Description of task

This assessment task addresses the challenge of creating overall design unity in a document. It is an exercise that requires you to focus only on this aspect of the design and not on the information and images that demand most of the reader’s attention in magazines

The 12  page digital booklet (submitted as an InDesign file) should be created using only colour and form.

Assessment and Grading criteria

• Overall design unity: the booklet should demonstrate an understanding of an overall design approach.

Description of task

This is an assignment in thinking about how type can function as an image.

Students should pick and illustrate a simple word or phrase, primarily through the use of typography. The visual design can reinforce or undermine the conventional meaning of this word or statement.

Students should use this assignment to explore the relationship between image and text. The final design should visually communicate the tone and content behind your message.

Fonts can be created from scratch or modified using existing fonts. Students may use any combination of vector, photographic, hand drawn and painted elements to create this typography but the final design should be digitally combined and handed in as a digital pdf and/or print on paper.

Assessment and Grading criteria

• The design should demonstrate an understanding of the function of
large-scale text and its visual impact.

• Innovation.

Description of task

A digital booklet submitted as a digital pdf document that contains between 12 -24 pages.

This course has not set out to define a particular genre of publication or teach a specific set of established design rules. It has used magazine design as it’s key reference point because this particular publication model  is useful for connecting the design and technical issues related to print production.

The expectation for this final assignment is that you will be choosing the nature and subject matter of the publication you are designing.

You may, if you choose, model your publication on a recognisable commercial magazine genre and make a simulated version of one of these. If you choose this option you may include texts and images sourced from creative commons or create your own.

Alternatively, you may use this assessment task as an opportunity to translate your own creative ideas or image making practice into a digital publication format. This could take the form of a catalogue, zine, artists book or portfolio.

In all instances it is the consistency, creativity, and innovation of the publication design rather than the merit of the content that will be taken into account when assessing.

Assessment and Grading criteria

•  Design structure

The most important design issue being assessed in this assignment is the overall unity of the publications appearance. The focus is on how all the different elements come together and are sequenced across the full span of the publication. This sense of design unity, the magazine’s signature style, should be clearly recognisable in the publication as a whole. The emphasis is on mastering the basics of the InDesign software program and knowing how to use it to layout and orchestrate the complex collection of texts and image that make up a magazine.

• Critical Awareness

The publication should demonstrate your understanding of good design principles. This means that the design approach you take should consistently demonstrate your awareness of the particular issues that need addressed in different sections or pages of the publication. Furthermore the sequence of these divisions around which the publication is structured need to be visible and well designed.

• Relationship between image and text.

The relationship between image and text lies at the core of publication design. This relationship should be conceptual with particular attention paid to the balance between them throughout.

• Innovation