MESH: Theme ideas

We got our name MESH from looking at the screen from screen printing. As well as this reference to traditional printing methods, we also needed a way to tie in public spaces and in particular Leeds.

After struggling for a while, we came on to the idea of maps - we could use a map of Leeds to make our idea actually relevant to the city. 

Maps have a grid overlaying them in order to make navigation easy, e.g. Far Moor would be in F4 on the map below. This grid link is perfect as we are working from a grid ourselves so is a fantastic way to tie in public spaces.

In order to make it scream Leeds we needed a solid strong reference. One idea was to use coordinates, going along the navigation theme. However the direction we decided to go down was postcodes. Looking at the postcode map is a clear way to divide up Leeds (could use this as curation and organisation for the exhibition) but the actual appearance of the city map didn't fit with our theme. 

We decided instead to convert the map into a more regular shape, with the sections made out of square shapes. This makes map fit more with our square aesthetic while still adding in that map element. The overall effect is something really cool and we could use this for way finding in our exhibition space.

We also decided to take a look at the Ordnance Survey Brand Guidelines as extra research. 

We found that for the main typeface, the brand uses Helvetica Neue. We decided that as an extra reference we would also use Helvetica as the main typeface for our body text. As well as it being clean and simple and a typeface that would contrast our custom typeface well, the extra link to the Ordnance Survey branding would be something different and make the reference stronger and more relevant.