Gorman - Astronomy Booklet

I found these few publication designs on fffffound so I cant be sure of their origin but i found the name Gorman by them all. 

This first design is very simple, very clean and crisp but its very effective. Its a bit to minimal for my personal approach but i think its a great example of how type can hold the page.

This design is really interesting, its a small booklet but enclosed in this folded case. Its a really nice way of packaging a booklet or publication and makes it something more special to open rather than something mass produced and cheap to make.

These next deal with editorial and astronomy and have a slip leaflet attached inside the main booklet. This slip folds out to a small poster containing a lot of information about the solar system and our universe. Its an effective way of breaking up the information and playing with the format more to keep people interested. 

What a beautiful piece of design, this layout is so simple but for me its beautiful. I love working with a 3 column grid in my personal work and this is a great example of why it works so well. Also that the photos work within the layout and obviously considered carefully when this was being designed.

Great piece of screen printing here, working with a black stock and printing white/silver which is best done through screen printing. The format works well as a small leaflet that folds out to view the images together.

Alexander Flores

These Observer cover designs by Alexander Flores are really interesting to my practice right now. This first cover has taken a really interesting approach to using a simple colour range. I have been experimenting with laying over block colour to a grey scale image to make it more interesting and I love the way that Flores has done it here with a simple circle of colour to highlight the creature behind the text. We no longer loose the image behind the text but more look past the text to the image first before reading it.

This second cover obviously relates to my current astronomy project but i have mainly looked at this cover because to the way they have separated the sections of text. The coloured circles/planets make this cover a lot more interesting but still with a high typographic resolution.

Editorial - Mark Blackman

This book really excited me, each page with different layouts, type and image. Its designed by Mark Blackman who has got a really interested way of laying out editorial work. The three books are on fishing, hunting and camping and straight away there is a creative twist to all these. 

First i absolutely love spot colour he has used on the photographs, normally it can be quite cliché but he has used it in a way that really supports the book. Bold colours on a half tone image to create something that's not just an image any more but used within the text aswell. 

I think the reversed out page titles work really well over the images leaving the body copy to dominate other pages in a very minimal and simple way.

All in all i really do love these books, really well thought out and designed, and beautifully presented in the tartan cover. I want to use some of these techniques to excite viewers when looking at my work.

The InteRail pack

So over the summer i used InteRail to travel around Europe, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Its a very organised company but their printed material for their customers is poorly designed. All three books are different size width and lengths and they don't work together. 2 are portrait and the last is landscape.  There is no reason why these cant work together.

The leaflets are designed with a bold red and a bright green which i personally don't like and think it makes it look cheap. I want to make these documents look more of a set and look stylised for its travellers.

The three printed leaflets you get once you have bought your ticket are:
1. A map of Europe. This has all the train lines on and was actually very useful but its a bit overwhelming. We wanted to be writing on it and drawing our travel routes on it but its so full of colour and big red lines anyway that it did help if we drew on it.

2. A Travel Guide. This is a book on the pass and how to use it and useful numbers and sites for each country. The book is a mish mash of colours and is a bland layout that doesn't consider the body copy very well as it cuts of sentences of half way thorough to place an image!

3. InteRail Pass. This holds the pass itself and a survey form to send back to the InteRail company after travelling.

Tom Bourne

These book covers by Tom Bourne are based around the planets in our solar system and there is one for each of them. Very simple image using the texture of each planet as the back ground image. One thing i really like about these covers is that the white circle shape changes size to represent each planet more accurately. It would have been easy to use one generic white circle but it shows that he has thought about the design. 

However the overall design doesn't work for me, i think it has become to simplistic and the contrast between some of the photos and the vector images don't work together.