Due to the excessive need of an A3 printer, and the struggle it has proven to be at college with everyone needing the printer at the same time due to the deadline, I made the decision to purchase my own A3 printer to have at home – which makes the printing process miles easier! Because of this, I now have the ability to experiment with my designs as test prints before I use the expensive photo paper, and its miles easier to do with my printer because it offers a ‘draft’ printer setting which allows you to see if the sizing, scale and colour is right. I have placed my test prints for each project below:
My first set of test prints are focused on the Conspiracy Theory project. I was unsure on how I wanted to present my final designs within my portfolio, especially since the infographics are partnered up with an information page, so it made more sense to have these two designs on the same page. I first printed the designs in portrait and had the information page ontop of the infographic, but I wanted to try and get the designs to sit ontop of each other in when printed in landscape. This was unachievable, but I did managed to print the designs side by side when in landscape, which carried across the aethestic of a book really nicely. However, I made the decision to print the designs in portrait because it offers a larger representation of the final designs.
From here, I then started to see how I could layout my mockups. In total I have 6 mockups, and I knew I wasn’t going to be print one mockup per page and I also knew that it was unlikely that I could fit all 6 mockups on one page. This is where I tested the idea of 3 mockups per page, which reduces the amount of paper I have to use while clearly offering a large enough view of the designs mocked up as books.
With the Conspiracy Theory project fully printed, I moved on to the Commemorative Stamps. I first wanted to make sure that my designs could fit happily on one A3 sheet of paper as well as clearly showing the designs at a large scale as well as a true-to-size stamp scale. For this layout, I took to Adobe Illustrator and worked with a A3 size document. I decided that the easiest layout would have the three large scale designs taking up over 3/4 of the page when in portrait position and on top of each other with a small gap at the bottom of the page to sit the true-to-scale stamps designs next to each other. My main purpose of having a test print for the stamp project was to ensure that when printed, my accurate stamp sizes didn’t look out of proportion and I think that stamps, when printed, resemble the size of landscape commemorative stamps quite accurately.
I’m not really sure why I did a test print for the stamp mockups. I had already proven to myself that the 3 mockups on top of each other worked well with the Conspiracy Theory version, but I was on a role. And at least with this test print, I can make sure that the sizing is still correct for the actual stamps and the colour palette works for the overall print.
HND2 Baxter's Designs 