Further Design Development

I quickly mocked up these pages ready to present to the clients at a meeting. The iconographic style was well received on the grey version even if the colours and cover weren't, with Francesca Davies writing, 'I really like the use of the icons to show our themes of work as these are eye-catching and easy to understand'. 

With that in mind I decided to keep the interior layout the same, and even progressed the use of icons onto a page displaying data on income statistics. Influenced by David McCandless' work on Information is Beautiful, I used relevant icons to the data to show the data, such as a stack of coins to show the statistics of those considered 'hard pressed' and scaled houses to show annual income.

I changed the cover, re-colouring the houses in a range of pastel shades and applying more to create more of a community image. I justified this in the meeting by explaining that the colours were to represent the diverse nature of the communities in the 'Our Happy Place' programme and to give a 'happier' look to the cover. I also changed the colour of the title, using two shades of blue and moved the logos up to look more of a part of the report.

A lack of photography was another issue raised by email, and while I don't have the official photographs that will be used in the final report and am not a competent photographer myself I decided instead to show where that sort of imagery could be used. Finally, I extended the houses theme from the cover to the footer of each page for continuity and take the varied colour scheme further as most components were rendered in the dual blue shades of the title.

The Meeting
I met with Francesca Davies and Claire Neville, along with my tutor Helen Holmes, to discuss the progression of the annual report project. I had edited the the design quickly and they were expecting to talk about the previous white and grey effort, so the meeting was shorter than anticipated. My new report style was very well received, and the colours were seen as more appealing, most of the meeting was centred around arranging for additional information and imagery to be sent my way.

There were a couple of recommendations made. One, by Claire Neville, was that not all of the residents featured in the 'Our Happy Place' project live in houses, and that flats and maisonettes could also be represented. Also, they were interested in adding volunteering case studies to the copy, and asked if it would be possible to add a volunteering badge to the report where warranted to denote case studies.