Week #10 — 7521QCA Visual Communication
This week’s class was quite productive. We were thankfully allowed to work on our assessment for the vast majority of our time while Rae went around the room to see where we were at in terms of progress. After making the edits to my zine that Rae recommended, I showed the result to her during class and asked her some of the questions I had while implementing said changes. Samples of the updated zine can be found in my previous Visual Communication blog post.
Our brief discussion revealed that I was heading in the right direction. It also came with some more helpful feedback along with suggestions for further edits.
From this discussion came three main pieces of feedback:
- Changing the font to “Apothecary”
- Go a bit further with the medical theme in the format of the information pages
- Use raster textures in each illustration
Font Change
To my sadness, Rae suggested changing the font. I spent time actually making this font so it made me sad to let it go. Originally, I made it so that it would match the whole hand-drawn theme of the illustrations. However, Rae made a good point in that it could also be perceived as a friendly/silly spin on fearful phobias.
She suggested using a sans serif font called “Apothecary”. This would help give a more serious undertone and emphasise a more medical vibe…
Wow…
Just as I typed those words, I made the connection.
An “Apothecary”. A place where MEDICAL drugs are produced, stored, and sold.
Anyways, I was unfortunately unable to find the suggested font. However, I ended up choosing another sans serif font called “Avenir”.
It’s a very nice, light and uniform font that I applied to all the text on the zine. This took a while since each of the pages were in their own illustrator file.
Medical Theme
The next significant piece of feedback involved going further with the medical theme. This bit of feedback wasn’t exactly specifically mentioned by Rae. It was more of a surmised conclusion based on smaller bits of feedback.
For example, changing the font was meant to contribute to the medical theme. During our discussion in class, the concept of medicine bottle labels came up. Most medicine labels come in the form of complex tables. So, with this in mind, I decided to try and go further with the table structure by adding some more information about each phobia.
After making a short list of possible things to add and researching them, I decided on:
- Etymology (origin of the word)
- Phobia Type (Simple or complex)
- Phobia Sub-type
- Other Names (also-known-as)
I was hoping to include some statistics showing how common each phobia is but I was unable to find any. I did find a top one-hundred list of phobias. However, with no numbers or references I wasn’t comfortable with using it for that purpose.
Raster Textures
One of the questions I asked her during this time concerned the inclusion of both vector AND raster graphics.
The zine that I submitted for assessment two included vector graphics on the information pages and raster graphics on the image pages. However, I was told by Rae that the style of illustration I had done would be better suited to vector graphics. After converting the raster illustrations to vector illustrations I found myself once again with a completely vector based zine.
So the question I asked Rae was how I was supposed to include raster graphics at that point. Rae recommended that I try to add textures to the illustration’s backgrounds or to the illustrations themselves.
Unfortunately, I have yet to act on this feedback.
I’ve been thinking about how to make this idea possible. So far the most attractive one is to give each of the coloiured surfaces in each illustration a texture that is in line with the subject of the illustration. For example, adding a feather texture to the bright yellow parts of the chicken illustration in the “Alektorophobia” section of the zine.
During class I made a list of potential textures to use with each illustration:
- Spider — Fur/Fuz
- Chicken — Feathers
- Cliffs — Ground
- X-Ray — Concrete (in place of bone)
- Plane — Sky
- Closet — Wood
Of course, as with every other raster image, the textures/photos will have to be made/taken by me.
