During my trip to South Korea in 2022, I chanced upon a magazine in my seat compartment just as the flight was getting ready to land. It was the airline’s complimentary inflight magazine called, Morning Calm. Its interesting cover caught my attention and I started flipping through the pages. Before I knew it, I had spent a good 15 mins reading the magazine. I did not realised then why it was able to hold my attention so long. Heck, I did not even notice that the plane had landed! Anyway, I liked this magazine enough to keep it in my backpack.
Fast forward to present day. I have been learning about typography, layout and spacing, etc. from MD0010. The module also had an assignment to create an 18 page brochure about Little India on the pretext of working for National Heritage Board. While I paid close attention in class and understood all the theory behind it, I was short of fresh ideas. I always want to submit a piece of work that I can be proud of, and was getting writer’s block for this particular assignment.
Suddenly, I recalled “Morning Calm” and dug it out from my bookshelf. This time as I flipped through the pages, I noticed some new things. I was taken aback by how elegant and simple the magazine was designed. The images and text were aligned nicely in 3 to 4 columns. Everything was perfectly aligned. Font sizes, font types followed a certain consistency, right down to its headers, sub-headers, captions and even footers! Why didn’t I notice all these the last time?
There was clear hierarchy, consistent use of white spacing that made reading the magazine very enjoyable. I knew I had a winner here. So, I decided then to scrutinise every page in search of layout designs that I could emulate for my assignment. I noticed it had only a few variants but always stuck to a consistent number of invisible column grids. I started putting yellow 3M sticky notes on some pages that I liked and began annotating on them. There was an article about railway travels, and it creatively used a little train track to direct our eyes from one section header to another. Since my assignment was a walking tour around Little India, perhaps I could follow this idea but use mini-footsteps instead?
Now I had a happy problem on my hands. How do I squeeze so many ideas within 18 pages? So, I started to rank which ideas were best and limit myself to only those. I applied the ideas to a Google Slides file to create a quick and dirty prototype. I felt that this was a good way to get decent feedback from my instructor because I was not that skilled in using Adobe Illustrator (AiL). Using AiL would take me forever to build even the first draft of the brochure. Worst, AiL is laggy and has destructive cropping. Meaning that there is no “undo” option! Conversely, Google Slides was fast to load, and easy to edit. It gave me multiple opportunities to rework some ideas (interative cycle!) each time I got feedback from my instructor or other people.
Aside from Google Slides, I also found Adobe Photoshop useful for this assignment. What happened was that one of the photos I wanted to use had only a small portion of the sky. I needed to have more of the sky so that it would have enough space to add my body text. I solved this by using Adobe Photoshop’s generative AI expand feature. So what if my photographs isn't perfect? I can supplement that by using Gen-AI tools! The majority of my other photos were fine. However, I still made a second trip down to Little India with some classmates as I simply wanted to hang out with them while working on this project.
Transferring my designs from Google Slides to Adobe Illustrator was rather straightforward as I had everything planned out. I even added a style guide to make sure that I kept things consistent. In a way, Google slides acted as a storyboard for AiL. Lastly, I spent some time manually check for kerning issues in the headers & sub-headers.
I like these kinds of assignments that require learners to go outside of the classroom. Exploring Little India to take pictures, visit the temples, taste Indian dishes made learning so much more fun. Along the way, I spoke with a few friendly Indian shop owners who were more than glad to have a conversation with me.
Overall, this was a fun assignment. I learnt how to design a brochure using proper techniques, explore local culture in Singapore, meet up with friends for photo taking and even got to try out some nice Indian food. Experiential learning at its best! I hope many of the other modules are also designed this way.
Howie Chia
26 Jan 2024
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