ADVE2292 GDP: Project Three Informational Factbook
Project 3 continues the development of creating assets for a brand for Kenya's Office of tourism. This particular part is heavy in editorial production as the goal is to make a factbook from research done both by the student and from what is pulled by the CIA's (yes, that CIA) website.
A consistent tone for the brand has always been led by prioritizing an image of community for our audience. We're the tour guide, your friend, your journey, all wrapped up in one. Maintaining the brands integrity of being adventurous, friendly, and leaders, I'm seeking to combine that with the illustrative assets made to incorporate visual aspects of Kenyan culture and history.
Starting with the earliest sources of inspiration, the Landmark Project for National Parks. There is little to no line art in these vivid illustrations and the type is usually boardering the images or pasted on top. This might be hard to translate to a factbook so I'm also bringing in references from Adobe Stock Templates of annual reports. I also looked at other projects on Behance that had an interesting typographic treatment and saw The Whole. There was a lot of layering and integration between text and image.
Additionally, I went on Pinterest and Instagram and looked at some works I thought worked well for editorials and books, looking to see what designers are currently doing in the industry. Illustrative editorials seem to be very popular right now, and self-sustainability seem to be a popular topic to report on. But many of these have double-column type treatment, lines to separate text from images and headings, and vivid colors on a neutral background.
After deciding on a creative approach, I began to condense information and finalized a plan for the TOC and ensured all the information provided on the CIA website would be able to fit in in the factbook. Currently, its looking at about 24 pages of content to include. All space is going to have to be highly organized and space needs to be used effectively.
A general idea of how many pages this content will take up was determined by looking at the the clean-up file used to organize all the information provided on the CIA website. The background information will most likely be one page, geography and environment will be around two pages, people and society will most likely be the longest at two to three pages, government will be around three, economy will also be three, energy will be one page, communications one page, transportation also one page, military will be one page, almost two, and transnational issues will be one page. And finally, there will be a bibliography page at the very end, so that would be around twenty pages total. For the sake of grace, I would estimate an additional five to be sure.
I started planning how that information will look on paper using Procreate to sketch out ideas for covers, TOC, and text treatment.
I like the idea of the covers resembling the National Park posters from the Landmark Project, especially since a major tourism point of Kenya is their own 24 parks. The concept of having Mount Kenya, the second highest peak in Africa as well as a major identifiable icon of Kenya, spread on both Cover 4 and Cover 1 like in the first sketch. However, part of my wonders if a more mature approach would be better for the brand to hone in on that guide persona. The final sketch with a continuation of a color block on the bottom of the covers is extremely sophisticated, perhaps too much for the audience.
With a total of 30 pages as of now, I know a lot of information will be condensed into graphs and charts due to the large amounts of statistics, so I don't want to invest in specific compositions just yet until I have a better idea of how this information will be presented. I want to keep options open and still remain true to the brand. The illustrations are planned and copy is ready to go, so after making charts, the rest of the content will fall into place fairly easily. (Hopefully.)
Some past student works I felt drawn to. I think the mountain graphics can be used in this project or finding more visually compelling ways to display information.
As layouts and text advance, I worked on graphs and illustrations. The graphs I've been making have felt as though they've been falling short and don't feel visually interesting, but they have vital information in them, so I'm trying to finish illustration assets and see if this rouses any ideas. The day we made prints I didn't have anything but a sketch done for a cover so I image traced a sketch draft in Adobe Illustrator to try to see one of my ideas in practice. I like the idea of illustrations stretching around spreads and covers like in one of my previous sketches and hope i can implement that in the final designs.
As each spread was done I began pulling and arranging all the assets as needed. It was like this for awhile, just arranging and some light suffering. Illustrations were finished and were pulled directly from photos of plants on Mount Kenya. I studied the Landmark Project National Park Posters quite a bit for this project, but now the posters look ugly to me after staring at them so long. I think this is one project I want to come back to over summer break to rework some things because I feel like there is more to be done here, but alas, deadlines. Below are the final spreads for the covers 1-4.
