OUGD502 - Studio Brief 02 - Deuce Studios: Layout & Imagery

As the colour scheme and type was now confirmed, I was able to move on to considering layouts and imagery.

Harrison was mainly in charge of the imagery of the publication. For this, we agreed to follow a tennis theme, as we found out in the interview that Jonny is a huge tennis fan and the other two members are getting into it. Such a theme also obviously links to their studio name. The main concept Harrison came up with was to use old, and new, photos of tennis players that have been successful. This was to visually make the tennis theme very identifiable, but to represent Deuce as being successful, celebrating their achievement to set up a studio in such a short space of time.

As our Designbytwo page is very colourful and vibrant, we wanted to tie in a fun element into the report. By sketching playful, Deuce-lime lines over the images, we were able to create a striking aesthetic that is modern, engaging and suitable with the colour scheme set. Some of the illustrations and images that Harrison provided me with can be seen below.

Despite the required outcome for this project being a digital report, we wanted to consider how we would physically make the publication, as we want to eventually send Deuce a copy of the work we have done. I would personally love to work with them in Summer/next year; therefore, this would be a great chance to physically show them my skills in editorial design.

Rather than having a publication with the same stock on every page, we wanted to make the report more interesting and tangibly exciting by using a variety of papers and materials. As a result of this, it was agreed that the lime-green illustrations would be printed on either acetate or tracing paper. These could be laid over the images, so that Deuce could see the full tennis images if they wanted to. A quick mockup was made highlighting how the tracing paper (right) could be printed onto and then inserted into the spine with staples (or possible sewn).

For the front cover, I kept it simple and made use of different layers. The two circles that make up the Deuce logo would be cut out of a black cover. This would allow the two dots on the acetate/tracing sheet to show through. Another mockup of how the front cover (left) and inside spread (right) can be seen below.

The main challenge that I had to consider was the layout of type and images in the publication. As I always put a focus on using Vignelli's rules in publications, I wanted to try and follow a different approach in the report. Rather than sketching out some ideas, I focused on the set tennis theme and took inspiration from tennis court markings and the sport itself when approaching the layouts. As the majority of modern publications have equal page margins, it was appropriate to follow such an aesthetic and keep the content centred in the middle of the publication.

When considering the placement of type, I looked at the serving positions of players. Keeping within the central margins, one layout choice was to use the diagonal placement of players when serving. This can be seen in the example to the left below. Other layouts were inspired by the actual court markings. The 'who' and 'how' page layout was developed entirely from a birds eye view of a tennis court.

In terms of the content, I had already condensed the majority of their responses in the 'Interview' blog post. This made the design process much more efficient to complete. By using the type sizes set for headers and body copy, laying out the information was very straight forward. One aspect that needed to be considered however was the width of text columns.

Too wide columns are harder for the eye to follow, which results in the reader becoming lost more easily. Too narrow columns can cause the structure of text to break up and annoy the reader, as they have to constantly skip from one row to another. Both of these problems really reduce readability. 

Magazinedesigning.com have some really great tips to consider when considering columns. One point that they make is that:

"Optimal line length is 40-50 characters. These line lengths will be mostly seen in 2 and 3 column layout that are spreading across the whole page width. For example, 10pt type laid out in 3 columns across the width of an A4 or similarly sized magazine will have 35-45 characters per column line. Two column layout can have around 50-60 characters per column line."

For pages that have just one, or two columns in the report, I roughly used a character count of around 50. For pages with 3 or more columns, a rough character count of 40 was used. This ensured that readability is good, and that it is not an issue in the publication.

The 5 main spreads produced can be seen below. They include all the questions asked, and try to clearly depict who Deuce is, the challenges they faced, advice and their future prospects.

Whilst justified text is considered as 'fundamentally contrived' (Vignelli Canon), the positioning of quotes and column boxes in the report works much better than flush left type, as paragraphs look visually more uniform and structured. To ensure that no rivers were formed, every line of text was manually tracked and re-formatted. The result of one spread can be seen below.

Harrison produced some illustrations of the Rice Krispies characters to use in the publication, as Deuce said they would be Rice Krispies if they had to be any box of cereal. After designing the spreads, I realised that I had not included their favourite emojis in the report. To try and therefore incorporate this, I made 3 illustrations in a similar style to Harrison's (for visual consistency).


To make the report slightly more personal to Deuce, I used a low opacity for the emojis and put them throughout the publication. This way, it is more subtle and hopefully Deuce will pick up on such small details.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 02 - Deuce Studios Report: Posterzine

As we first got in contact with Deuce through our Instagram poster project, we wanted to include a poster of some sort that they can keep or put up where they work. For this, we kept the same aesthetic as in the report, by using the same colours, typeface, formatting and rough layout.

Harrison came up with the idea to produce a posterzine that celebrates legendary tennis players. He worked on the layout and imagery, whilst I worked on the typesetting. The zine produced can be seen below.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 02 - Deuce Studios: Publication Colour Scheme & Typography

In terms of the colour scheme we wanted to make the report immediately linkable to Deuce. The easiest way we found to do so was to use their brand identity colours, which are very striking and attention-grabbing. The 4 main colours present on Deuce's online platforms were taken, as seen below.









In terms of the typographic style of the report, we wanted to keep it very modern, bold and simplistic. This is the main style that Deuce takes when approaching a brief, and is also the style that myself and Harrison try to keep to when working on Designbytwo posters.

The trip to EPS 51 studios in Berlin was extremely eye-opening to me in terms of their fantastic use of typography. One point that they made is that you should try to continue experimenting with different typefaces, rather than using the same one from brief-to-brief.

I mainly use DIN in most publications, because I used it for my self branding and try to tie in a part of my identity into publications. Whilst this creates an overall consistent, identifiable aesthetic, design outcomes can become boring and predictable. For this reason, I researched into various type foundries to find a new, different typeface to use in the report.

One modern typeface that I found is FF Bau. As Deuce use a sans-serif typeface in the majority of their designs, it seemed appropriate to go along with this style to keep consistency with their design approach. The main source of inspiration for choosing this typeface was EPS 51's Bi-Scriptual project, which uses a very similar typeface for the header and body type. As the bold typeface is quite heavy, FF Bau Regular was chosen to use for body copy, with the bold option only being used for quotes and headers.

One aspect of the interview that also needed to be considered was the typefaces Deuce picked for eachother. The three that they chose were Gill Sans, Rockwell and Bodoni Sans. As one design rule learnt is that publications should use 2-3 typefaces maximum for good consistency, these typefaces were chosen to be used as a one-off on one particular page. Rather than incorporating them into every page, there would be one page that explains who each person is, with their chosen typeface for the header. This ensures that the entire publication stays fairly consistent, and that the typographic does not become confused.

The 5 main typefaces used in the publication can therefore be seen below.

In terms of the sizing of type, the standard recommended sizes for A4 print are 10-12pt for body copy. Type is usually smaller, from between 6-12pt in magazines, as there is a lot of text and content. One pet hate that Jonny pointed out in the interview is designers that do not understand the use of space, particularly negative space. Because of this, we later decided to keep our content very condensed, so that paragraphs of type could be spaciously laid out on a spread. As the paragraphs are fairly low in word-count, I chose to use the slightly larger recommended type size of 12pt for body copy.

In terms of headers, 40pt was chosen. This was keeping to Vignelli's rule that headers should be two or 3 times the size of the body copy (plus leading space). For the leading, it is recommended that line spacing is set to 120-145% of the point size. This resulted in body copy being 12pt in size, with 16pt leading, and headers being 40pt in size, with 54pt leading.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 02 - Deuce Studios: What Outcomes Should We Produce?

As my interests mainly lie in branding and editorial design, I agreed with Harrison that the most appropriate outcome we should produce is a publication. As we would essentially like to work further with Deuce and potentially gain some work experience in Summer, creating a publication gives us the chance to produce something physical that we can send to them. Our view is that making something physical, as opposed to just a digital Issuu PDF, is more tangible and shows a lot more time and effort put into the project. By producing a high-quality publication with quality stock and informed design, we think that Deuce would be much more likely to be impressed by our work and possibly offer for us to come and work with them. Physically sending them a copy of the publication also gives them something to keep forever, which is another aspect for why we want to physically produce the publication.

I looked at some online publications to gather some inspiration. Aspects that I want to consider when producing the publication are use of high-quality stock, a variation of stock, non-staple bindings and a strong visual consistency.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 01 - Beazley Designs of the Year Exhibition

Before meeting Deuce for the interview I managed to head down to the London Design Museum for the first time, where the 'Beazley Designs of the Year' exhibition was on. The exhibition celebrates design that promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice and more. There was a range of design to see, from typography to physical products. It was great to see a variety of designs that have a real impact and effect, rather than designs that just visually look nice. Some of the work that appealed to me can be seen below.

My favourite piece of work featured in the exhibition has to be the Moth Generator, designed by Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt. In 2015, Twitter disclosed that 8.5 per cent of its users were bots —software programmes that send out automated posts on the social media platform. That amounts to about 23 million of Twitter's monthly 271 million active users, and they are a growing presence in social media more generally. The Moth Generator is a Twitter bot. While most Twitter hots work simply, sending out tweets periodically or in response to specific phrases in user messages, the Moth Generator responds to tweets with art, by drawing endlessly unique 'fantastical' moths. Built in JavaScript, the Moth Generator's algorithm draws its moths stroke by stroke and point by point. They are then shared as a Twitter feed, making the Twitter timeline a platform for artwork. The moths provide unexpected moments of visual delight in a sea of words, but they also pose questions about human versus computer creativity.

This idea to produce something so creative purely from the analysis of data is incredible. As I am focusing on technology in my CoP essay, this got me thinking about my practical piece and how I could have focused my piece on data in a different manner. Overall, it was great to see such a wide range of fantastic design - I have taken a lot away from the exhibition and have clearly seen how genius, yet simple, designs can be to be extremely effective.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 02 - Deuce Studios: The Interview

This week, we met up with Deuce at the Book Club in Shoreditch to interview them about their practice and find out more about how they went from graduating to a design studio in such a short space of time.

The entire interview lasted around an hour, and we were really lucky to get some really in-depth answers. It was very chilled out and Deuce were really friendly and open to talk to, which was great as we were able to talk to them about everything we planned. We gave them a tube of some Designbytwo posters they had liked at the end of the interview as a little thank you for their time. Notes on their responses were made after the interview by listening back to the recording taken.



• How did you guys get together?

After a year of working for various agencies and clients, Deuce was essentially formed by three designers - Jonny Aldrich (Managing Director), Richard Patrick (Digital Director) and Matt Down (Creative Director).

They graduated two years ago after all studying graphics. A year of experience at a bunch of agencies (packaging, advertising and freelancing). did some interning at first then got offered jobs after that.

Known as the Managing Director, Jonny runs the entire team, keeping everyone and everything organised. He is mainly responsible for finding new clients, managing the business side of Deuce and visualizing the design process for multiple projects.

In charge of web design and everything coding related is Digital Director Matt Down. Whilst working on the digital side of things, Matt is also an accomplished typographer, gaining an Honor & Award membership to the International Society of Typographic Designers. 

The final key member of Deuce is Creative Director Richard Patrick. Also a member of the International Society of Typographic Designers, Richard is skilled at typography, art direction, photography, branding, identity and corporate work.

• Why the name Deuce?

Despite the fact that one of Deuce's first projects, Wimbers130, focused entirely on a series of tennis posters, the name behind the agency derived much earlier.

To simply sum it up, Jonny loves tennis, and there is a really great bullshit meaning behind the word 'Deuce'; it's about two people coming together - the client and the designer - to make something that is successful and effective.



• If Deuce could be any box of cereal, what would it be and why? 

An eclectic mix - Snap, Crackle and Pop - it has to be Rice Krispies. ‘We can do anything cause we’re Rice Krispies’



• Why London when you could pick North Wales? 

"Even though London is expensive, it's got the whole package."

Despite the average pint in London being extortionately priced in contrast to those up North, Deuce still consider London to be the best city in the World for design.

Their view is that London is internationally renown as a creative hub for design. It is fun, lively and busy, with a vast range of regular events that offer great networking possibilities. In terms of services, anything you could ever possibly need is available.

 

• When going from uni into industry, what was your biggest challenge? Have you got any advice?

"You don't know what you're doing."

One of the most challenging aspects that Deuce discovered after graduating is how to handle the business side of design work (especially tax returns).

One tip received is that even though some clients may try and take over the creative process, you should always remember the fact that they are hiring you for your ideas and expertise.

• What’s your pet hate in design?

Watching other designers that don't understand spacing.

• Hardest question. If you could describe one another as a typeface, what would you be?

Jonny would be Gill Sans as he’s done some pretty shady things in the past.

Richard would be something classy and sophisticated - how you like to present yourself, a little bit of class but not much class - like bodoni with no serifs - Bodoni sans

Matt’s a bit quirky - Bellway's got the little flourishes on it, a bit art nouveau. Something a bit more hard edged is needed though - Rockwell cause of his big toe - slab footed.

• Favourite emoji?

Jonny - Wink face

Matt - Peach

Richard - Moon face

"Is there not a squirrel emoji"

Where do you guys hope to see Deuce in 5-10 years time? 

In 5 years, Deuce see themselves having a little rooftop tennis court, with a small design team (around 6-7 members) that completes great quality design work. As they are currently mobile around London, Deuce would like to see themselves having a small office with a ping pong table.

Thinking even further ahead, Deuce hope to have a third floor office, located around somewhere like Hackney Wick, with maybe ten people. Staying true to their clients, they would like to work with a mixture of small and large companies.

This content will be used to develop a 500-word report on Deuce. I am going to work collaboratively with Harrison on this as it feels only right seeming as we did the interview together.