Updated Designs

I sent my four designs to some friends and family to choose their favorites and I further improved the two designs that got the most votes.

Design #1 Original:

Updated:

The first one gave me a lot of problems as to what I wanted to change. I personally like the original design a lot, so I didn't want to stray from it too far. I tried different colours and blue or beige are the best ones so far. Green would just blend in too much and red stands out too much.

I added a subtle shadow to the map to make it more visible. The green and blue blended together too much otherwise.

I also tried out different fonts and decided to do one design with a sans-serif font, but I don't think it works. It looks to corporate.

To me, the whole thing looks a bit flat, so I wanted to try and add some texture or a pattern to it. I found some interesting marble patterns and layered it on top of the blue background. It does give it something extra, it makes it more interesting. 

So after a while, I just enhanced the original by making the text smaller and moving the map upwards. And I added a 3D effect to it so it looks more like an actual board that's standing on its own.

Looking over the 'in a nutshell' of the brief, I realised the board is supposed to have a blue footer strip for the university logo, so I made some adaptions to my design and added one at the bottom. It doesn't really fit, I'll have to change it so it fits and doesn't disrupt the flow of the board.

Design #2 Original:

Updated:
The header text looks more like it has actually some light to it, to show my idea of the led lights a bit better. I also made some of the other titles bolder so they'd stand out a bit more or be more legible at least.

I changed the flowers from three to four and made them smaller so they'd fit. I still don't know if I can add all of the flowers without making them too small and the text illegible.

I added the footer which I previously forgot, and it has the UoW logo on it and a QR code to my improvised website for the university's biodiversity projects.

I still think the board could do with some more illustrations or diagrams, or something. But I'm having trouble fitting all of the text already, so adding more stuff is challenging.