Design Process - How to travel as a bussinesman-making of guide and collaboration of designs and research

This was quite a difficult area to organise, due to the difficulties we are having with our group being split up we could only rely on 1 or 2 people actually put all of our designs together in the book. We decided Indesign would be the best choice of software to do this, but unfortunately me and a couple others have never used Indesign before so therefore had to rely on Nathan to put the book together, this is some of the progress of the book as well as a general overview of what information we have all collated and how we have individually laid it out! as well as laid it out as a group.

 After the change in plan on Wednesday, we decided to keep the booklet at an A5 format, this would help aid printing, as we will be able to use the mac suite printers, and it will also improve the amount of space we have to work with.

 Seeming thought the size of the book has had to change, there had to be adjustments to the page layouts, some pages had already been designed by individuals to help aid the putting together of the book, so it would just be a case of using the Illustrator of Photoshop file and dropping it straight into Indesign, but unfortunately now, pretty much every page had to be altered in some way to cohere with the new page size.

 We tried to keep the book as neutral as possible, incorporating, info graphs, charts and data to allow ease of understanding for the reader. this worked quite easily as you often relate these kind of charts to a business environment so it relates perfectly as well as providing useful easy to understand information that will aid businessmen on their travels.

Most of the design process was discussed and sketched out as a group before we took it to the computers, the layout of the pages was quite a fun task to do as a group, and I think this is where our group has succeeded, making sure we all had a good general idea of where the guide was heading (design wise) before any layouts and designs were undertaken. 

 Some initial design ideas had to be changed to fit. initially, these info graphs would have been on 2 seperate spreads, but this had to be changed, this time to fill the page.

The planes as the bottom which are  giving information on the distances between main business cities in the chosen countries. these were first thought to span the witch on an entire double page spread, American planes going west, and Chinese planes going east. 

 As you can see from the spread above about Travel in the chosen countries, their is a lot of written information on both these pages, this is why the size of the book had to be changed, I would have preferred to keep the book passport size, as I feel this would have made the guide more 'Travel size' which in essence is the main function of this book,  but unfortunately the written part would have been totally eligible, unless we had a complete re think of the infograph designs and ways of presenting the necessary information

 After another trip on Wednesday to the Library to search for stock to be used on the front cover, we chose a mango coloured papers it was quite a bold yet soft colour and would really suit the simple black logo and heading, this was then translated into the book and a small column of yellow was added to each heading, which I believe completely transformed the book.

Because our intention has always been to keep the book as simple and professional as possible and due to us just using black and white we realised that the book was starting to look visually dull, and in someways look more like a Microsoft Word document than a professionally designed guide.

But after we incorporated this tiny bit of colour to the book it really did make a huge transformation to the aesthetics.

As we are splitting the book into the 3 main sections that will together incorporate all the useful information we have gathered. we created this tab like system on the right hand side, that will inform the reader of which section they are reading, whether that be, Preparation, organisation or communication.

The tabs would not be cut out, but would be highlighted in black depend on which section of the guide you were reading.

 The final business card page, concept is not exactly like I first planed, but again due to the changes in paper size, this is the only way that it could have been laid out. We had to loose the aspect of an area to hold the individually sized business cards from each country and instead just focus on the information of how to give / receive a business card in both cultures.

 Also due to the fact we wanted to have limited colour in the guide, the flags also had to be changed to black and white, this is a much better aesthetic and fits with the style of the rest of the book.