Book swaps & raindrops.

So today was our first day of research and exploration in attempt to find design resources for our soon to be student guide. As a group we had brainstormed several ideas before today, those being:

- The Carnaby Street Book Swap; an LCF student founded project which encourages customers to bring a book and give a book for free,
- The Heygate estate; as a place for students to explore and interact creatively with,
- Columbia road in Hoxton; a quirky street that students could visit and draw inspiration from, and
- Cecil court; a small street near Trafalgar Square bursting with antiques and book shops.

We started the day off by visiting the Carnaby Book Swap, which we discovered was started in April and intended to be a 6 month long pop up, which provides a free book swap service. However due to the positive feedback from the area the pop up is being extended until November. Not so good when we are creating a guide for students next year then... It was lovely though!

Despite that fact that we can't move forwards with this idea, I still found the model of the shop really inspiring, and would like to go back and use it before it shuts.

We moved on to explore Cecil court which I found to be a lovely little street with older shop fronts, kind of like Diagon Alley in Harry Potter. It was great to see all the old books and shelves crammed with various different antiques which Julia found so inspiring. We even went as far as enquiring into the price of a bust....a lot more than we could afford it turns out.

Another idea occured to us as we were wandering around, which was to create a guide based on what magazines are good to read as Graphic Design students, and which are designed well. I find magazines to be a huge source of inspiration for my design, but have to weed out the poorly considered and poorly written ones. The guide might include the publications below as examples:

- Lula
- Oh Comely
- 1883
- Indie
- Material Girl
- Monki
- i-D Magazine

Creating a guide with the most useful and inspirational magazines would make the process a lot easier and form a start point for people who are unaware of what magazines are out there and what they focus on. We put this idea on the back burner for now as the whole group wasn't sure about it, but we may come back to it later.

We also discussed potential colour schemes and types of paper stock we might use. We decided we were all happy with the colours white, black and blue, and are all open to experimenting with the order in which those colours go, e.g. white and black on blue paper, or black and blue on white paper. Below are some swatches of the kind of blues I am leaning towards.

Based on what I saw on Friday's mini exhibition, the 3 of us all create smaller illustrative work, which I think will quite heavily influence the way in which we put together this guide. The magazine Oh Comely frequently features illustrators and designers with a similar style, as well as a regular illustrated quiz on the back page.

At the end of the day we sat down to collect our thoughts and work towards a more solid concept for the final guide. Our idea is focused on the central concept of places we are inspired by, and we are thinking of manifesting this in our guide through each choosing a street or area which inspires us and individually illustrating them.

Grace x