Design Principles - Studio Brief 02 - Idea Generation

For my book, I had the content already planned out. Luckily, a friend I know who runs a blog wanted someone to produce a physical copy of their blog similar to that of VICE. This meant I could demonstrate effective layout design without having to research or gather content at all. However, I was given a set of guidelines to follow when creating this work which I thought was helpful to give myself a realistic scenario of creating for a client. The layout of the book had to relate to the content in some way, and had to be able to be created with low cost in mind, like a throwaway book that can be handed out for free. This meant that I would have to use a cheap and effective production method in order to stick to a realistic budget for my client. I also had the task of relating my layout to the content, and I decided to look at the concept of Yin & Yang further.

Yin & Yang was a concept in Chinese philosophy that states that every positive has a negative. Light has dark, good has evil, smart has stupid and so forth. The belief states that both elements are needed to maintain a balance, as having too much of either would have a negative impact on the world.

Obviously this was quite a complex concept to work with, so I tried to interpret it in a design context instead of trying to create a deeper meaning as this would take away from the blog itself, and the client wanted the actual content to be the main element of the book. I decided to play with the black and white colour scheme in the book while maintaining an original element with the way I laid the content out. I tried to keep my pages symmetrical in some way, maintaining a balance within the pages. 

I kept the content on one page similar to the other and I believe this is a subtle but effective way of conveying the concept of Yin & Yang without overpowering the concept itself. Putting this plan into action was easier said than done however, as I found some pages would often look bland if they were simply the opposite of eachother. This resulted in me producing many different mock-ups of pages and going through a lot of trial and error to come up with something I liked. I did this for most of the pages as I found that trial and error was the best way for me to find a balance between symmetry and originality.

Below are some of the mock-ups I produced: