I was asked to create a publication that summarises the various international activities that staff from the College of Arts are involved with.

Having being involved with many of these activities myself, I thought this was a great idea. However, after scoping out how much is happening over the course of a semester it quickly became apparent that a printed publication was a poor choice because of how sporadic these activities actually were.

I suggested that we develop an App that is powered by web content that can be updated and managed by the authors as opposed to having a dedicated production team. Obviously, the initial outlay is much higher, but this mode of operation was more appropriate given the nature and infrequency of new content.

Regardless of what form the product might take, it still needs some branding. I wanted something that represented the college without focusing on any particular school within the college. This meant dealing with the abstract. The feature image above is what I came up with (thinking along the digital output mode).

 

The hexagonal emblem was not only a trend thing, it actually represents the 6 schools we have within the College of Arts. I wanted something modular that can be adapted and reconfigured easily for each “issue” (an issue in this instance was going to be a cover update to give the impression the product was evolving).

Sadly I lost my design sheet for this (and I’m actually writing this post retrospectively, about 18 months after the publish date) but below are the various screen designs for the digital publication:

The app was to be created using Adobe InDesign’s Digital Publishing suite of tools. There was a whole host of interactivity built into this project such as the ability to access the contents either via a traditional list of pages or from a map of the world (with each article having a marker on the map acting as a link).

Sadly the project never really took off. Maybe now (as of Autumn 2015), our international activities and partnerships are flourishing, this project might be revisited. But for me, it was an interesting design process and I learned a great deal about the possibilities, and many issues, surrounding digital DTP.