Wednesday, 9 October 2013

COP - Study Task 2

The first thing I notice about the prospectus is the hexagons on the cover. Personally I don’t feel that they add anything to the design of the cover, and that the opacity of the colours doesn’t really aid you in any way. The background image is a fairly busy one as it is, so I don’t really think the hexagons are necessary, nor is the extra colour, however, it might be interesting to see what the image would look like if the separate pictures in the image did have a tint of colour, because clearly whoever designed this wanted to use colour.



Following on from my previous point, the hexagons continue onto the back cover around the spine. While the pattern has some continuity to it, the hexagons on the back have a mixture of block fill colours and gradient fills, which I don’t think works very well visually. I also think that the amount of whitespace on the back is too big, and could be used for useful text such as contact information, or even the names of the people who produced the prospectus.



Something I found rather irritating was the contents page. Not only was it printed on glossy paper for no apparent reason, the page size was noticeably smaller along the right hand side than the rest of the prospectus. I could understand this to some extent if it was in the middle of the prospectus on a very important page, as it would make the page slightly easier to find when flicking through the book, but the fact that this is done on the contents page makes it completely irrelevant. I have no particular problem with the page itself, so if the size and stock of the page was changed, I think it’d be fine.



Every page with a large amount of text on it is set out in two columns, I like this continuity. What I don’t find necessary is the line that is drawn down the middle of these columns. It is on every page, and the colour varies from page to page. It isn’t clear why this is, my best guess would be that it was a poor attempt at some sort of colour coding. Personally I feel that the line just makes the pages look busier than they need to be, and removing them would be a big improvement.




A recurring theme throughout the prospectus is the use of images. They’re often randomly placed and don’t seem to fit in any sort of grid. Another thing I noticed was how generic most of the images were. On one page there’s a picture of some tubes of paint above an image of a girl on an iMac on the page across from a page talking about higher education in general. Examples like this are fairly numerous, and so throughout the book it’s fair to say that the use of image is fairly poor and could be improved by using more appropriate images organised in some sort of arrangement rather than being seemingly randomly placed.

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