Collection 100. Product

To start this part of the brief we were told to make 100 categories which our objects, facts and opinions could be placed into.

Categories:

1. Metal
2. Weight
3. Size
4. White
5. Chrome
6. Black
7. Blue
8. Red
9. Orange
10. Multiple colours
11. Round
12. Straight
13. Right angled
14. Screw
15. Brand
16. Price
17. Design colour
18. Multiple design colours
19. Design Content
20. Imagery
21. Damaged
22. Snapped
23. Material
24. Hand Made
25. Type of Wood
26. Manufacturer
27. Alphabetical
28. Alphabetical by text
29. Most to least damaged
30. Parts heirarchy 
31. Type serif/ sans
32. Reliability
33. Multiple Materials
34. Parts that spin
35. Flexibility
36. Solidity
37. Circular
38. Hexagonal
39. Pentagonal
40. Parts turning others
41. Rubber
42. Number of holes
43. Amount of type
44. Features people
45. Has symbols
46. Number of symbols
47. Multiple identicals
48. Actual age
49. Appeared age
50. Plastic
51. Wood
52. Layers
53. Length
54. Width
55.  Thickness
56. Concave
57. Clothing
58. for feet
59. Density
60. Number
61. Importance
62. Simplicity
63. Strength
64. Integrity
65. Symmetry
66. Detail
67. Visibility
68. Number of components
69. Lightness
70. Darkness
71. Texture
72. Gold
73. Rectangular
74. Cone shaped
75. Cleanest
76. Dirtiest
77. Ambiguity
78. Safety
79. Performance
80. Necessary
81. Most Expenisve
82. Cheapest
83. Conrasting colours
84. Still function
85. Curved
86. Number of corners
87. Number of edges
88. Number of faces
89. Multiple shapes
90. Most used
91. Least used
92. Shiny
93. Matt
94. Size of type
95. Negativity
96. Positivity
97. Statistical
98. Features pro skaters
99. Uses the word 'Skateboard'
100. Deck related

After coming up with the 100 categories, I used them to categorise my objects, facts and opinions visually to help get a starting point for the brief.

Development:

I didn't find this very helpful at first, and I actually just started beginning development with an idea I had from the briefing. I wanted to look at how the same object can change over 100 recordings.
I started by drawing out 50 pictures of a skateboard wheel.
I wanted to use drawing in this brief because up until now i've only used digital illustration and photography to make the final resolutions. 
I really liked the visual effect of the same image over and over again but with subtle differences so I continued this idea.
I photographed the same view of the skateboard wheel 100 times to see how the photographs changed.

I like the patten of the similar image 100 times in row, but each image is so similar to the next that the overall look isn't as impressive as the drawings. After this, I went back to the drawings and chose to do 100 of a view of skateboard trucks with wheels attatched.

I think this worked really well again. During a crit at this point I showed the work and everyone agreed that it worked well and was reminiscent of wallpaper or wrapping paper because of the repeated pattern. This was an interesting possibility of a direction for the brief to go in, but I wanted to try out a few more things as well so I carried on developing more ideas.

I already had this design for 100 trucks so I thought I would use it for another idea. Since the beginning of the brief I had thought about skateboard decks which all have different graphics on the underside.
I managed to get a book from the library all about different skateboard graphics and their designers which showed how varied the graphics can be.

 

 

I thought it could be really cool to produce 100 different skateboarding decks possibly based on my research so I made a design using the 100 trucks for a skateboard deck.

 

It has the same appealing look to it but is quite plain as far as skateboard graphics go. Obviously the colours would need work done with them but stil the idea seems a bit plain for a skateboard deck. Often boards are bought because of the graphics on the underside (Especially in younger skateboarders) so the look is really important. 

I tried the same idea but with 100 skateboard helmets:

 

This product would have its place in the market by being focussed on wearing safety equiptment or something in that area but again it doesn't really suit a deck graphic. I think the patterned look might be the reason that the designs dont look well suited to the deck. A lot of skateboard graphics vary loads and it is a bit too precise to have the same image over and over 100 times.

I thought about the safety issue and eventually realised that it wasn't at all an easy problem to tackle. People have tried to make skateboarders wear safety equiptment over and over again hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways and I know that it doesn't work. I think that the overall reason for this is that safety equiptment isn't cool. People have tried countless times to redesign safety equiptment to make it smaller and beter designed and less bulky but it doesn't work.
If two people land the same trick and the only difference is that one is wearing safety equiptment and that the other isn't, the person who is not wearing the safety equiptment looks cooler. It is an unfortunate fact.
A big part of the excitment of skateboarding is the thrill of possible danger which is taken away when safety equiptment is introduced.

At this point I looked to the other issue which showed up in my research which was hostility towards skateboarders. I wanted to produce something which could reduce hostility and make people realise that skateboarders are just totally normal people and nothing else.

I came up with the idea of having a book which contained 100 pages. Each page of the book would have a photo of a skateboarder and then the reverse side would have some information about them.
The idea would be that a person reading the book would judge the character in the photograph and then their judgement would be broken by some positive information on the back which is probably completely different to what they thought.

During a short tutorial with Amber I realised that I hadn't thought about the audience at all and that the ideas in my head probably wouldn't appeal to the people that would need to read the book. We decided that I should go away and look at pullouts from broadsheet newspapers like the Guardian or the Observer and see what the design and content of them are like.

I looked into the pullouts and thought that this was a far better idea to go with and would tackle product promotion and distribution (Promoted by featuring in the newspaper and some front page mention of the product and also distributed inside or along with the newspaper).
I realised that a 100 page pullout would be thicker than the newspaper it was in so I decided to change the layout altogether and came up with a better suited applictaion of the product.

I chose instead to create a 10 x 10 poster which featured 100 skateboaders on one side and then the corresponding information about them on the reverse. The poster would then fold up and sit inside a kind of cover which would make up the pullout.
I also wanted to add another level on to the product so I came up with the idea of a false cover.
The idea was to have a false cover which had a negative statement towards skateboarders on the front. There would then be a pull tab that you would pull which would rip a line straight through the negative statement and show a positive one underneath. The false cover would then be in two pieces and could slide off to show the real pullout inside.

After coming up with all of these ideas I started creating the final resolution.

Poster:

I first started on the poster which took a really long time to complete. I wanted to get a mix of ages, genders, races and a mix of professional and non-professional skateboarders. I tried to get skateboarders around the Leeds area but the poor weather meant that there were no skateboarders at the skateparks (Where there would usually be up to about 40 at the Hyde Park skatepark).
Top try and get around this problem I posted some threads on skateboarding forums to try and get a photo and a bit of information from a few different skateboarders. Understandably, a lot of people were unhappy in sending photos and information over the internet to a complete stranger so I only mananged to get 2 useful responses.
I used friends from St. Albans and a couple of people that I knew from different areas to make up the numbers, but the majority of skateboarders shown are either professional or well known skateboarders from the US. If I could figure out another way to address this issue then I would definitely want to include more local skateboarders to even the numbers out.

Because all of the photos came from different sources I knew that they would be a mix of varied quality, size and colour so I needed a way to make them all follow the same format. I chose to ditch using the photographs and instead illustrate the people in each photo. I chose to go with using Adobe Illustrator over hand drawing the images because a mistake when doing them by hand could ruin the entire poster and with 100 different faces to draw it could happen a lot. Here is the final poster front.

 

'False' Cover:

I wanted to use a phrase that was anti-skateboarding so I came up with the title "Skateboarders: Thugs and Vandals". This is the phrase that would be ripped through with the pull tab. I also wanted to use an anti-skateboarding picture on the front. I was worried that this might take away from the overall effect of the pullout and just be confusing but I did it anyway in the hope that it supported the idea of ripping through the negative statement and throwing away the previous judgement of skateboarders. I used an image of a skateboarder holding a skateboard with his hood up and acting as though he was going to swing it. 

I used a blue theme for the colours to give a relaxed feeling to the pullout. I was considering using a red 'false' cover and a blue inside cover but the red against blue would look really unappealing overall. It has tabs around the outside for gluing the whole pullout shut.

Here is the 'false' pull out cover as a net. 

Real cover:

When designing the real cover I kept the same style as the false one. The colours are a little lighter to account for the change of stock. I used fireproof for the false cover so that it would rip better than other stock and used normal matt for the real cover to make sure that the paper didn't split when folded and creased. I used a normal picture of a skateboarder doing a trick (360 Flip/ Tre Flip) in a typically dynamic pose. The writing underneath now just says "Skateboarders: People". 

Inside cover:

The inside cover was kept simple with the same colour scheme and a small amount of text that says 

"100 Skateboarders.

 100 reasons to rethink the way your judge."

The poster folds up and sits on the right hand side of the inside. 

Printing: 

I tested the colours before printing everything and gave myself enough time to make sure that everything was printed in time. The printing went well although the double sided print on the real cover was really difficult. The printers in digital print aren't made for double sided printing so it has to be fed back in to the printer. This wouldn't be a problem but the margins on the side of paper where the printer holds on to it change from top to bottom meaning that if both iimages were perfectly lined up on the screen there is about a 6mm difference when printed double sided in this way. To fix it we had to keep adjusting the poisitioning of the images on screen until it worked. On the 4th attempt we got it about 1mm off which was probably the best we could do. 

Everything else printed well and I was happy leaving the print room and going to craft the actual final resolution. Everything worked well until it came to the poster. I hadn't thought about the thickness of the paper used to print the poster and hadn't realised that I was intending to fold it 4 times. 

The final folded poster was way too thick and didn't even stay folded flat. It warped the paper and ruined the poster.

On top of this the thickness meant that all of the measurements for the covers were wrong and didn't fit around the unexpected bulge of the poster. I salvaged the covers to a degree by cutting parts off and managed to close up the whole thing but the product was messy and buldged out. 

I was really not happy with the result at all because I didn't think it reflected the amount of work that I put in or my skill as a designer.

The final crit for this brief picked up on a lot of the flaws in crafting the resolution and the stock used which I was not surprised about. One issue that I didn't think about was the branding of the product. 

I said throughout the development of the pullout that it was to be put in the guardian newspaper yet there was no evidence of it on the product itself. I was also told to think about the further scope of the product as thought it was more of a campaign than a single product and think about what other products could be created.

With this and some other issues about handwriting, general quality and neatness and a numbering system to make it easy to identify which picture went with which information on the back, I went away from the crit and worked on changing a lot of the product to make it better.

Branding:

I wanted to make some branding for the product to link it back to being associated with the Guardian. 

I started by looking at the branding that the guardian already uses for some of it's pullouts, most notably the G2 magazine. 

I liked the use of the lower case G to link to original guadian logo and took the idea forward with my branding. I added a few different versions of the skateboarder from the real cover and a few different colour examples.

 

The logo that I chose was the first one (Blue g and black skateboarder). I thought this worked best because it is easily readable as a G and recognisable as a skateboarder and the simple block colours work really well in a logo.

After choosing the logo, I re made the cover designs using the logo and adding and tweaking some other parts to make it better.

 

  

 

Printing:

This time when printing came around I had a lot more difficulty.

When I went to my booked in session in digital print I had to sit for an hour and half before being told that there wasn't enough time for me to print and so I had to leave with nothing. I booked 4 days in advance and was really annoyed that the admins in the print room had overbooked because it ruined the final stage of my resolution. By this time there were no more space available to book before submission of the work so I had to deal with it and print on the lower quality laser printers in the library and Mac suites. 

I was really annoyed at this because so much of it was out of my control and I took so many precautions to make sure that I had enough time and that I was definitely booked in. The real fact of the matter is that this could easily happen in the real world at any time because human error can't be helped. 

As a firther precaution in future I will need to come up with a plan B incase this event happens again (Leave time to go elsewhere and research other places that could print what I need). 

To be honest the printers in the library and Mac suites only took away from a small part of the quality and the stock was far more suitable that the stock used in the last attempt at crafting the resolution. 

I am much happier with this final resolution than the last one. The colours work better together and the overall branding and imagery of the pullout looks much more professional.