Hello and thanks for meeting me here at city guidebook number 8 of 10- Melbourne!
When you imagine Melbourne you see sun, sea and surf! I found myself getting confused between Sydney and Melbourne though! :s Again, I did a search on Pinterest for ideas and inspiration.
What I noticed was a lot of photos with Pink hue skies. Pink is a colour I know I haven’t used much in my designs so far, so I decided to use Pink and make it a dominant colour in this design. Pink is modern, confident and warm so it would make it an ideal colour for this popular city. An iconic structure in Melbourne is the Princes bridge, it appeared in a lot of the photos on my search. Melbourne is a coastal city with a lot of landscape and structures but there is also a lot of green around the city. This is something else I would include!
Similar to my design that I did for Manchester, I didn’t want to draw the bridge looking exactly like a bridge.. I wanted to leave it open to interpretation and make sure that the abstract was present with it. I took a photo of the bridge and sketched it out above using only its simplest form. The bridge uses triangles as part of the design so I used this as the main frame for it.
This is the final mock up. I feel like this design is very balanced. The design has a centre point where everything comes together and then there is a lot of negative space and room for the design to breathe. This design allows the eye to travel from the bottom left to the top right. It flows naturally ad comfortably. As I said, I wanted to use Pink as the dominant colour. It is bright and modern and confidently portrays the atmosphere of Melbourne. To break the pink up I used a cool blue, this brings contrast between the 2 colours. A pop of green was used to represent the natural environment which does appear within the city itself. This I feel fights with the blue for attention but it is definitely the attention seeking accent colour of the design. The bridge itself is built from the triangles which appear on the real thing. It is seen to appear in the distance and then come closer to finish at the forefront of the design. It is the bridge in this design which perfectly balances this design. The eye flows comfortably across the design.
Hello and thank you for joining me here at guidebook design 6 of 10: Marrakech!
When I think of Marrakech I think of warm sunshine, a lot of warm colours – oranges, reds, yellows, terracotta… I think of souk markets and rich spices and rich, bright colours; purples, pinks..
I started off the same as usual by searching Pinterest for some inspiration. What I found matched the idea I had in my head. The colours were very warm. A lot of terracotta orange appears on the stonework of the buildings. The buildings all look like temples with the arched shapes doors and windows and the intricate patterned tiles and designs that feature on the buildings. I knew I wanted to include the arch designs and some of the intricate tile patterns. The buildings all look luxurious and rich. The ideal colour to represent this is purple.
The building that appeared the most was the above: Medersa Ben Youssef. This was a college but now acts as a historical site. I liked the symmetrical design, the arches and the intricately detailed tiles that appear on the walls. I knew that I would try and replicate this in an abstract style for my cover. I had the idea to include the arch into the design, a diamond pattern to represent the tiles and maybe some blocks to represent the water at the front of the building.
I overlapped 2 arch shapes with a different tint of terracotta. I chose a terracotta colour for the building to match what I found in my research findings. The arch designs also overlap the type on the left side which matches the rest of the designs for the other guidebooks I have done so far. Following the rule of 3 or thirds, I tried to split my cover into 3 again to get different design elements in each third. The 2 lines at the bottom represent the water at the front of the building and they also add some contrast against the warm colours. The diamond tile pattern I drew and split up across the negative space on the right side. I did not want to overwhelm the design and wanted to maintain as much negative space as I could. I have used purple to highlight wealth and luxury and a bright accent of yellow to again bring contrast but to also represent the bright colours that might appear on the buildings, the tiles, in the souk markets or in the spices. I think the eye flows naturally throughout this design with the diamond shapes adding a level of interest and also bringing the design to a close.
This is the final mock up for Marrakech. I am happy with it! It has kept the same layout as all the other guidebook designs I have done so far, it is keeping with the others and looks a part of the series. I have kept the abstract approach but again, it is open to interpretation but is obvious what it is portraying. The colours match what you would find in Marrakech but also contrast and work well together for the purpose of this brief. The terracotta is the dominant, the blue is the subordinate and the yellow adds a contrasting accent colour trying to fight with the blue for attention.
Welcome back to design 2/10 city guidebooks! – Malmo!
I was more aware of time (or lack of!) after completing design 1: Madrid, these guidebooks are time consuming! I decided I needed to try and cut down the research part of things although this first stage is crucial to achieving winning over a brilliant design outcome . I always start my research by searching Pinterest, it is the best place to find and record inspiration I find.
I had never heard of Malmo but after looking at some photos of the place and reading about it online, it now seems like a nice place to visit! I learned that Malmo is a modern coastal city in Sweden. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Madrid by basing it around architecture and landscapes so I searched Pinterest to see what landmarks stand out in Malmo.
The most intriguing building that I found in Malmo was “The Turning Torso” it is regarded as the first “twisted skyscraper” in the world. It was designed by spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor and painter Santiago Calatrava. It officially opened on the 27th August 2005 and reaches a height of 190 metres with 54 storeys and 147 apartments within it. In August 2015 the Turning Torso was the winner of the 10 year award from the Council on Tall buildings and urban Habitat. It also won the 2005 Gold Emporis Skyscraper Award.
With the brief in mind I knew that I had to keep my design abstract, I was conscious that I didn’t want to make the design too pictorial and obvious as to what it was. I didn’t want to draw the Turning Torso onto my design and it be obvious what it was! The way I went about designing was to take a photograph of the Turning Torso and trace around it several times, each time taking something away so that I was finally left with the bare bones of the building. I then took the whole drawing apart and found clever ways to piece it back together but in an abstract way!
Sketchbook pages: First sketches and ideas
This is the photograph I found on Pinterest, I printed it out and I based my sketches off it:
What I ended up with was a simplified sketch – the minimalistic “bones” of the building:
From this drawing it is still obvious what the building is, I took key parts of the building and simplified it down to its simplest recognisable form. This formed the basis of my final design.
In my final design I kept the same layout as I did with Madrid as I felt that this would make the guidebooks become part of a series and be obvious that they all belonged together. I wanted to use quite “earthy” “beachy” natural colours because Malmo is a coastal town. I used blue for the Turning Torso which reflects the sky and sea and the fact that this tall building is between the two! I used a natural pop of green and yellow which would reflect sun and sand… Yellow being nice and warm also contrasts against the cool blue and green. I wanted to keep the design simple – I decided to split my design into thirds (rule of 1/3s!) and split the design up into each section. This lets the eye flow naturally and easily across the whole design. The yellow boxes allow for a pop of colour, add interest to draw the eye right to the end of the design but also represent the windows of the Turning Torso. The only flaw in my design is that I enlarged the Turning Torso to only show the lower half and a segment of the top… you can’t actually see the “turning” aspect. However, going down the route of keeping it very much abstract and not too obvious, I still really like this design and I think that you would still be able to recognise what the structure is from the key elements I’ve picked out even though they have been moved around and enlarged slightly. Negative space to me is just as much part of the design as everything else so I was adamant I wanted to keep a lot of space around the design but also to not restrict the design too much to its edges. I wanted it as a whole to remain “breathable”.
The location and how I designed the typography of “Malmo” was just as important as the rest of the design. I really toyed with the type layout again and kept questioning myself as to whether it was the right decision to make; I wanted to do something different and for it to look quite modern and edgy. Splitting Malmo into syllables also forces the eye to follow over to the other side of the design to see what the rest of the design is about.
This is the final mock-up of my Malmo guidebook! I am pleased with how it has turned out, I met my own expectations of how I wanted it to be and look like. The dominant colour used on this design is definitely the blue followed by the yellow being next in line as the subordinate colour. The green is fighting against the blue for attention which is exactly what the accent colour should be doing.
pinkangeleno.com 