With the near completion in draft of all our Cotswold and Malvern Line routes (5 in total) we've now moved on to developing the next tranche of station to station walks in the WCRP area on the Wyre Valley Line. This runs north out of Worcester towards Droitwich and beyond.
Our first route (Worcester Foregate St station to Droitwich station) goes through some idyllic countryside, along old canal towpaths and passes near old WW2 airfields and takes a look at Roman Droitwich too.
The graphic design students on the University of Worcester's Graphic Information Design module received their new 'live' brief yesterday via Lyndon Bracewell (left in image) representing Worcestershire Ramblers and the Worcestershire Rail Trails Project. Design tutor Andy Stevenson (right in image and also working on the Rail Trails project which is promoted by the Worcestershire Community Rail Partnership) also helped put across aspects of the brief to best allow students to understand the client's 'asks'.
This trimmed-down design brief asks the students to develop 'working concept' artwork for a supporting brochure that will act as an overview to the ongoing Rail Trails project and which would otherwise have gone out for commercial tender.We're busy developing and discussing the way the new Rail Trails content will look (and work for users) on the WCRP web pages at present.. Key considerations include: legibility and logic/ease of navigation. As such we're trying to cut out lots of additional sub pages and give users a 'quick hit' when it comes to accessing our various walking route sheets.
We're busy looking at possible visual themes to use to promote the Rail Trails project on station platforms and similar and are exploring ideas that relate to 'classic railway' style posters, quirky family countryside walks and the present hot favourite: sustainable travel and walking for all.
A 'sneek peek' at some work ongoing, we've now created 3 of the first 5x guide sheets in draft for the first phase of the project (the Cotswold Line). With luck we'll have our first tried and tested self-driven guide sheets available for free download in the new year.
I'm presently preparing a small presentation to be given at the Guildhall in Worcester on Friday Nov 18th 2022. This will cover an overview of the project's aims, the partners involved an idea of scope and timings and will show some of the progress made to date.
One of the many aspects of the mapping and guide sheets that we're developing for the project is the small 'route focus' sections which describe flora, fauna or historical references either on or aside our routes. Each one of these elements needs to be agreed by the project partners first and then a new bespoke line illustration needs to be developed and draft associated information text created alongside.
A 'positional' image and token positional text is shown in the guide material initially to help show how the refined version might look. Each line illustration is then created via using a set of source material (photos, other illustrations etc) and then scanned/digitised and made to fit in the planned space on the guide sheet. the process takes roughly 3-4 hours per illustration (depending on it's complexity) to complete.
Here's an example of the stages discussed above:
Suggested initial positional illustration:
