Research, Collect, Communicate: Product

For my final product i have decided to make a city guide for Leeds targeting the same audience of the Wallpaper* city guides. The audience i am target are young professional adults, who have an interest in art and culture. The guide will be aimed at 'hipsters' and 'indies', people who are interested in alternative music and boutique vintage shops. This target audience is good as it allows me to design my product in an edgy and contemporary way, focussing on the design to sell the guide, much like the wallpaper* city guides.

To start off with I decided what areas of Leeds tourism i wanted to focus on. I chose to focus on architecture, shopping and entertainment. I then researched in to these themes finding suitable features to appeal to my target audience.


Architecture- The broadcasting tower, I chose to feature this as it is a modern and contemporary building, it is individual and like no other building in leeds, i also discovered it is an award winning architectural structure. I chose to look at the ultra modern and contemporary building as opposed to some of leeds more classic architecture (such as the city hall) as i thought it would be a lot more appealing to my target audience.

Shopping- I decided to include shopping in my guide as fashion and style is such an important part of my target audiences life. For my target audience it is all about appearance and individuality. Because of this i decided to look at boutique and vintage shops in Leeds. My research lead me to a store called 'Best' the shop doesn't only sell vintage clothes, but also reworks and redesigns them, this shop is perfect for my target audience.

Entertainment- My decision for entertainment was easy. I chose the hyde park picture house. It is artistic and trendy. It shows a range of films, new and old as well as being heaped with history. I thought the cinema would be a great alternative from the corporate giants such as odeon and would really appeal to the target audience.

Here are some of the images i took on my first shoot of the city, I am really pleased with these images as a start, even though i have a lot more photographs to take.

Next i decided to experiment with some of my photos on photoshop. I wanted to manipulate them to make them more graphical and visually interesting.

I really like the graphical shape produced by the negative space in this image. I think that this could work well as a front over as the white space would frame the title perfectly.

Next i decided on the name of my product. I wanted it to be edgy and slightly ambiguous to apply to the target audience. I had a few ideas such as, Discover..., Finder, Explore, Seek and Guide. In the end I decided on 'guided' I think the name is ambiguous but not too abstract from the purpose of the book. The name also means that my product has room to grow and wouldn't have to be specific to Leeds, meaning the 'Guided' brand could expand and create books for more cities, much like the Wallpaper* city guides have.

I decided on the first font called 'Letter Gothic Ltd' I think its simple and stylish, I also think it is the most legible and readable.

Cover design:

Page art work:

This will be the contents page and index. I decided to make the contents page interesting and individual by adding the circles. The off centred text and use of circle is a reference to my target audience connoting that they don't conform to the rules (shown through the off centred text) and that they don't fit in a stereotypical box.

Here is a mock up of what the layout will look like. I created this on Facebook just to get an idea of what the layout could be, for my actual product i will use InDesign. The layout of the information will be the same on every page in order to make the book cohesive and flowing.

I decided to add a double page spread at the start of each of the different categories, this improves the structure of the book and makes it obvious what is in each categories. Also due to time constraints i only have one spread for each topic, if i had more time i could expand the book further and add new features, this page would help categorise that. It also adds to the cohesiveness of the product.