aka Jess Watson
Here’s all the screenshots of my progress through the Nutritional Curriculum project, through to the final product. In the end I decided to focus on only 1-2 ‘key messages’ so as not to make the document too eclectic and disjointed. In particular I’ve centred it around the concepts of reading nutritional labels, and thinking about the health value of different foods.
And the finally finished product:
This tutorial I spent much of my time trying to find out if there was any specific research into Graphic Design for highschool-aged students. I also drew up some sketches of illustrations based on the different ‘key messages’ for the year group. Here’s some of the ideas I’ve had so far:
Key Message:
1. There are a number of political, economic and societal complexities which influence healthy food production, supply and demand in Australia and around the globe.
Ideas?
Illustration Ideas and Inspiration (RE: Nutrition curriculum for years 9-10)
Cashier serving (Fast food or Supermarket)
This week we’re looking at aspects of document design that we’ll need to consider for our Nutrition Curriculum project. In particular, we were introduced to the ’10 Principles of using Type’ by Erik Spiekermann & EM Ginger (1993, as cited in Medley, 2013). Rather than list all of them verbatim, there were a few that I thought to be specifically relevant to my plans for my document, namely:
6. Keep to ‘invisible’ fonts for body copy
As this document is supposed to be used in a teaching context, it will likely contain a lot of information. It would be best to stick to an ‘invisible’ font, which is in essence something familiar that is not overly decorative or complicated. Maybe something like Arial, Times New Roman or Gill Sans?
7. Keep the noise down in the background
While I want the design to be interesting and engaging, I will have to be mindful not to make it difficult to read. I will need to find a way to make it interesting, without distracting students from the text or making it hard to see. Which also links to…
10. Contrast of at least 70% is best for legibility
In order to break up the content and make it interesting (without being too noisey) it will probably be worth having some solid coloured backgrounds for some of the pages. Whichever colours I use, I will have to be mindful that they can be read whether printed greyscale or in colour; thus keeping the contrast of at least 70% will be pretty important. This may also relate to the colours of the BG and font in terms of visual contrast for students who are colourblind. Might look into that as well.
The lecture for week 9 introduced us to our next assessment; designing a faux school document for the new national curriculum on nutrition. As the curriculum will be developed for all levels of schooling, it was important to take into account the audience of our illustrations and document design.
Staff from the Child Health Promotion Research Centre came to give us some insight on the new National Curriculum, as well as outline the types of concepts students will be covering at each year level. The overarching aspects are that…
Food literacy involves having awareness and knowledge of the dietary guidelines for good health, as well as skills in:
(Waters, Miller & Baker, 2013)
This week we started looking at Editorial Illustrations, which started with a brief history of illustrations, and the use of pictures in design. An understanding of this history will allow us to better communicate our design reasoning with clients, as well as aid us in our quest for design inspiration.
Some of the points discussed in the lecture were:
Week 6 was all about colour, which is good. I like colours 😀
Unfortunately one of the problems about colours when it comes to creating on a screen to be printed out is that “we work in opposite colour systems” (Medley, 2013). When we’re working on a monitor we’re looking at additive colours (the RGB gamut), and yet when we print things out it’s through subtractive colours (the CMYK gamut).
When working between these two formats, it is important to be aware that significant differences can occur as not all the same types of colours are represented. Thankfully if you have a great need to print a colour that’s unavailable in the CMYK gamut, it is possible to have a specific type mixed for you; in Australia these are generally referred to as ‘Pantone‘ colours in relation to the brand, but are also called ‘Pre Mixed Colours’ / Spot colours / Solid Colours. But then to make the job of getting the ‘right’ colour even more complex, these two formats still cannot fully represent the range of colours we can see in the real world. Gah!
