One of my first projects while working at STFC was a set of eight leaflets briefly summarising the various compute services offered by the Scientific Computing Department. The finished products were displayed on STFC’s stand at a major supercomputing conference in the US. A small selection can be seen below.
What went well?
This project really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the many projects and services my department was involved in. It was a steep learning curve but I continued to refer back to the leaflets as long as I was working there - and gave copies to confused new graduate scheme students too!
These leaflets were designed not long after UKRI went through a major rebranding, giving all the research councils new logos and identities. I really enjoyed playing with the new brand guidelines to produce documents with a strong, interlinking visual identity.
What were the challenges?
The target audience for the flyers was fairly technical, so they had to include a lot of detail that I struggled to understand. The ‘by numbers’ section on the back page was particularly tricky as I had no reference point for what was an impressive statistic. I relied quite heavily on the teams behind the services to tell me which figures would look most impressive!
This was my first real project in Adobe InDesign and I essentially taught myself to use it through trial, error and lots of Googling. It was worth it though - it’s a skill I continue to use to produce impressive-looking documents. I even designed my own wedding invitations in 2023.