Project 4 Brief and Initial Template

Farm to School Brief:

­The premise of this initiative is to create a healthier lunch for elementary and middle school students. In order to do this, they are proposing a three-part initiative. Part one is to increase the nutrition standards for school lunches. This would mean to increase the emphasis on the healthier food groups and decrease the amount of processed and froze foods. Part two is to integrate local produce into the school system. This would not only increase the nutritional component of the food, but it would also give back to the local economy. Part three is to create student-grown produce. This produce can either be consumed in the school lunches or the students could bring the produce home to eat. All three of these parts are completely separate from each other and each school does not have to do all three. The hope is that this initiative can also be applied to other districts outside of the Des Moines area.

For the creative aspect of this project, we really want to break up the text so that the report doesn’t seem so text-heavy. Because of that, we want to utilize white space throughout the design along with graphics and pull quotes. We also want to utilize different colors that tie back to a farm. These colors would also tie into the target of elementary school students. The key here is to use the colors in a professional way that doesn’t make the report appear childish. We are also looking at making all images monochromatic in order to limit the amount of color overall while also creating a unity in the overall design.   

Project 3 Final

This project challenged me in a different way than I originally expected. For me, finding that balance of a image-heavy design and a more clean look that was appropriate for the iPad was hard. Especially since Seventeen is so chaotic in it's printed editions. I definitely think that my ideas of how to approach the layout shifted as the project went on. By adding an additional grid system that I could switch between allowed for more flexibility in the layout. I also think that this helped to make breaking the grid to make sense in the design. One of the biggest challenges that Seventeen has design wise is that it looks like they through stuff at a piece a paper and wherever it hit is where they kept it. That concept was very hard for me to imitate because it's not the style I usually design with. However, I think having the text still fall into the grid system with having the images do as they please really created a nice balance between the two conflicting approaches. In the end, I decided to only do a landscape layout because I don't think that the interaction between the image and the text would be as effective in a portrait layout. Plus, the media content (videos) lends itself to be viewed in a landscape fashion due to the aspect ratio. I also really like that it makes it seem less like a PDF of the magazine since it is oriented differently.

Project 3 Critique

For this project, I think I need to more fully consider exactly how the teenagers will access the content of each issue. Also, I need to find a way to use my grid in a more playful way. The content of this magazine needs to be more random and loose. However, it still needs to have that designed aspect to it that will give a clear function and hierarchy to the project. I also think that I want to utilize more of a image-based layout for the content since so much of it is based on the imagery. Pulling out colors from the images will also help to unify the articles. The other aspect that I really need to finish developing is the integration of social media throughout the magazine. I think there needs to be a presence of it, while still having the focus be on the content itself. Trying to find that balance is what I still need to resolve.