Finished Board

These are a couple of pictures of my finished A1 board. I am pleased with the outcome of this module and have put a lot of time and effort into the whole thing. I did have a few problems in finishing the project because it was quite tricky trying to get the images on the A1 board to line up correctly. I should have planned out more accurately the layout of the A1 board. Here is the finished product:

Designing the signs in Illustrator

 This is the wall sign. It is a development from one of my initial drawings. I like the fact it has text and image on it because it makes it more appealing and attracts people more. One of the main purposes of a sign is to be prominent so people can see it with ease. I used the designated red heritage zone colour for consistency.

This is the finger sign. After considering other initial designs, I wanted it to be nice and simple in the end. Once again the colour zone is indicated as the shopping zone colour and the sign points to the high street where most of the shops are.






Illustration is a new program to me, so learning it was quite tricky even though it has a similar layout to other programs I've used like Photoshop. I had trouble getting some of the tool to work like the gradient tool to make the pole look metallic.

Initial Sign development

In order for me to create an effective sign, I had to get started on doing sketches so I did quite a few sketches and put a lot of thought into some of them. Here are some photos I took of the sketches:

This was the first set of sketches I did. There are a variety of type of signs. Wall mounted, floor, standard finger signs. I quite like the one in the bottom left and the one in the top left because the one on the bottom left has a lot of detail visible on it, you can add text and image to it. The top left sign is nice and simple and gets the job done.

This sketch is not actually a sketch of signs. These are some initial sketches of the information board I must design. I was just working out how to position all the elements like the maps, images and history.

This sign was a bit of a jump forward. I wanted to emphasize that  the town was a river town so I design a sign in the form of a boat. Not only that but this sign potentially has multiple purposes. It has room for a bench (hence a person sitting on it in the picture) and room for a flower bed and also room for a bin. The flag of the boat would be the sign. I put a lot of thought into what the production of this boat sign would be like. If this sign was actually made, the prototype would be made with wood for the actual boat (maybe even a second hand boat) this would be painted to preserve it. The mast and flag/sign would be made of a metal. The point of the flower bed would be to deter people from climbing up the boat. I like this design a lot but I think it may be a bit too complex to mock up a design.

 Following the river theme, I thought of how I could make a wall sign. So I thought the actual sign could represent a river with a model of a man fishing on top. The text would be implemented in to sign too.

I thought the top of this river sign could have interchangeable models on it like presents for directing to somewhere (i.e. the presents would be pointing to shops and the man fishing would be pointing to the river)

 This is a variation of a river sign. This one is a finger sign. The same idea of having a model on top of the sign has been added to this idea.

This is the sign from different viewing angles.

Now I need to decide which one of these signs would look good as a final prototype and then get started on finalising the idea.