The Green College Report/Magazine for 2015-16 was the biggest print related project I have ever been involved in to date. I was the main graphic designer to tasked with revitalizing the look-and-feel of this magazine, to make it more modern and fresh. Though I was essentially given full creative freedom and it was not required of me to follow the style guide for the original brand of the college, it was important to me that the magazine reflected the history of Green College with its roots in in the Arts and Crafts movement. On the part of the original style guide, it had specified the use of Arno and Gill Sans for the typefaces and I thought it was appropriate to stick to this norm with the mild up-date in that I used Gill Sans Std and Arno Pro because Adobe has since modified these typefaces and added more weights. The new Arno Pro has about 31 weights total, in particular I enjoy using the display varietals in the set because the thin and thick of the strokes is more apparent and modern. When it came to the colour palette I decided to make some changes as well. Though I did use the Pantone 350 green as outlined in the brand guide, I introduced two other pantones 351 and 4745 because I felt that these less saturated colours would give the report a more clean look.
My favorite article to design, was the Dangerous Knowledge piece. There is a lot of great written content in this issue and topics range from interviews with one of Africa’s most prized poets, a statistician, journalist and doctor. But this piece was very relevant to the intense political climate of 2016. It touched on the societal role of the academics’ quest for knowledge, and it reminds us all to stay vigilant — to use our critical thinking skills to sift out the lies from the truth. Since there weren’t many pictures to choose from for this piece, I was excited to make this piece different and stand out from the rest. After all, this was the piece the magazine was named after. I used larger type and re-introduced the beige from the brandy style guide, enjoying the almost gold look the stark black background gave the pull quotes. I think this piece really draws the reader in and creates a successfully intriguing sense of drama.
