settle on what typefaces to use. Drawing inspiration again from the creative handbook we chose to have the headers in a scribbly almost handwritten style and the body in a simple sans serif typeface. We ended up settling on Brain Flower for the headers and Calibri for the body, and although I wasn't 100% behind the Calibri decision, the beauty of Brain Flower more than makes up for it.

Crits and Feedback

We received some very useful feedback when it came to crits. They liked the amount of information on our recipe pages but said we were lacking anything that explained calorie content- suggesting a traffic light system like on the front of food packaging. They also felt the recipe pages were a little dull and suggested adding illustrations to give them something more visually appealing. It was also heavily suggested that we add something about alcohol to keep it relevant to our student audience. There were a few mentions of our colour scheme being unorganised with a few pages having 'double printed' colour making them too dark so colour is still an issue we need to sort out.