I was really excited about this design brief. When thinking about what area of my life I really wanted to bring into this assignment - I immediately thought about my childhood authors who's stories shaped my upbringing and who inspired me.

I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to bring together those authors who's stories I got lost in. I arranged the authors in the order of which I read and experienced their stories.

I began with Dr Seuss whose books and playful rhyming was always my favourite bedtime stories when I was really young, to Enid Blyton who took me on adventures with the Famous Five and to English boarding school with the Naughties Girl. Elizabeth Eulberg and Kasie West dominated my early teens with stories of the lonely hearts club, a remake of pride and prejudice and stories about love between friends and between strangers. These stories definitely shaped my unrealistic expectations of love! And this trend continued with my favourite series during my mid-teens - the Hush, Hush series by Becca Fitzpatrick about a fallen angel become guardian angel.

These authors HAD to be in my dream line up of people to meet. Because I had susch specific stories I loved from each author, I knew that the brief had to include one more item - a quote from my favourite book from each author.

Since these authors were based in my childhood, I wanted a more playful but still professional design style to convey this effect. I choose a light but bright and abstract design that I created which develops  the modern but imperfect and playful style. When choosing my typefaces, I wanted to create this contrast between the playful youth and professionalism of the conference. Thus, I went with two typefaces that contrast to make this effect. I chose a font called 'balloons' from dafont.com that expresses a bubbled yet structured style to emphasise the playfulness of the design. I contrasted this choice with the use of Montserrat - a minimalistic, thin and systematic font that expresses structure. These fonts combined create the effect of a professional yet child-like design.

I created each authors speaker topic as one that describes the key lesson they taught me. I wanted these to be short and simple but still capture the essence.

Each authors image is in a unique shape which adds to the effect of the design with its connection to the background but also to emphasise the quirkiness of the design to relate to youth.

The composition of the text is a simple but effective layout of three columns, with centre aligned and justified text in a consistent grid format. Each piece of text is aligned in a row that is consistent across the columns. This structure is exactly what the design needed to convey the professional nature of the spread - as part of a conference proceedings booklet.

This design creates a visual hierarchy through the manipulation of text size, thickness and use of colour. The title of the article is in big, bolded text with the introductory paragraph also in a bigger point size and bolder than the rest of the body text. The use of the coloured background with white text on top also draws the viewer in and creates interest for the breakout quotes. The use of the three column layout with some text (header and intro) overlapping multiple columns creates an interesting look which makes the article look more organic and is more viewer friendly.

The second page is a bit of a mystery, it consists of some supposedly relevant white text on a coloured background but it appears very disjointed from the rest of the article as it seems to have ended on the previous page. It also has a larger point size section of text which one would assume is a break out quote, however, it is then followed by some very small text that doesn’t take up a full column adjacent to it. The combination of these three text styles appears aesthetic at first glance but is quite bizarre when you take a closer look.

I re-created and redesigned this page in InDesign to rectify the design errors I believe the original artist overlooked. I tried to keep most of the layout and features the same to avoid completely overwriting their work, but I added in some more 'featured' break out quotes and gave these some text in an appropriate font. I also increased the font size for the body text as it appears that (if they designed don a standard double A4 spread) they used a very small font size. I took this up to the standard 10/11 minimum for legibility purposes, specifically since I was also using a sans-serif font. I added in a Drop Cap for the first paragraph to generate interest. I also utilised some coloured blocks to represent how sub headers would be represented. My main goal with this design was to make the right page more connected to the article whilst still drawing the viewers' attention along to this page. I used a large coloured break out quote block which connected to a standard text but with a coloured block - this represents the continuation of the article and ensures viewers keep reading. I added in some more text that would be relevant for the article and then ended the design with another coloured block which creates a continuation of the row created on the first page. Overall, I believe this amended design better creates a flow and hierarchy of information.