OUGD405 - Studio Brief 02 Research and Production

Over the Christmas brief I gathered my research and started to put my work together. I had decided to present my research on cards, as I think they would be more interesting than a PowerPoint. I would find it difficult to talk about taxidermy for a long time and make it interesting and engaging, and this way I can make my designs look good and make people want to look at my research. 


I got the majority of my research online, as it was hard to find facts and statistics on taxidermy in everyday life. I found it was quite hard to get 20 of each, as there wasn't much information overall. For the words I decided to use special terms used in taxidermy and define them for people who may not know exactly what they mean. I found opinions on taxidermy by asking friends, family and social media. I tried to include a broad range of people within these opinions, looking at different age ranges and gender. 

Once I had gathered all of my research, I started to consider how my cards would look. I began looking into taxidermy business cards - as I wanted them to be around that size:

I didn't find any of these designs particularly inspiring, so I decided to look further afield. I came across this poster, which gave off the right feel to it. I wanted quite an old, vintage theme to this work which was portrayed nicely in this poster:

I think the typeface and layout and decorative features all contribute to the aesthetic of this design, so I started to think about what I could take from this and apply it to my taxidermy cards. 

When designing my cards, the first thing I decided to look into was the typeface. I looked at different typefaces, such as:

AFL Font Pespaye Nonmetric

Teletype 1945 - 1985

Telegram

None of these typefaces really felt like they were what I was looking for. They're all too generic and sometimes the slab-serifs are too much. I found a typeface called Nexa Rust and that felt like it was the right typeface:

This typeface still looks old and worn but also has a modern feel because it's a sans serif. I think this would work well within my project and give the right feel.

After choosing my typeface, I decided to work on the layout. I wanted the cards to be portrait, so that the type was easier to lay out and I didn't need any columns. I also wanted some decorative features to make it look more interesting. I found that Nexa also has a symbols pack, so I used that and found that it had symbols of animals on there, which I thought would be great to use for my project: 

I thought that these symbols could be used at the bottom of each card, and as there are 4 of them, they could be on the words, facts, statistics and opinions cards - so they don't take any attention away from the images.

I next went on to create the back of the card. This would be the same for each card, but with different writing, e.g. "Facts about taxidermy" etc. I wanted them to look quite vintage and old so I decided to have them all on black and white. I thought this was a good decision too as most things work well in black and white, but not all the time with colour.

I looked at old style ribbon posters and ribbon vectors to get some inspiration: 

I went into illustrator and began making my own ribbon and then built up my card from there: 

I carried this theme onto the other side of the card that displays the fact:

I used this design layout for all of my other cards, but the images were slightly different. I made them a bigger size so that the image was visible and I made it landscape instead:

I made the images black and white to fit with the theme, and edited them so they were quite grainy. I liked that they looked quite sinister as it made it look more interesting to look at and showed taxidermy in a different light.