Catalogue of t shirts River Island:

I have mocked up a small A5 sized 'catalogue' which would be part of my information pack. 

At this stage the catalogue displays my t shirt designs and claims that they are for sale.

The back ground of the catalogue was made up from making a pattern out of my YMC-aid logo and duplicating the stamp many times. 

I am pleased with this small catalogue and would have liked it to have been printed onto a nice gloss stock in A5 size and placed in every information pack which came free when the customer brought a t shirt from River island and the charity. 

River island bag, logo impose:

Knowing that at this time, River island is the store I intend to stock and sell my charity T shirts, I felt the need to impose my logo onto the store's bag, as it shows an active collaboration between the store and the charity.

I had the idea to impose my logo onto the River Island bag, but the River Island logo will take preciseness. I knew easily how this could be done in Photoshop, so I have taken screen shots to show how.

I had cut out the white space around and inside the logo, and I then copied the layer over the River Island bag, where I then used a blending mode tool, so that the crumpled texture from the bag was visible in logos red and black colours.

After the logo had been placed over the bag and look partially convincing and realistic, I chose to apply a Gausian Blur to the logo, to break up the edges from being so sharp and obvious, which then made the logo look yet more realistic and less artificial. 

I was happy with the attempt at the final bag, and would settle for this for this being used by River Island during the time when they would be selling the charity's t shirts.

Pocket t shirt design:

As mentioned in the research, I was to create a range of t shirts including pocket t shirts and oversized ones. Here are a range of pocket t shirts I have mocked up using one piece of christian art work.

I am pleased with the simplicity and effectiveness of these mock ups and feel if I were to get them hand made, the pocket print would look good on a silk material against a black cotton t shirt. Obviously this would cost a lot to print, and that is the reason in why I have only mocked them up. 

Final spreads

These are my final 5 double page spreads in screen view, I still have yet to print the pages and see how they look on A3 paper with the printing marks kept on the page. 

Every aspect of my spreads were informed from research and feedback:

Font:

The font was informed from research into magazine design and double page spreads, where  I read that Aerial pt 11 was typical use in A3 publications, I cross referenced this with the opinions of my peers in the interim crit, and the majority agreed, some recommended that I use a Roman font, to stick with the theme of Christianity, which I experimented with:

I felt it was fitting to the subject of the publications, but it complicated the documents with the serifs and the thin text was yet more difficult to read than the Gothic font Aerial, also I felt that the typeface didn't reflect my target market which was young people, for this reason I chose to stick with Aerial.

I had a running theme of the headers on the page being Aerial pt 21, which were bold and underlined, I felt this was consistent and gave order and a connection to all the pages.

Layout:

The layout of my pages were informed from experimentation which were then re-informed by the feedback given at the crit. From the crit I was given feedback from many that the layout of my text boxes were hard to read and baffling with all the text on the page. It was recommended to me that I made use of four columns per page:

I attempted that on the page which I had taken for feedback, and it made a massive improvement. I felt the need to stick with this layout through the entire series of my spreads.

Grid system:

I had used rulers, margins, grids and a bleed on all my pages which kept them in line, the layout of the page was based on four columns which then made use of text wrap and so did the images on the page, this was very useful, and broken the text up into separate areas which was less baffling to read. 

Theme:

I started with a black and white contrasting theme in all of my spreads and then developed it into using a dark background photograph which looked very effective on the page, and looked a lot more interesting that a block black background.

The white Aerial text worked very well against the black background, so I chose to keep this as a running theme.

I made use of a white line which gradually faded into 0 opacity on every page. The white line was in a gradient style and I placed one on the top and bottom of every spread. I feel this acted as a border but was located higher than the bleed of the page. It kept the page in line and looked good as it contrasted against the background photograph.

Image placement:

Each image on my spread had it's opacity reduced by 10%:

I felt that this made the images less bold and in your face than other wise which I was pleased with, I could notice the difference when looking at all the spreads in conjunction, and 90% was definitely the better choice than leaving the images at full opacity. 

The back ground image had been applied to the master slide which was again reduced to 90% but also placed above a solid black background, which lowered the detail of the image but kept it so the background wasn't transparent.

Over sized T shirt creations:

Six oversized t shirts have been mocked up using adobe's photoshop, in which I imposed Artwork from the Christian Artwork book onto blank black, oversized T shirts. As I never actually intend to get the t shirts printed for this project, I have only gone to the stage of mocking up photographs of what I would intend for the final products to look like.

 I will not be printing the T shirts which I have partly created due to many reasons, cost and time being one, but also due to the fact that I wouldn't have the artist's permission to use their prints, which could lead to copyright infringement and me being potentially sued, as this brief I am intending to sell these t shirts for a profit which would go to charity.

I have mocked these up in photoshop using layer masks, blend modes and other such such as the eraser tool and the lasso tool.

I intended to create the most realistic looking I could, as I wouldn't be printing the actual thing, so T shirt to 

I must not receive feedback from my peers and people who I feel would buy over sized T shirts to see their opinions on them, and which they find best.

River island t shirt stockists - website mock up

Having chosen River Island to stock my charity t shirts due to the fact that, in my opinion, they are the most popular shop for teenagers to shop at.  I decided to investigate their website and see how they layout was, and if it made a good attempt at displaying the clothes they had for sale.

I liked the layout and style of the website, I felt it was very young and trendy, but not patronising, and was clearly aimed at the more mature teenager, or even older. 

I had the idea to mock my t shirts up on their website using photoshop in an attempt to show what my t-shirts would look like if they were selling in the actual River Island stores/site.

I chose to display four of my T shirts in the spaces where the previous River Island clothes were located. I removed the older images and used the type tool to write a brief description and also the price of the available t shirts. I noticed River Island used a hierarchy of type method to describe their clothes, so I attempted to stick to that, in top line held the name of the charity in a bolder typeface, as did the price which was in a different colour and also bold, where as the finer detailed text was in a regular typeface.  

Here there is a closer view of my t shirts located on the site and the description that goes with them.

I chose to do a more detailed description of one of the t shirts as if a customer on the site was interested in one of the designers and wanted a closer look, or to potentially buy the garment. 

I was basing the closer view on this blazer from the earlier part of the site.

I stuck to the grid system River Island had used on their site to locate where the information and pictures of the T shirt should go, using the rulers, I lined them up exactly where the information was on the blazer. I then deleted the blazer's information and replaced it with images and a more thorough description of the t shirt I was attempting to sell.

The final product looks very real such as the River Island site, which I am pleased with. I have stuck to the use of a Gothic font such as the one used on the River Island website, I appreciate how it isn't exactly the same as the River Island site, but it is close enough for what I am attempting.

indesign-ing

Changing the view modes in indesign allowed me to see my double pages spreads in the most basic view, which shown the text boxes, images bounding boxes and type on my pages. 

Using this mode, I was able to see the simple layout of my design rather than everything being cluttered by the images and the detailed background.

This view shows the layout of the double spread and the way in which I have placed the images and the typeface. It shows the bounding boxes that have been used on In-design.

The columns on the spreads acted as a guide of where I could place text bounding boxes and where there was space for image boxes.

A grid system was required for our spreads, and I based mine on a four column style, which I stuck to, but the theme of the spreads stayed the same which I felt was important.

The header of the page was always located in the top left corner of a page, as that is what my research informed me to do.  

I am happy with my final spreads and feel the grid system and columns helped me in designing a range of  spreads I was happy with and had a running theme.

Problems with a test print

When test printing one of my final double page spreads, I had checked to print the 'Non-printing objects' and for this reason when the printed page came out, it had the lines of my columns on the page, which I obviously didn't want.

As these photographs show, the printed out B&W version of my double page spreads contains lines down the faces of the people in my photos, which are very distracting, and not what I intended for.

I have been able to remove these lines by unchecking the box which prints the columns and guides onto the page. This is a hurdle i've overcome in the printing process. 

Christian Aid/YMCA clothes tag creation and exploration:

Having found a high resolution image of a clothes tag on google, I thought to impose the new logo onto this piece as a representation of how it would look, completed:

The image of the clothes tag started off with a lot of blank space, so I harnessed this by imposing on my newly created logo using Adobe photoshop.

By changing blend modes, orientation and opacity of the piece, I was able to create 3 convincing looking clothes labels:
Full length logo

 This logo covers the entirety of the label, and the opacity has been lowered enough to read the text that previously filled the blank white space.
Horizontal logo located at the top of the label

 This logo found at the top of the label makes use of the large amount of blank white space that was there before, it is large enough to be able to be read, and the opacity on it shows strong bold colour, but also realism of how it would look printed onto cotton.

I feel this orientation works best as it makes use of the most white negative space, but because the logo isn't vertical, it puts me off, as the audience can not tell the logo is the letter Y for YMCA.

Smaller vertical logo

This final vertical logo is smaller than the other two which makes the already small font even harder to read, but it looks professional I feel and the logo is in it's correct orientation.

Evaluation
I am pleased with the options I have for the placement of the logo on the clothes label, but at the moment I feel I don't have a certain orientation which works best, so I can continue experimenting with this logo as part of the charity's brand.

Christian charity logo collaboration

Knowing that I was going to be designing t shirts, the profit of which would be going to a charity, I had to chose a charity which would endorse this product and which the profit would be going to.

Firstly  decided to investigate YMCA, as it is based around males and has connections to religion and christianity: 

"The Young Men's Christian Association (commonly known as YMCA or simply the Y) is a worldwide organization with more than 58 million beneficiaries from 125 national associations. It was founded on 6 June 1844 in London and aims to put Christian principles into practice by developing a healthy "body, mind and spirit". These three angles are reflected by the different sides of the (red) triangle – part of all YMCA logos. The different local YMCAs are voluntarily affiliated through their national organizations. The national organizations in turn are part of both an Area Alliance and the World Alliance of YMCAs. The World Alliance's main motto is: "Empowering young people", and it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland."

I also investigated into Christian Aid, who like a lot of charities, fight to reduce poverty in third world countries.

"Christian Aid is the official relief and development agency of 40 British and Irish churches, and works to support sustainable development, stop poverty, support civil society and provide disaster relief in South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Christian Aid campaigns to change the rules and systems that keep people poor, speaking out on issues such as tax justice, trade justice, climate change, and Third World debt. Christian Aid has fought poverty for more than 65 years."

Using abode's Illustrator, I took both of the YMCA logo and also the Christian Aid one into the software when I instantly knew how these two logos could be combined.

           
I used the tools in Illustrator to my disposal, and edited the red arrow into the black Y from the YMCA logo, after the arrow was lined up and I was pleased with it, I used the colour picker tool to ensure both colours were matched together equally.

At this stage I also feel the significance from the YMCA logo is lost, and the iconography behind it has been taken away by the Christian aid logo.
I have found an older/different countries YMCA logo and used the text found on their logo to add to the black part of the Y in this new, collaborative logo to show the both charities working as one.

Other logos I could have considered

These are 3 other potential logos which I could have considered for the collaborative charity logo, in this instance I have duplicated the black stem of the 'Y' and flipped it so it forms a complete Y with the red downwards arrow adjoining to complete a full logo.

I am most happy with the 1st logo I created due to the fact it remains similar to the original YMCA logo and hasn't be modified too much.

I feel it was necessary to experiment with possible other logo creations rather than just settling for the first one I created, as this shows diversity, and also justifies to myself why the initial creation is better.

I also feel in a collaborative logo, one logo shouldn't take presedency over another, and they should have an equal amount of space on the page.





I have chosen the name the logo/refer to the collaboration of charities as YMC-aid. This will save time rather than calling the charity 'collaborative charity' every time I wish to mention it.

Creating my double page spread layouts using in-design

After having a tutorial in in-design I have begun creating my double page spreads. At the moment they don't have much context, and make use of the Text filler option, rather than saying something which is justified.

I chose to place a white circle around the image of the t shirt because the darkness of the image blended into the background, so I feel this breaks up the layout well. 

This page will contain less type, more images, and a smaller main image, in the future.

After the crit, I have chosen to go for a 4 column on each page style, and have changed the design from a black background with white text, to a dark desaturated photograph, but stuck with the white text, I feel this combination works well and the background doesn't distract the audience's eyes from the images or text due to the opacity being reduced.

The Background relates to Christianity and it very beautiful to look at alone, but I have reduced the opacity on the image so that it doesn't confuse the viewer.

I have included lines along the bottom and top of the page which act as borders and an indication to where the margins of the page are. This is informed by my research into magazine layout. 

My initial page developed from being on a black background, to using the chosen image as my background, and making use of 4 columns per page, as was suggested in my feedback.

At this stage, my pages are just a rough layout of what I intend for them to be, they will not have as much text as is present at the moment, and will contain statistics and more photographs. 

Whilst creating these spreads, I had a piece of A3 paper infront of myself so that I could consider how big the images would be in scale to the double page spread.