Taking care of your valuables: HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT - Final products

Package envelope

Front page of booklet

Page 1 & 2 of booklet

Page 3 & 4 of booklet

Page 5 & 6 of booklet

Back page of booklet

Stickers for the "Track your shit" app

Side 1 of keyring

Side 2 of keyring

Sticker for keyhole of the student's front door

Poster included in the package

Layout for final photographs of our work

Taking care of your valuables: HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT - Design development

Ideas for keyrings

We want to use simple imagery and text on some small key rings. These will match details that are in the booklet. We'll narrow them down and only print two of these to show in our presentation. We may make them smaller (around 30mm x 30mm) so that they work better on a key chain and fit into pockets etc better.

Sticker development 1

Sticker development 2

Further sticker development

We think that these three sticker ideas were the most effective, particularly the top right one. The imagery being in all black works the best.

Sketches for the "how to lose your keys" page to be included in the booklet

As a group we decided that these images can be developed further on illustrator to be used in the booklet as a sarcastic way of telling students how you can easily lose keys.

Envelope front

After the group crit we improved the envelope design by using both Langdon and Bebas Neue. "Shit" is in Langdon to emphasize the word and its importance, and "How to lose your" is in Bebas Neue. It is still clear but the swearword is what we are using to get the attention of fresher students at first glance. [the critisicm we got said that using Langdon for all words is too unclear]

We also lowered the amount of times the word "shit" is in the booklet while still keeping it in titles.

Taking care of your valuables: HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT - Group crit

We joined with another group to have a group crit. We talked about how our brief is developing and explained our reasons for using certain features.

• We were told that the use of 'shit' is really effective for a student market, but it is overused in the booklet. Reading it too often is an overkill and I think it normalises it so it loses some of its taboo. 
• We talked about why we have picked a traditionally brown envelope and the context they are usually used in: formal letters in schools and places of work.

Envelope idea

• Some other feedback was that we could use the little keyhole symbol as the "i" in shit, or the full stop in an exclamation mark at the end of "shit". However, we have already tried the "i" and it doesn't work.

Envelope idea

• The other group preferred the above envelope as it is more clear, bold and more eye-catching. It's also very large text.
• We noted the pointers and criticism down and will try to improve our work from it.

Taking care of your valuables: HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT - Design ideas

We paired off to work on small areas of our project. Me and James have started to work on visual ideas for the statistics to be included in the booklet. These facts are:

"Leeds has the third highest burglary rates in the whole of the UK."

"20% of all student robberies happen in the first 6 weeks."

"One in three students are victims of crime."

We are wanting to use very simple diagrams, like graphs and pie charts. For the first stat we thought we'd just use text and use red to embolden some important words to make them jump off the page.

We've created a bar graph and line graph for the second statistic, we are unsure which to use.

For the third stat, we will use a pie chart as it works well with it being a third. It's really simple and easy to understand.

We want to use red, white and black to signify danger and to keep it extremely minimal and simple, also straight to the point. The capital letters throughout make it seem urgent and important.

Planning of the booklet and where the stats will be put

Taking care of your valuables: HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT - Envelope ideas

Alex made some simple prototypes of how the envelope including the information could look. We want to use simple and bold font to get the point across loud and clear. I also think that minimalism is such an important tool in graphic design.

Front of envelope idea 1

Back of envelope idea 1

Front of envelope idea 2 (back is blank)

Front of envelope idea 3

Back of envelope idea 3

I think these ideas are really effective. The fonts used are Langdon and Bebas Neue, which are bold and clear. Langdon has a really nice shadowing effect which makes more of an impact on the page.  Back of envelope idea 3 doesn't work that well as its portrait and the front is landscape, they don't match up.

I think Back of envelope idea 1 is really nice, but would look better bigger. The front of envelope idea 2 is everybody's favourite that we will be developing and moving forward with.

Taking care of your valuables: HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT - Crime statistics research

Below is research I collected to help with our brief. These statistics could be used in our project to portray the dangers of being a student and having valuables.

CRIME IN LEEDS
September 2012 

All crime - 1453 

Anti-social behaviour - 390
Burglary - 49 

Criminal damage and arson - 60
Drugs - 30
Shoplifting - 138
Robbery - 13

Other theft - 488

Violent crime - 147 

August 2013

All crime - 1526

Robbery - 11 

Burglary - 64

[police.uk]
"Crime rates in Leeds are still one of the highest in West Yorkshire, perhaps due to the sheer size of the city and student areas acting as a hot bed for burglaries and drug abuse.
In 2011 Leeds was found to be the city with the third highest burglary rates in the UK.
Winter sees an uprise in burglaries.
Last November break-ins occurred in Hyde Park and Woodhouse area via tiny basement windows."
[leeds-list.com]

• 1 in 3 students are a victim of crime.

• 20% of student robberies happen in the first 6 weeks.

• Outside of the capital, Manchester Metropolitan, Manchester, and Leeds have the highest crime rates in the 3 mile radius of the campuses.

• Leeds Uni and Leeds Met have the highest rates of burglary.

• Chestnut Avenue, Hyde Park - was once dubbed Britain's most burgled street, but has recently improved.

• Burglary, robbery and assault - 3 most common student crimes

[bbc.co.uk]
Top 5 most commonly lost items1. keys
2. USB drive
3. phone
4. sunglasses
5. gloves
[zomm.com]

TAKING CARE OF YOUR VALUABLES - HOW TO LOSE YOUR SHIT

After coming up with 10 problems freshers face in Leeds on friday, we were put into groups of 6 and given a problem. Ours is "Taking care of your valuables", which is what our first brief is set on. We have to create a solution for Leeds freshers losing things such as keys, phones, laptops. This could apply to robbery, burglary, damage, or simply misplacing these vital objects.

Firstly, we have thought of ideas for the title such as "Don't lose your shit", "Keep your shit safe", "How not to lose your shit". We want to include the swearword because its bold, eye-catching and entertaining to a young person to read. It's a word that most designers wouldn't be able to use, because of it's inappropriateness. However, our designs need to appeal to young people who are mostly aged 18-19. Young people are the ones who use swearwords the most and who may find them amusing, especially in this context where usually leaflets etc are full of boring information about keeping safe as a student.
After some discussion we decided on "How to lose your shit", because we wanted to making a guide in simple terms how most students lose these items, hopefully making the reader come to some realisations they need to prevent these things from happening.

We brainstormed what exactly "shit" could refer to, not just expensive valuables or keys. These things are all vital to everyday student life, meaning losing them should be prevented. We chose to focus most of our attention on keys, as every single student owns them and relies on them everyday. We also think a key and a key lock make good images to use throughout, as they symbolise burglary and leaving your door unlocked, aswell as physically losing keys.

Above is the development of a keyring idea. Giving out a key ring seems clever as its on the key, so would be a reminder to keep the key safe. It's also a freebie which are always popular, rather than it all being on paper.

MODULE ASSESSMENT BRIEF - TAKING CARE OF YOUR VALUABLES

For our first task to start the brief, we were split into pairs. In these pairs we came up with 20 problems that students often face when they move to Leeds as freshers. We then had to join pairs with another pair to make a group of four, in which we joined together our problems and whittled them down to 20 from 40. I found that often we had similar problems and they overlapped, because we are freshers ourselves so its coming from our own experience.

The next step was making a group of 8 with another group. We tried to come up with 20 again from the 40 problems. By doing this we were combining all our knowledge and issues we face in Leeds.  We worked well as a team and listened to each others criticism. We had some disagreements over which to get rid of, but we solved our differences. We then swapped our list with another group, and chose 10 problems from their list (and used some of our own points). These issues were ones we felt applied to almost all freshers and ones that could be worked on and solved instead of inevitable problems.

 

Left: the swapped list given to us from the other group. Right: Our group's final list of 10 problems.

We put our problems on the wall and presented them to everybody as a group. Then we all picked 10 issues from all of them, which can be seen on the board below. We all agreed that they were vital problems that can largely affect you as a fresher.