The Youth and Road Safety Action Kit is here and the journey that has led up to its final publication has been a creative one for both the YOURS team and the designers behind the kit: Airspace Studio. From its inception to creative mapping, the Youth and Road Safety Action Kit was designed from scratch including the whole 3D city that is featured throughout the kit. See behind the scenes.
Sometimes, when we pick up a publication and think, “that is really cool”, we often do not realize how much work really goes into the finished result. With this in mind, we feature a special article looking at the creative process behind our new Youth and Road Safety Action Kit. So far, feedback from both young people and road safety experts has been remarkable and the unique 3D city featured in the Kit gives a unique feel to this youth document.
In an exclusive interview with the designers of the Kit, Airspace Studio, we spoke to Mr Mark Woodwood who was the lead designer behind the kit.
Mark Woodwood of Airspace Studio turned his design studio into a photoshoot of the handmade 3D city!
What made you come up with the idea of the 3D city?
A recent trip to Copenhagen inspired the idea of creating something in 3D. When I got back to the studio I had this idea floating around in my head. I was impressed by the wooden toys in Denmark, and upon starting the project I wanted to create the the effect of a city out of wood. This was fairly difficult and soon became time consuming, hence using paper which turned out better in the end.
Behind the scenes of the 3D City
The concept of building a 3D world came from the idea of an road map, this later developed in to a map that encompassed different terrain from desert to city. The road map was able to re-create scenarios highlighted in the original Action Kit text document. In meetings with the YOURS team, it soon became evident that the design also needed to consider different road users and rules, such as cycle lanes and speeding signs, bus stops and zebra crossings.
How did you go about turning it into a reality?
It took around 15 days and several different versions of the road map before we had a design that we were all happy with. It was a real team effort with the YOURS team to make sure we were covering a global demographic. Our early meetings mostly consisted of snap shots of the road map model until we were ready to do a professional job.
Katarina Premfors who is an awarding winning professional photographer and also an AirSpace director kindly shot the model as we re-created the scenarios.
We turned a corner of the design studio into a photography studio with lights and gels the full works, and spent 3 days photographing the model and the paper people. Following this we spent around a week cleaning up the images and retouching the paper characters into the images based on storyboard sketches.
The 3D city was shot and captured to look like a real city!
The whole process was created from an previously approved storyboard. So next we started wit the actual design of the kit from an editorial design perspective. We had a rough idea how much text was needed for each page but it was important to create clear space so the text could breathe. A kit-of-parts was created, consisting of a grid system for the pages, typography styles and colours that would work with the photography. We also created a series of charts and diagrams made from paper and photographed to give the kit a consistent feel.
Each character featured in the kit was hand designed and cut out to fit into the 3D city.
Once the preferred concept was approved we created the artwork for the document. This is the technical side and involves the artwork team who make sure the whole document has correctly aligned graphics, numbers, text are correctly aligned, colour is consistent, images are all of a certain format with the same colour output. It is then proof-read and finally made print ready, packaged and sent to the printer. We schedule a time to visit the printers when they start the printing to ensure quality and correct colour output, before finally receiving the completed Action Kit.
Each angle created a unique picture, a style that is very appealing to young people.
How you feel with the end result?
We are very happy with the end result. I think we have the YOURS team to thank for this as well. It is very rare that a client shares the risk on a job like this and they believed in the idea, which wasn’t exactly the safe option. We all wanted to create something that would appeal to a youthful demographic and hopefully we have all achieved this. I would be interested to hear how it is received by the people who will be using the Action Kit.
You can also see a video montage of the kit in creation in the right column!