BBC news report - homeless rise in worcester

"The number of homeless people has risen by more than 60% in Worcester.

It increased from 338 in 2008/09 to 551 for 2012/13, according to city council figures revealed in a Freedom of Information [FOI] request from the BBC.

Proposals to cut spending by about half for housing-related support, from £1.19m to £616,900, have been revealed by Worcestershire County Council."

Reference

BBC (2013) Worcester Homeless Figures up by 60% [Online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-25103414, viewed on: 30/01/2014.

Homeless services in Worcester

Maggs Day Centre:

*Church run centre for homeless, provides:
*Food (breakfast and dinner at lunchtime, coffee and biscuits)
*showers,
*machine machine,
*clothes (such as socks pants and towels)
*Shelter
*counselling
*social room (with xbox)

Maggs Day Centre 
Deansway, Worcester WR1 2JD
Tel 01905 25027
mkirk@maggsdaycentre.co.uk


St Paul's Hostel:

*Shelter (46 beds)
*Substance abuse support
*Rough sleepers support
*"Link Up" a service that helps homeless make connections in worcestershire, its a gateway.

Link up:

"The support single
people will receive:
• Assessment of individual needs
• Housing Advice
• Referral to Supported Housing Providers
• Referral to Support Providers
• Arrange Multi-Agency Meetings for
those clients with complex needs"

Reference:
Worcestershire Link Up leaflet

Resettlement:
*Training opportunities
*volunteering opportunities
 *recycled furniture - available to buy or have

Housing support at:
Bromyard Road-
  -for those recovering substance abuse or abstaining.
  -help out with household chores and shopping on a rota
  -attend weekly meetings
  -community feel
  -formal support work and key work planning

WHIT (worcester homeless intervention team)
*direct contact with homeless on streets

NAC (night assessment centre)
*open directly from the streets during coldest months for emergency accomodation

Tel: 01905 723729
Email: admin@stpaulshostel.co.uk
Charity number: 1043921


Street Link:

Service for reporting rough sleepers in need of help, connects them to other services.
http://www.streetlink.org.uk/tell-us-about-a-rough-sleeper



The Bubble:

Youth related service to help youth homeless

Bath road project - flats that clients live here but serve cook and budget themselves, quite self sufficient.
http://www.ymcaworcester.org.uk/stay-safe.htm


Smart Lets:

Scheme that assists homeless singles and youths into private rented accommodation, with house benefits, or with on going support.
http://www.cabwhabac.org.uk/our-services/housing-services#homelessness


Shaw Trust

Given 1.5 million to help homeless young people in Worcester
.
18-24 year olds

social exclusion, potential offenders or learning difficulties.

Working with:
YMCA,
Hope Unlimited,
Morgan Motor Company (Malvern)
Dytecna (engineering company)

Through TALENT MATCH (Lottery funded charity assisting young people, outside of benefits and long way from employment)

Support programme, can get linked in through the Job Centre.

Looking at other street papers in the INSP umbrella:

The contributor

2008 edition of newspaper at Nashville, Tennessee

Real change:

Real Change, Seattle Washington.  Website snapshot as doesnt seem to have archive of paper.

Ideas generation - logo typeface

Making use of a open source font: Peleja.
Taken from Open Font Library : http://openfontlibrary.org/

Playing with ideas

Typeface from Chestnut Tree - Castan, by Carter Wong.

Delicious and ridiculously beautiful, letters are carved from the trunk of a chestnut tree.

created for Howies, by Carter Wong.

So intricate, the word "unique" hardly scratches the surface.


Video here:

<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/82198204" width="500" height="281" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>


Montgomery (2014) outlines Howies persona as "rugged, hard-wearing a low-impact ethos, Carter Wong decided to create the typeface using a wind-fallen chestnut tree from near the clothing brand’s base in Cardigan, West Wales."


Reference:
Montgomery, A. (2014) Creating the Castan Font [Online] available at: http://www.designweek.co.uk/we-like/creating-the-castan-font/3037834.article, viewed on: 29/01/14.

Demographic info

Reference:
Schmidhauser, T. (2013) The Big Issue Magaine Brand Audit Report 2013. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/TabataSch/the-big-issue-magazine-final-report, viewed on: 28/01/2014.


585,000 readers a week

Gender and work status:
female: 56%
male: 44%
ABC1: 75%

Working full time: 41%
Studying: 31%

Age:
Under 24: 20.5%
25-44:      38.4%
45-64:      29.3%
65+          11.9%

Profile:
Urbanities, busy lives
Prepared to pay more for extra quality
Culturally, ethically and socially aware
Courageous, conscientious

Music concerned:
readers spend 3.8M on albums and singles
71% say music is important part of life
nightclub visits total is 377,000

Logo typeface ideas - tall zoe typeface

Heres some ideas :

Target Audience: in the north

Reference:
Lawton, C. (2010) The Big Issue in the North: Media Pack, Available at: http://www.bigissueinthenorth.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/media-pack-2.pdf [Online] Viewed on: 28/01/2014.

Targeted at:
• Urbanites leading busy lifestyles
• Prepared to pay extra for quality
• Culturally, ethically and socially aware
• Courageous conscientious consumers

The Reader
• 60% under 44
• 60% female
• 70% ABC1
• 33.3% have children
• 59% married/living with partner
• 69% believe it is worth spending more on quality goods
• 75% really look forward to reading The Big Issue
• 45% spend over 30 mins reading
• Exclusive – do notread print competitors

Full page size: 280 x 195mm
Full page bleed: 307 x 220mm

My own typefaces- Tall Zoe

I have often tried to write title pages or covers of sketchbooks in a way thats simple but with slight personal touch.

Today i put that into a typeface - called in Tall Zoe.

Thanks to Yourfont.com, i made it an official typeface to use too.

Alphabet:

Trying out my new typeface as a header for The Big Issue paper:

In terms of The Big Issue magazine, it embodies these Key words:

Optimistic

Inviting 

Inviting

Current

Fresh

(Hope?)

However, lt does not show these qualities i wanted to:

Strength

Stability

Home

Help

Drive

Relevant

Ambition

It actually also shows:

Informal

Relaxed

Friendly

Key Words - to define what client wants in this brief

Identifying Key Words that I Identified in terms of the brief, the client and the project:

Hope
Help
Drive (Ambition)
Optimistic
Relevant
Fresh
Insightful
Inviting
Strength
Home/House
Current
Stability

Layar App

It describes itself as an Augmented reality App.

By photographing a page of printed media through the app, you are redirected to online sources that show videos of further information, whilst appearing as though it is still on the page (through the window of your camera phone)

Can scan magazine pages, business cards, printed material.

Can also be used for:
QR codes, video and audio in situ of page, social media sharing, view movie trailers.

Can also use as Scanning the outside world, geo layers, find out whats around you, homes for sale etc

logo

video:
Available at: https://www.layar.com/products/app/, viewed on: 12/01/2014.

Big Issue content - Criticized.

Reference:

Howley, K. (2005) Community Media: People, Places and Communication Technologies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

"From the  outset, TBI's [The Big Issue] approach - glossy covers, a paid professional writing staff, general interest features, celebrity news, advertisements for upscale products, and a modest, but regular column featuring work by homeless people - alienated street paper workers whose vision was more activist orientated, less entrepreneurial."

"For Some, like Jon Bird, publisher of TBI, street papers are a business whereby the homeless and unemployed can earn a "respectable living" selling periodicals in streets, train stations, and other public spaces."

Howley notes of Hutchinson Persons mistake in the business plan of the simular press Street News in New York:

"In retrospect, Persons' entrepreneurial fervor obscured the rather disingenuous notion that selling newspapers could eliminate poverty and that the problem of homelessness and unemployment was the fault of the individual, not a a structural problem or a systemic failure.

Rebranding a magazine, other examples

The New Yorker ( New York Times supplement)

*  Subtle
*  Cut down the section that looked at what events are going on in New York town (wide readership, beyond living in NY)
*  Adapted the typeface "Irvin"

Wyatt Mitchell, Creative Director says: 
"As we build complex content hierarchies across multiple platforms, the New Yorker's primary historic typefaces—Irvin and Caslon—prove to be tools too limited for the problems we need to solve regularly,So we've added another tool to produce the typographic tension we need to communicate more clearly, more consistently."

New typeface: Neutraface.  An art Deco inspired and generational typeface.  Used for headings.

Available at: http://gizmodo.com/how-the-new-yorker-redesigned-for-the-first-time-in-13-1325328771, viewed on: 23/01/2014.

Christian Scwaltz, at House Industries, formed this typeface in 2002.  Based on numbers and letters used on houses designed by architect Neutra designed.  Added in the missing letters or numbers, basing them on the style.

"I took the limited number of uppercase letters and numbers we were able to find in photographs of Neutra's buildings, filled in the missing letters, and then looked at geometric sans serifs from the early 20th century to help me start to imagine how this would have looked if it had been a typeface rather than just architectural lettering."

 "The New Yorker is one of the more appropriate places I've seen it used."

Reference:
Mitchell, W. (2013) 'How The New Yorker Redesigned For the First Time in 13 years' Interviewed by Alissa Walker Gizmodo, 9th September. [Online] Available at: http://gizmodo.com/how-the-new-yorker-redesigned-for-the-first-time-in-13-1325328771 [Viewed on: 23/01/2014].

Inc Magazine

"to integrate the print edition with its online offerings"

"We have always seen Inc. magazine as a title owned by the entrepreneurs who read it. Our redesign is a direct response to the changing habits of our audience and to the growing popularity and reach of our website and tablet edition. The new Inc. will bring readers our best content, in the way they want it with technologies an insights that they simply can't get anywhere else," 

Can find out further information on some things digitally by photographing the pages.  In union with Layar - media based company that has technologies to make this happen.

Kearney, J. (2013) Top 10 Magazine Redesigns [Online] Available at: http://blog.agilitycms.com/top-10-magazine-redesigns#sthash.KCQmb3dt.dpuf Viewed on: 23/01/2014.

video:

Ref:


This video outlines the changes.

If have "Layar" app on your phone/pad device, you can scan the page, when an icon of a phone is on that page, and be sent to a website to watch further videos - gives further depth to a story, interactive.

New columnists, new ways of telling stories.

New sections for article grouping.
Launch - starting a company.
Lead - leadership within company you have
Made - entrepreneurs who build
Innovate - inspire, how to, ground breaking stuff


http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/inc-magazine-redesign.html

Previous Big Issue designs

First edition of The Big Issue - September 1991:

Available at: http://magpile.com/the-big-issue/sep-91/, viewed: 20/01/2014.

available at: http://www.red-lines.co.uk/reading/TheBigIssueFeb2010.html, viewed on 20/01/2014

Wired - redesign magazine

Reference:
Indvik, L. (2013) 'Wired' Completely Overhauls Print Magazine [Online] Available at: http://mashable.com/2013/05/21/wired-redesign/, Viewed on 20/01/2014.


When redesigning Wired magazine, Claudia De Almeida quoted:

 "[We asked ourselves] what is technology, what kind of role does it play in our lives today, and how can that be communicated on the pages of Wired that people can connect to and that feels current?"

And

"From my point of view, technology is not only your computer on your desk anymore, it's part of your life. It made sense to me to have a design that felt more accessible, that didn't make you feel all the time that you're just reading a tech magazine," de Almeida said. "It's not only a magazine about technology, [it's] also a magazine about people who make technology happen."

The redesign tries to be less focused at the male gender audience and more inclusive of the female audience too.  

The "i" looks like a "1"

Searching for existing fonts by concept...

On Myfonts (www.myfonts.com) looking for existing fonts by entering in concept terms into the search bar:

Unemployment

1. Shape is even and ordered and important and formal, written inside small enough to not see is hire me (suit message or subliminal concept?)

2. Loose, painterly approach, block letters , uneven alignment, looks like hand lettering rather than typeface, fast/quick, 

Hopeless

1. loose, thin, sketchy, all in uppers, fast pace written, aligned and simular size conveys some discipline. light colour.

2. grunge feel, dated somewhat, transfer/screen print appearance suits street life in its overused revisited palced, block even letters suit house shapes or a skyline.

3. decorative font - immature, resembles lego, appears pixelated from short distance, obtuse in its message.

Meet Me In Brooklyn Font (street style)

House

Feels strong, yet approachable, friendly and orderly, smooth and sleek, human touch.

hand touch feel, shakey lines, human, hand writing influence, not overtly neat.

Initial impression is block lettering but shows some calligraphic tendencies on diagonal strokes, in examples it suits posters that shop windows put up (informal, produced quick, local events), thick letters easy to see, easy to read sans.

available at: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/sudtipos/brownstone-slab/, viewed : 20/01/14

Redesigning Fonts and layout for The Independent...

Reading an article on Taxi.com by Jullian Wong that draws attention to the new redesign at the Independent magazine.  Typeface designer was a guy called Henrik Kubel.

The Redesign includes:
New Typeface "Indy"
Has 14 fonts: 
Sans, 
Serif, 
Italic,
Condensed 
(all in Bold, Light and Medium)

Hairline (header) 
Numbers only.

Layout changes include:
Less mid length articles, leaving short or long articles, leaving more white space.
Flexibility on word counts of articles.

Wong heralds 
"The Independent looks like a stylish literary magazine rather than a national newspaper, achieving the brief’s goal of ‘bold sophistication’ and setting it apart from other news publications."

Images:

Ref:
Wong, J. (2014) The Independent Gets a Bold, Sophisticate Redesign [Online] Available at: http://designtaxi.com/news/363220/The-Independent-Gets-A-Bold-Sophisticated-Redesign/, Viewed on: 20/01/2014.

First edition of The Independent:

available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/migration_catalog/article6246702.ece/ALTERNATES/w620/Pg-04-front-pages-1.jpeg, viewed on: 20/01/2014.

Looking at the website...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/

main homepage:

available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/, viewed on 20/01/2014.

Article page:

available at: http://http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-says-mars-mystery-rock-that-appeared-from-nowhere-is-like-nothing-weve-ever-seen-before-9070323.html, viewed on: 20/01/2014.

Best Practices of combining typefaces - article

Article outlining some good methods for putting different typefaces together in a piece of work.

Reference:
Bonneville, D (2010) Best Practices of Combing Typefaces [Online] Available at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/04/best-practices-of-combining-typefaces/, Viewed on: 18/01/2014.



"Trade Gothic wants to get to the facts, but Bell Gothic wants to have some fun. This kind of tension is likely not part of the design goal, and should be avoided."

Here Bonneville raises the point that each type's personality works in relation to the message it is sending, and also then mirroring the texts meaning.  Considering first the attributes of a type helps determine its personality, then knowing that personality helps us know the message that is being conveyed by using this typeface in this context, finally it is clear what kind of message this makes the text read as.

attributes of a typeface indicates personality.  Personality of a typeface in conjunction with the meaning of the text determines the mood created.  This mood can enhance the communication with reader or hinder or distract or convey the wrong meaning altogether.

"Typefaces of the same classification, but from different typeface families, can easily create discord when combined. Their distinct personalities don’t play well off of each other and create a kind of typographic mud if careful attention is not paid."

Bonneville outlines the visual tension subtly created by putting two typefaces from the same or simular sub category next to each other in a project.

"Slab serif typefaces are known for their distinct personality, and they like to dominate any area in a design they are used in. Putting two slab serifs together can create a needless and unsightly tension."

Being aware that slab serifs, although varying most strongly in characteristics within its own sub category, the command the attention of the eye too much when used more than once in a project.

When using a variety of typefaces within a project, giving each typeface a rule and sticking to that throughout the project assists visual understanding, as Bonneville outlines
"they all pull together into a cohesive design, because each role assigned to a font is fixed and is very clearly defined in the typographic hierarchy"

It is possible to still confuse communication through typeface choices if do not apply contrast of weight within the heirarchy set, as Bonneville backs up
"A sure-fire way to muddy your typographic hierarchy is to fail to distinguish elements in the hierarchy from one another."

Another important factor to consider is how the personalities of the typefaces create the mood of the project
"Mixing the mood of typefaces can draw attention to the typography instead of the message, which results in a poor design."

Not overloading the project with many high personality typefaces is important, as its almost like a personality clash in that the different qualities and moods they represent being comfortable in contradict each other.  This and the lack of chemestry between the different personalities is problematic.

Do not contrast to the point of visual awkwardness

Or, stick to two typefaces - can pick two or three fonts within each of the family as know will combine and compliment well together.

In terms of the aesthetics of the piece, correctly noting the negative spaces and colour of the typefaces allows assessment of the  suitability of visual communication - its it clear, or muddy, is it cluttered or has breathing space?
"Using different point sizes helps distinguish the typographic hierarchy and increase the variety of typographic color."

What Font should i use - article in smashing magazine

Found interesting article on font selection for graphic design jobs.

Reference:
Mayer, J. (2010) What Font Should I Use. [Online] Available at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/14/what-font-should-i-use-five-principles-for-choosing-and-using-typefaces/ [Viewed on 18/01/14]

Notes the initial approach students take when choosing suitable typeface for a project:
"Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as though they were searching for new music to listen to: they assess the personality of each face and look for something unique and distinctive that expresses their particular aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history. This approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality."

On Sans Serif, groups together Geometric Sans, Grotesk and Realist as have simular properties.  On what these types are best used for:
"At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal, boring. A classic Geometric Sans is like a beautifully designed airport: it’s impressive, modern and useful, but we have to think twice about whether or not we’d like to live there."

On Humaninst - it derives from handwriting, has the human approach.
"a Humanist font generally have more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights "

On Old Style, its been changes gradually but consistantly over centuries. used plates:
"Old Style faces are marked by little contrast between thick and thin (as the technical restrictions of the time didn’t allow for it), and the curved letter forms tend to tilt to the left (just as calligraphy tilts). "

Categorizing personality type of Slab Serifs into a neat covering description is hard as they vary such within this subcategory, representing opposing moods or audience or place:
" Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that they convey very specific — and yet often quite contradictory — associations" 

THEMES:
Contrast or Correspondence.

Principle is this- when designing a piece of work, mostly one typeface will suffice.  When adding another typeface, either go big or go home; either add something so different and obtuse that it contrasts and they compliment each other, or keep identical types so that the sit neatly together and dont distract from visual communication.  If pick second type that is similar but slightly different it draws the eyes attention to the tiny difference rather than fluidly reading it:
" This creates an uneasy visual relationship because it poses a question, even if we barely register it in on a conscious level — our mind asks the question of whether these two are the same or not, and that process of asking and wondering distracts us from simply viewing."

AVOID:
Using two types from the same sub category as the difference is not enought and distracts the eye.

ADVICE:
"But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. 

Shared aspects include: x-height, weight, time period, chronological, same designer, for e.g.

Display typefaces, consider this advice:
"‘do not exceed recommended dosage"


Extra notes from commenters:

Optima has vertical instead of diagonal contrast and this makes it suit better to be known as a modern sub category typeface.

Karsten Luecke