Project Description
Project Brief
Early on in the planning stages of this project, I was asked to think about how to best lay out guides that would teach people in various positions how to implement Stormwater Management practices. These guides were to explain ideas that would be a first for the Nothern climate, so they were pretty important to get right. The guides also showcased many people work over many years, so I knew I had to make it a priority.
The Challenge
The regular challenge of incorporating and planning for the endless possibilities that arise during the process of creating five large books was a challenge. There were a few other particular challenges that also arose.
These books had to be able to be printed “at home”, that is in black and white, on normal sized paper and also without bleeds. The cover was an exception to the bleeds rule, but we were fine with a border in exchange for a catchy cover page in the printed versions.
I had to figure out a way to best incorporate image and diagram heavy content into these books while still maintaining a professional appearance. I had to make sure that the template for the book offered up enough layout options to allow for other designers to fill in the content without straying too far from the original set. There were a lot of other difficulties that arose, but were taken care of with great teamwork and some long hours.
The Solution
I ended up laying this book out in a three column landscape page. This allowed for two diagrams, or a double span diagram and a bit of text next to it in the chapters that called for it. It also allowed for full pages of text, broken down into manageable line widths for easy digestion.
With these books came a need for a way to advertise and brand them. I had come up with a solution that would allow us to further the use of the initial project, “a leader for clean water”, and allow it to continue past the initial project scope.
The books can be downloaded at the links below if you would like a further look at the layout.
The Books
Can Be Downloaded Here
Grey to Green – ROW
This book was full of diagrams which I made in Photoshop with various imported vector patterns which were created in illustrator. The horizontal street diagrams were drawn on top of city street plans, and had colour and patterns added and parts manipulated to showcase our design preferences. The diagrams with the car were part of a set of various Road Right-of-Way diagrams which were created similarly, but from pencil sketches through conversations and site visits.
Grey to Green – Business and Multi-Residential
This book contained a lot of parking lot based diagrams which were quite similar to the ROW versions above. They were done from sketches created in meetings as well.
Grey to Green – Public Lands
This book was easy on diagrams, and didn’t really contain many hand-made graphics other than icons here and there. In the images you will see a basic three column page in one of the combinations of layouts provided to the other designers. The next image is the stylized table of contents that appears in each book.
Grey to Green – Residential
These are examples of a solid block call-out, and a page containing a large image.
Grey to Green – Optimization
The colourful image shows a legend for a section of the book that is colour coded per land use type. The image to the right is another technology implementation diagram, drawn from city blueprints.
