Can we make it actually Clunk?

When we found out that we were naming the collective and publication Clunk we had thoughts since clunk is a a sound, could we make our outcomes make that sound?

I had the idea of making our publication clunk by maybe having some metal hidden in the binding? or in-between the middle pages so that when you drop it, it makes a clunk.

Also we could make the business cards out of metal so if you drop them it will clunk.

The Clunk Manifesto

"The value of print needs to be celebrated. 

There is no need for exclusivity. Leading 

conversation will strip the stigma."

Our manifesto is short but clear, we want everyone to celebrate print, and stop all the stigma associated to it, Print still needs to be embraced as a form of creativity that still has a place in modern design. We can create both digitally and traditionally, equally both have the potential to create the perfect outcome for all briefs and clients.

It is important for us to have an manifesto to stick by.

Thomas Gravemaker and Clunk video

The Thomas Gravemaker teaser video I created. 

What will the publication include

Together we discussed and planned exactly what will be the content of the publication.

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What to include in printed publication? 

CLUNK

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Interviews:

• Thomas Gravemaker
• Florence 
• Coreen
• (architect)
• Wendy Richardson (art director)

- Sandra Nicolas (art director)

- Lee Boulton (writer)

• 3 to email

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- Armina Ghazaryan (printmaker)

Photographs:

• of our trip
• of recent projects, process

Artwork:

• work of those we interviewed
• imagery of recommendations (from interviewees) 
• ‘Anyone’ who wants their work to be featured, professional or amateur

Disasters and Successes

• peoples stories
• reality 

Adverts 

• print themed 
• materials, workshops, deals

Competition 

• social media challenge
• i.e. produce a image made entirely of type

Whats on

• print festivals across the world?? UK??
• competitions
• experiences, workshops
• exhibitions

The Clunk Logo

We wanted to use the type we set and printed in Amsterdam as we felt it was most appropriate because we created the type with clunk in mind.  

We experimented with isolating the different fonts we used and all agreed on our favourite. We were unable to find the name of the font but we can contact GWA and ask them if they could find out for us. We choose this because we felt it was the most bold and timeless. We want the logo to resemble in looks how the word clunk sounds. It works well alone and in black.

Some of our more fun experiments mixing the fonts. It makes a fun face.

Working on some promotional Videos

We want to create promotional videos for Clunk to put on social media. Over the trip we took many little clips when we were at the interviews showing the spaces and environments they work in. My job is to edit Thomas Gravemaker footage into a video montage. I am experimenting with music or overlaying the interview audio over the video clips. It shows Thomas showing us things in his workshop and certain type he uses. 

I think these videos are an important document of our trip and visually portray the interviews well. They will work well on social media giving people a bit of visual context on traditional print.

Changing our name

During our time spent in Amsterdam talking to professionals in the traditional print industry there was a word that stood out to us as a word we don't normally here but that they kept saying.

CLUNK

They spoke about the satisfying cluck that the machines makes when you come to the end of a print. This stood out to us and we felt it was a fun unique name. The people in Amsterdam laughed because in dutch a clunk comes across as a word used to describe someone who is fed up but they loves the context we gave it. 

When we were given run of the workshop and facilities we decided to take the word and create some traditional works from the word in wooden letterpress. We feel like this would be good to help us create a logo.

We are also considering using these prints to sell as original special edition prints.

This is a piece of work that GWA asked us to print our design over as part of a series.

Printing Mistake

I decided to use Lulu printers to produce my book because they do ring bound A4 which is what I wanted. I ordered a tester and it was good that I did because It was printed wrong. The layouts were in the wrong order so that is something that needs to be. changed. 

Although there is a giant misprint, I really liked the quality of the print. In the next steps I am unsure of wether to try another printers or to try again with Lulu.

Final Book Design

Overall I am very pleased with my final book design. I took a lot of inspiration from the SBSK branding and made it promote Chris and his work as much as possible. I included small parts of the interviews so the reader would get an idea of the child's personality but would also go on the youtube channel to see it all. The text is in Late which is easy to read and bold amongst the colour choices. The photography may be a little less quality then I would have liked however I felt it was important to show a screenshot from the video as that is what I am representing and wanting the audience to watch. My information pages are made simple for the audience and only include small key bits of information. I see the books being used more in primary schools but could also be used for older children along with other activities where they can find out more. I think my design looks fun but educational and is visually appealing to the audience through colour and images.

Amsterdam Trip

Monday

Monday was a travel day were we went to Manchester Airport to Amsterdam. We also used this day as a day to plan others things we could do on our trip such as design museums etc.

Settling in to the hostel

Tuesday

We visited Thomas Gravemaker in his studio and interviewed him, we also were given a tour of his space.

His workspace

Us with Thomas

Wednesday

We visited GWA and interviewed two people there, They also let us use there workshop and gave us lessons on how to use some of the older traditional machines. After we finished there in the evening we went to the Stedelijk Design Museum.

GWA workshop supplies

Us with the GWA team

The entrance to GWA workspace

Me in the Stedelijk 

Thursday

We spent the day interviewing people at 72&Sunny organised by Wendy Dupart

Getting a tour of the 72&Sunny studio

Friday

We collected our work from GWA and then headed back to the airport to travel home.

Overall the trip was very successful and gave us loads and content to use within our publication.

Finalising ideas and Feedback

We have organised a trip to Amsterdam to talk to creatives. Before we go we wanted to get together and talk about what the magazine needs and what is out focus.

We talked about how we want to be approachable to our target audience showing how traditional methods can be available to anyone. We want to be relevant and open minded, although we want to promote and talk about the love and positiveness of traditional print we also want to look at the other side and how it isn't practical in some design. There were many other things we discussed at out meeting which had helped us to understand what sort of questions we can ask the creatives we were going to meet in order for us to get the best content.

FEEDBACK

• Alec did not like the name we choose for ourselves and the branding, he felt like it made us look less serious, he understood the theme of talking and socialising but felt we should stay away from the word pub. He suggested not to have a name until we found one that just fit well.
• He talked about us pushing the boundaries and exploring all traditional print, even the strange that only certain people have managed to do.
• He said to not lead the publication by Amsterdam but just on the theme of print. It is great we are going to talk to people in Amsterdam however we should not make the place a focus.
• Make the publication and content as exciting as possible to make it stand out from others.
• Don't just say no to Digital there is a balance.

Overall the feedback was very beneficial as it lead us down a new path making us think differently about the project.

PUB logo and feedback

Coming up with a name we decided to call ourselves the PUB collective because it is short for publication but we can also play around with the word pub as a social place were people talk to each other.

Previously we had mocked up this logo for a presentation on our collective that we had done in second year. We did not feel it was serious enough so decided to work on the logo more.

This was some of my logo ideas, I was experimenting with a mix of Serif and sans serif fonts looking at the ideas of modern and traditional Pub logos. 

We all discussed the idea of creating beer mats as business cards and inviting people to pubs to talk with us. We decided together that we should talk to Alec and get feedback about out ideas since he runs a successful magazine and we would benefit from his opinion on our ideas. 

Who we are, creating a brief

Who are we and why have we come together

Kate Higgins, Thea Koutas and Joe Turner 3 Graphic designers with a love of publication design and traditional methods. We decided we would be good together as a collective as we have similar interests and wanted to share our love of print.

Coming up with a brief 
We worked together to brainstorm and talk about what our aims were within the project. We all agreed the end goal was to be able to produce a publication that talks about traditional print.

This is the brief I wrote,

Clunk is a collective made up of three graphic designers who are passionate about print. In this brief we will interview and meet Creatives to discover what they think about print. The aim of the project is to celebrate print and explore the benefits of keeping traditional print alive as well as digital which is taking over our design direction. The deliverables is to create something that communicates what we learn throughout the journey.

We talked about how this project could be good for us personally as we could go out and interview and talk to people who love traditional print and just learn from people.

Final Outcomes

This is not my real final outcomes as I will be finishing them at my placement during summer but these are the outcome to the brief I was given.

Overall I am happy with my final designs and layout as I feel they are well organised and ready to edit by adding images and content. My theme relates to the target audience by being inspired by their love of Disney. They also relate to the world and outdoors which is Easterseals 2018 theme. The colours and constant bright and engaging as well as the type. It is easy to read and navigate as well as looking fun. The illustrations relate to the activities and will remind the campers of all the fun memories they had. Throughout the process I kept in contact with Devin who is in charge of the projects and he was pleased with my designs.

Story board promotional video ideas.

In discussion with Devin there are not many videos online at the moment to show camp. They are all quite old. Because Devin liked my video I created of camp last year he wants me to work on creating some videos this year.

Ideas

• Day In the life of a Harmon Counsellor.

This video will be aimed at the audience of people who are thinking of becoming camp counsellors at harmon or a CIT. I want to feature a Counsellor and follow them around for one day with the camera.

• Video Montage

This is similar to what I created last year but instead of it being more personal it will be more promotional. I want to take lots of snippets of camp life and add them together with music.

How will I achieve these goals?

• I have discussed with Devin about buying more Cameras for the staff so rare moments are easily caught on camera
• I will take my Cannon 1000D to camp to get good quality film
• I have a underwater Go Pro to be able to get footage of swimming and the big swing

I have drawn out some storyboards of what types of shots I need for the videos. I have some skills in using iMovie and enjoy editing videos so I am excited to do this as a challenge.

Creating a Newsletter

Devin wants me to create a News style Newsletter that will include an article about the week as though it is in a newspaper. It will be printed and given to the campers at the end of there sessions and they can get the back of them signed by their friends.

I wanted my newsletter to look very simple so it can be printed out in both colour and black and white since there will not be as much money and resources for this part of the project.

For my final layout and design I created the name 'The Harmon Press' and made the logos some redwood trees. Like a newsletter it includes the sessions dates and the issue number. I also put some place filler text for where the article will be and a box where the main picture will be.


At the moment the design looks very simple but the idea was to make it so there is less ink needed and it is easy to edit for each session. Once the correct text and photography is added I think it will work very well.

Harmon Illustrations

For the illustration style I wanted them to look bold and simple so they would look good smaller or large. I took pictures I took last year to help inform me of what some of the things look like. An example of this is the illustration I did of the sheds in the farm area. The illustrations can be quite time consuming however they make a big impact on the design making it more relatable and fun.

Final Yearbook Designs

My final designs look minimal but once the photography is included will have the right balance between colour and photography making them stand out. I bought the licensing to two fonts. I feel like they add to the designs by looking hand drawn but also being readable.

This is an example of what it will look like using my photography from last year.

The front page looks like the adventure book but shows the camp grounds and how it is located in the beautiful redwoods.

I emailed my designs to Devin and he loved them. Overall I am happy with my designs and I am excited to be able to finalise them with photography this summer.

Design Plan

Thinking back to spending time with the campers they all seemed to love movies especially Disney, In the movie UP by Disney the main character Carl has a adventure book. I want my yearbook to take inspiration from this as for the campers coming to Harmon is there escape and adventure.

I emailed Devin and told him about my idea and he really liked it so I decided to move forward with planning. 

I looked at the past books and looked at what must be included. I think that I should design all pages and then depending on what activities happen in each session I have different pages ready to bring together.

I have picked a colour scheme similar to the colours used on the adventure book cover on up. It is a limited colour scheme of 5 colours in warm and cold shades. 

The layouts will consist of square coloured boxes so that I know where the photography will go and they can have bright colour boarders. I also want to add my one illustrations to be consistent.

Past Designs

Devin told me for the past few years harmon uses Treering to publish and print there yearbooks, he said if I didn't want to use them I could use something else but I decided to stick with tradition. Once I got the account details and signed in I could see all the yearbooks created since 2014. What I found by looking at them is that they all relate to the theme given by easter seals each year.

2018's theme is to do with the world. I need to figure out how I can link this theme to my scrapbook style idea.

Initial Ideas for Yearbook

I began the yearbook by coming up with some visual ideas on themes. 

One idea was to create something that is very photography based. I wanted to cater for the fact that unlike a lot of other camps Harmon has a very wide age range of campers from 8-65 years old. I felt the photography idea felt more grown up however it was not very fun. It doesnt really reflect Harmon as a fun colourful place.

From working at Harmon last year I found they do a lot of stimulating things such as feeling different textures etc as a type of therapy therefore I had the idea of having the pages in colourful textures. I liked the textures however did not like the contrast of the writing and the photography against the backgrounds.

This lead my to a collage type feel with colours and photography this kind of looked like a scrapbook cover to me which lead me down the idea of creating a memory book that looks like a scrap book, it makes the books feel personal.

On the inside it can include illustrations and the pictures could look like they are stuck in by hand. I like the idea of scrapbooks but I want to look more at the past designs they have done to see how this can be improved.

Brief // Skype Meeting

As part of my summer placement I will be a yearbook designer and editor at a special needs Camp in California, before I attend the placement I need to have created the yearbook theme, content, layouts ready to run in summer and collect photography. The year books will need to be printed and sold to the families of the campers.

My Brief
To Create a theme and layouts for the yearbook/memorybooks, create a newsletter layout and plan ideas for promotional videos.

To get the job I had to have a Skype meeting with Devin Laming the camp director for 30 mins
he asked me questions like was I fit for the job etc.

I told him what experience and skills I had, that I am good with organisation and time management and that I would do the job to the best of my ability.

I will not have to do much research as I have already been to camp last summer and know the way it works and the things they do therefore this will help inform my design.

Illustrations, changes to designs

I have a specific illustration style which is minimal and bright, I felt that would work well for this as it works well for children. I had the idea to make them look like sticker by putting white around them and adding a shadow making them appear to be raised of the page. This means the illustrations stand out against the bright background.

The illustrations relate the persons personality and what they mentioned in their interview.

After my feedback I changed my background shapes to be able to place the text inside. All of Chris's questions and speech is coloured and the answers are larger and black to make it stand out more. I think the illustrations work really well in the layout.