publication designer
During my last semester at Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) in 2020, I participated a remote collaboration project with architecture design students at Ravensbourne University London. In this project, each institute studied a 300m x 300m area in terms of people, communication, and architecture in their chosen districts, Sham Shui Po (Hong Kong) and Hackney Wick (London).
My role in this project is also an editorial designer, which I followed and tried to understand all other participating students' design processes to document the process and outcomes of the whole project, as well as to follow up with the print production with quality control. On this page, the result of the editorial design will be showcased; however, if you are interested in discovering Sham Shui Po, I have written a blog post Sham Shui Po through my lens, where to share my discovery in this district.
Below is an intro video of the whole project:
Before students had started to research the area, the project coordinator suggested first planning on the publication. This included the categories and order of different content and possible print effects for the publication. Based on the goal of the publication, the first flat plan was drafted so that it helps picture the overview at the stage.
In the beginning stage, it was challenging to set an expectation of how students would set up their research and design projects. Therefore, I decided to first experiment with the layout for the introduction and think about how to structure and connect the content of introducing the two sites in Hong Kong and London.
Although my main role was editorial designer, I also actively participated in students' meetings and presentations to get to know what their design focuses and I can, therefore, constantly reflect on the first flat plan to see how it can be adjusted and updated. That being said, after having several meetings, the total amount of design/architecture projects in Urban Futures would be more than 25. Each student had also started to have a more clear picture of what they would like to develop further. However, it led me to be concerned about how practical is it to design a thick publication and place it in an exhibition? In what other format can we improve the experience? If we want to create a coherent linkage between two disciplines, i.e., design and architecture, and between Hong Kong and London, then perhaps dividing the projects by neither discipline nor location would not do the deal. After reviewing all the students' design direction, I have categorized all students' projects into four major themes, i.e., interventions, stories, memories, and sustaining identities (, as well as an intro as project overview. A set of 5 booklets is therefore created at the end.
On the other hand, I set up the standardization of the booklet for students to input their content, e.g. the layout structure and amount of spreads for each student. When I received the works from some architecture students, I also realized their contents were way more different than communication design students. Therefore, I designed other sets of layout templates with guidance for them to follow. I understand that everyone might have other ideas for laying out their content, thus I also encouraged them to modify if needed.
During the process, I saw that students struggled to select the highlights of their projects for publication. I did not have any prior knowledge of architecture, but I feel some content (text-wise) could be arranged in a better way. Therefore, I set up meetings with students and lecturer to review the content together and sketch out an alternative solution to see if that would fit with their intention.
A set of five booklets were designed and printed as below (photo credits: Keith Tam's behance):
The publication has also been uploaded online, please feel free to read them if you are interested! ↓
Intro · Interventions · Stories · Memories · Sustaining identities
