Charlie Barber's profile

Family Project - British Wildlife

Charlie Barber
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British Wildlife
Book spread designs for University 'Family' project.
To begin with for this project I had to come up with a list of 10 different families, not necessarily families of people, just groups of things that all relate to each other or go together in some way. The examples given were a family of emotions, a family of fonts and a collection of photographers. Some things we weren’t allowed to do, such as football and pop acts, ideally we were meant to choose a boring subject that we could make visually interesting, rather than trying to make an already interesting subject more exciting.

After I came up with the 10 families and produced some development for a few of them I think the family that emerged with the best style and most potential was the family of British Wildlife, which had a sub-theme of food chains. I had started taking this down a vintage-looking route, using fairly dull and pale shades of green, and rustic serif fonts for the headers. I also had to idea of only using vintage, 19th Century-era illustrations of animals to give it a more unique look, rather than using photos.

Here are the final designs I came up with:
british wildlife animal bird green family Deer frog grass rabbit red FOX shrimp Perch northern Pike cormorant Caterpillar blackbird peregrine falcon vintage darwin 19th century rustic circle book Victorian fish Plant grass Nature creature Layout magazine type Food chain biology predator prey eat
Front Cover
british wildlife animal bird green family Deer frog grass rabbit red FOX shrimp Perch northern Pike cormorant Caterpillar blackbird peregrine falcon vintage darwin 19th century rustic circle book Victorian fish Plant grass Nature creature Layout magazine type Food chain biology predator prey eat
First Spread
british wildlife animal bird green family Deer frog grass rabbit red FOX shrimp Perch northern Pike cormorant Caterpillar blackbird peregrine falcon vintage darwin 19th century rustic circle book Victorian fish Plant grass Nature creature Layout magazine type Food chain biology predator prey eat
Second Spread
british wildlife animal bird green family Deer frog grass rabbit red FOX shrimp Perch northern Pike cormorant Caterpillar blackbird peregrine falcon vintage darwin 19th century rustic circle book Victorian fish Plant grass Nature creature Layout magazine type Food chain biology predator prey eat
Third Spread
british wildlife animal bird green family Deer frog grass rabbit red FOX shrimp Perch northern Pike cormorant Caterpillar blackbird peregrine falcon vintage darwin 19th century rustic circle book Victorian fish Plant grass Nature creature Layout magazine type Food chain biology predator prey eat
Fourth Spread
I was extremely pleased with the outcome of my final spreads, I think I managed to develop a very unique style and successfully incorporated the concept of having each page different from one another but all still being part of the same style. I also thought I was pretty successful with the whole vintage aspect, the designs had an old-fashion feel to them due to the way I distorted the headers and because of the old illustrations, but at the same time it looked like a very up to date and modern design. There are a few adjustments I would probably make if I were to produce this again, firstly I would come up with a different layout for each spread, since most of them here have basically the same layout, just different content and colours. Also I would research illustrations more, perhaps finding a book of vintage animal illustrations to use rather than just grabbing the images off the internet, so that they all had the same illustrative style. Lastly I would probably think of a more interesting way to lay out the text, since here I have just one narrow column of text on each page, instead I would have multiple columns, incorporating a grid, etc.
Family Project - British Wildlife
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