Live Brief - Hungry Sandwich Club

OUGD406 - Visiting Professionals - Hungry Sandwich Club 

One Day Brief - North Leeds Cycling Trail 

We were given a talk from visiting professionals 'The Hungry Sandwich Club' it was a really great presentation as they are recent graduates of the course so it was a good insight as to how the course sets you up for life after graduation. They have set up their own design studio at Duke Studios in Leeds and have a quirky niche of predominantly animated illustration that features a really distinctive unique style that sets them apart from other studios. They gave us a presentation about their life after graduating from Leeds College of Art which was really informative, they also gave us some great advice for when we start graduating. They showed us the projects they have been working on so far and I was slightly surprised to see they have worked on arg scale national briefs for well known clients within their first year of setting up their studio. 

They then introduced a one day live brief to us which was to design a map for the 'North Leeds Cycling Trail' as part of the Leeds Independant food festival. I was excited for this brief as it was a chance to take part in a fun one day competition that could lead to more exposure within the industry as the winning designers would be credited alongside their work. We were put into our current collaborative work groups for Studio Brief 3 and were given all day to work on our design. 

We initially had some problems with idea generation so we asked the guys from the Hungry Sandwich Club and they gave us some great idea generation ideas that they use when they are stuck for ideas within their own practise. They told us about crazy eights which involved folding the paper into 8 sections and we each had 5 minutes to sketch 8 ideas. We found this was a great way to gain a range of simple concept quickly which we could then evaluate and see if we thought as a group one idea had the potential to be developed into our final concept. Another Idea generation method we used was word association where we gave ourself a topic and we then had 1 minute to write down as many words we could think of that was associated with the initial topic. This was a great way to expand our thinking and allowed us to consider a range of new topics or ways we approach the design.  We disagreed most of these ideas however we all agreed that one of the crazy out outcomes could work as a resolution to the brief. 

Crazy eights

Crazy eights

Word Association

We had decided the that the concept we were going to develop into our final resolution was a concept derived from the crazy eights activity which had the idea that the train was included within the frame of the bike, we felt this could work well as a relatively abstract approach to the brief. We all produced a range of basic sketched then started to develop this digitally. Hattie did a great job of recreating this initial sketch digitally which we would all then modify and tweak until we felt the design was successful. We played around with hand rendered type to appeal to the independent and artisanal nature of the food festival however later decided as a group that the design worked better with digitally produced type. 

We all developed some simple illustrations of typical foods served by each establishment, We felt this would make our design ore engaging and aesthetically pleasing.  We had a few different styles of illustrations however we decided to go with Megan's abstract style illustrations as we felt this appealed to the quirky nature of the 'indie' feel of the food festival, we therefore thought these illustration would be lost popular with the target audience. We felt Thea's mock ups had the most aesthetically pleasing colour schemes so decided to develop these designs further to create our final resolution.  We noticed that the map was the wrong way round for standard western reading (left to right). So we flipped the bike round to make it more legible. We experimented with bolder colours such as a darker orange however we felt this was too stark so decided to keep to a slightly more conservative colour scheme to not make the page too busy as it already contained text, illustrations and the vector of the bike overplayed with dots to depict the cycling trail. 

Final Resolution

I am happy with the final outcome of our concept, I feel it looks professional, engaging and aesthetically pleasing. I am pleased with the results of this one day brief as we initial found it challenging to work within a group as we all had individual ideas we wanted to push forward however we worked well as a group compromising and working together to develop a strong final resolution to the brief. Although we were not picked to win and feature in the Leeds Independant Food Festival catalogue I am still pleased with our final outcome and think we worked well to create this resolution in such a short space of time.