It's all about the dims

February 9, 2017 Tanya Cornish

Horniman Museum and Gardens approached me to create this identity for the temporary closure of their galleries while they create the new (and very exciting) World Gallery.

Rather than talk about the design as I usually do, I thought I'd talk shop instead. The 'design' part of my work takes up about 20% of the total time spent on any job. And the rest? It's all technical, technical ... and technical. But what does that mean?

It means thinking about how visitors enter and move around the space: what will they see from where? How legible will the graphics be from a distance?

It means thinking about how a job will be installed: will the vinyl go outside the glass (sticky back) or inside (sticky front)? (The larger part of this job went inside the glass to avoid the cost and inconvenience of scaffolding.)

It means working to accurate dimensions, or 'dims' as we call 'em in the trade. The dims have to be accurate down to the millimetre and include all fixtures and fittings or things can go seriously awry ... imagine trying to cover an A4 book with a standard envelope. (Oh dear.)

And most of all, it means a lot of work in Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. Here's a quick overview of the digital work that went into the project:

The explanatory text panels were created in Indesign. (They were installed on the outside of the glass so they can be updated easily without removing all the large colour graphics.)
The large letters were created in Illustrator and converted to vector halftones. This looked great but the file sizes were way too big. Bigger files can slow you down – unwise if you work to deadline. To counter this, I took them into Photoshop and converted them to bitmap TIFs which, having only black pixels, are much smaller than colour images.
The map was originally a vector/Illustrator file which I converted to halftones in Photoshop, running it at different dot sizes until I got a pleasing result.
I brought the above two sets of files back into Illustrator to layer, crop and colour them into the x25 sequential files that make up the job. See below for a pic of all the elevations plus a screenshot of an Illustrator file.

Each of these processes takes time and much like creating anything, you have to take a few runs at each stage before you can clamber over the top. And here we are on the other side of the job. Nice.

http://www.horniman.ac.uk/about/anthropology-redisplay

(post by Tanya)

Behind-the-scenes for the museum

December 11, 2016 Tanya Cornish

These two shots were taken in January and December this year and are pretty representative of one part of my work process. Printing test strips for exhibition graphics is crucial to test colours, resolution, legibility from a distance, aesthetics and all that other good stuff.

They also represent different roles I can play in an exhibition project. The dinosaur was a retouching job only, I wasn't involved in the exhibition or marketing design. On the other job I was the sole designer, meaning I took the brief, presented a number of concepts to my client and once we'd finished distilling the design, I artworked the resulting x25 pieces for manufacture. (The latter is still with the print house so I'll post pictures once it's installed).

Want to know more about artworking and the crucial role it plays in the design process? Read this little piece I wrote a while back:

http://chutneychorus.com/blog/design-artwork-and-a-dogs-dinner

(post by Tanya)

Design, artwork and a dog’s dinner

November 18, 2013 Tanya Cornish

I’ve just come to the end of a heavy week of artworking and realised the differences between ‘design’ and ‘artwork’ aren’t made clear by us designers, despite the fact they’re both crucial steps in the design process. Allow me to fill you in.

Here are the stages a typical design job goes through:

Client brief
Design proofs (usually around four)
Client sign-off
Artwork
Job sent to press/repro house

Broadly speaking, design is the creative stage and artwork is the technical stage. (There’s often some overlap but for simplicity’s sake I’ll keep them separate). You could compare the design stage to making sketches. They give a good feel for the final look but aren't finished. Or perhaps they’re more like movie façades – from a distance they look great but under close scrutiny they’re insubstantial. Try to send a design proof to print before it’s been artworked and your repro house will either refuse the job, or charge you extra to sort out the mess. Why does this matter? It could cause the things that clients and designers fear the most: delays, going over budget, a missed launch date and maybe worst of all, damage to the brand.

Here’s a fictional example of how a design and artwork file can differ.

Left form bad, right form good. The fonts and alignments on the left form are horribly inconsistent. The artworked form on the right is not only tidier, it's easier to understand. — **Left form bad, right form good.** The fonts and alignments on the left form are horribly inconsistent. The artworked form on the right is not only tidier, it's easier to understand.

To stay on safe shores, artwork has to be spot-on. My own preference is to do artworking out-of-hours. This is when I know my client is tucked up at home and I can get on without being disturbed. Artwork involves getting around a dozen tasks ticked off a list, some more time-consuming than others. They might include re-touching and cutting out images, doing a final spellcheck, checking consistency of fonts, aligning elements across multiple pages, checking colours and generally using a clinical eye which, after an intense day of coming up with design ideas, can actually be quite soothing.

Before I became a designer, I was an artworker. Anyone who seeks perfection and likes to spend their days doing something where it can (almost) be attained would do well to choose a career in artworking. True, you don’t get to make many design decisions, and you’re firmly backstage but its importance can’t be overstated. During my artworking years I freelanced in over thirty design studios and advertising agencies around London, from the major to the minor. One of the most memorable jobs I had was re-touching a leading brand of dog food. The brief was: can you make the pile of chunks higher? Can you add some carrots? Now create a cast shadow from the pile of chunks over the pile of carrots etc. Not very glamorous sure, but really crucial. Cut corners at this stage and the integrity of your brand can be seriously undermined. Who wants to buy products with an unprofessional finish? Your customers will see you as sloppy if your artwork is sloppy and you can say goodbye to your hard-won place in the market.

I’m a little evangelical about artwork as you can probably tell … I care about it just as much as I do about design. Not only am I a compulsive proofreader (Mike says I can spot a typo from 20 feet away) but I also compulsively check artwork too. Occupational hazards I guess … Dodgy cut-out images and misaligned text make me shudder. Here’s a couple of my favourite howlers that I look at whenever I need perking up. They remind me that close detailed work is worth it. (I’ve blurred the faces and details to save embarrassment). And yes, that really is a leaflet with no text content and just a background image … incredible. Not only did it make it through the printing press but it was also distributed – we received this copy through our front door.