Pentagram Project Development

Here is my final design for the Pentagram Project. Below is a brief overview of the development process which got me to this stage.

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After coming up with a number of initial ideas for this project, last week I went on to develop and finalise those ideas digitally. 


My development was done in Illustrator and InDesign. I decided to keep my work very minimal and used inspirations from the Swiss Style and a variety of other designs I had researched that adopted a clean approach.


Whilst I was focussed on keeping things clean and simple, I also wanted to be creative with whitespace where appropriate, to make my designs visually more unconventional and fresh.


Therefore I tried to make abstract use of features like kerning, columns of text were placed off centre with margins that were wider on the outside than on the inside.

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I used Illustrator to create my front cover as well as edit typefaces. For example I used the font Helvetica and created outlines to edit the letter A, remove the centre space and replace it with a circular shape, which I then used pathfinder to remove from the letter. This was part of my concept to integrate the typographic circle logo into my type.

I initially came up with a front cover which was quite different in comparison to what I eventually went for. My first design was very bright, I used magenta and quite complex, I layered up letters, such as the 'A' I had created above and also a 'B' in the same style and used filters to create different levels of colour. I later felt this cover was too bright and strong and lacked the subtlety and refinement of the rest of my work.  I then set about creating another design which fitted better. 

My spreads by this stage were basically complete, except for a few minor alignment adjustments and tweaks here and there. My work made strong use of white and black, therefore I thought it appropriate to create something bold in those colours for my cover. I decided to write 'Anthony Burrill' in oversized type across the cover, without hyphens so that it went across three lines. This looked visually quite abstract, and using the letter 'A' I had created, and removing all the other white spaces in the text, this helped to create quite a striking graphic cover, which helped to integrate my overall concept with the rest of my designs.

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