High School Reqruitment Notepad

First Six Thumbnail Sketches

Next Four Thumbnail Sketches

Rough Sketch

Word Matrix

Final PDF

Going into the notepad project we were told to think of what high school students are interested in and what we as students were interested in when we were in high school. In high school I was not the typical teenager, I have been a geek (for lack of a better term) my whole life. I’ve always been more interested in computers, books, and art than most people my age. So keeping this in mind, I thought of what would have attracted me to a notepad in high school. I knew that I wanted to do something involving technology because for one it interests me and for another, we are a School of Technology. I envisioned a computer mouse with the cord bleeding off the edge of the notepad. It just so happened that I found a vector art online (http://vectorart.org/mouse-vector/) that perfectly fit my criteria. I positioned the mouse on the bottom right side of the notepad so that the cord did bleed off the edge.

Another part in designing my notepad that I took into consideration is the overall setup. I looked through the notepads that I had at home and observed the pros and cons of the different styles. I noticed that the one I used the most was long and had lines on the majority of the page every quarter of an inch. I use it the most because I like to make lists on it. For the purpose of a high school student I thought that it would be a good way for them to make lists, whether it is for a to-do list, a grocery list, or whatever they would use it for. I liked the spacing that was used in the notepad that I had, this is why I changed my design from my rough sketch that had lines every half inch to lines every quarter of an inch.

We were asked to incorporate the school website as well as the title of our department, “Graphics and Image Technologies.” I also decided to include the name of the college because it seemed to balance things out better. When choosing a font, I looked for a font that looked like it would be used on an old fashioned type of computer, very digitized with straight lines and angulated edges. I chose “OCR A Extended” because of it simple, thick strokes that were historically used on computers.

During the design process of the notepad, we were also asked to find out how much it would cost to print our design notepad. We were to have them quote us the price based on a notepad of fifty sheets with a chipboard back. When I went in on September 16, 2010, I was told that it would cost $2.78 per notepad, $51.20 for fifty notepads, and $101.14 for one hundred notepads.

Overall I think that my notepad stays within a specific theme: computers. It doesn’t have as many illustrations as some, but it has plenty of writing space as well as all of the information required on it. After I had my notepad printed I was very pleased with it and am very happy wit the way it turned out.