OUGD505 - Module Evaluation

1.  What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

The main skills I have developed throughout this module is my ability to take a logo/identity and apply it effectively across a range of media and across different channels. I think that this module has taught me real values about branding and how to do it well, not just sticking a logo on anything and calling it a branded item. Creating brand guidelines is also something I have learnt and thoroughly enjoyed through this module. Developing my skills in this area is something which I have definitely enjoyed and will continue to take this forward.
I think I have used these growing skills effectively through my work, and I think that it shows obviously from the first brief of the module through to the last, in which this is applied in a very strong way with a lot of considerations.
Not necessarily a skill, but I think my constant need for bettering my designs is something that I have put to effective use in this module. While it is constantly said that I am too hard on myself and my designs, I don't think that this is the way to think of it at all. I am constantly trying to better the designs and see where the issues are so it is the best that it can be. I think that this is something that I have done consistently through the module, and have produced some strong work because of it.

2. What approaches to/methods of design production have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

One of the main design production methods I have furthered in this module is my book binding skills. While I had a basic understanding of binding from inductions in the last module, I took it upon myself to further this skill throughout this brief. I taught myself how to perfect bind, and am very confident in my ability to do so. I think my ability to learn fast and craft well certainly helped develop this skill much faster and to a better quality. Doing mock ups of the binding certainly helped me too and let me learn where I have gone wrong and how to fix it.
I have also designed work for a range of different sizes and medias, focussing particularly on editorial work and creating work that is to be bound together in a publication, large and small. I think that working in this area has improved my layout skills and helped me organise how I want information to be displayed and seen.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

The main strength in my work lies in my effort to make each project consistent. I think this is down to my development on branding, and down to my constant need to make everything perfect. While this means I have redone elements a fair few times, I definitely think it is worth it when it comes to the final product. An example of this is my research publication. While I had the information and general layout resolved within a couple of weeks, I have continually pushed the design and display up until the last possible point and to where I am happy  with it and feel that it works at its best as a publication. I think that my strength in making everything consistent is shown in Studio Brief 2. This was the largest brief and the one that I worked consistently on to make everything work together well and make it all clearly part of the same event.
Another strength of mine has been time management. While many have struggled in this, I have found that if I give myself a set timetable and give myself deadlines, I get the work done and can move forward and develop my outcomes more than I initially thought. This has definitely been beneficial to all the briefs in this module. I feel that these strengths have aided me in creating some of my strongest work to date.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

I think once again, my weakness lies in the number of printing processes used in my briefs. While I am a designer who likes to design for digitally printed media, I do think that my designs could have been pushed that bit more to include methods such as embossing or laser cutting in the production to give a more refined and professional appearance. I would like to use both of these processes in the future as well as foiling and spot varnishing. These are the four processes that I particularly like and think will push my designs further in the future.
I also think my main weakness in this module has been in Studio Brief 3 - the movie poster. I didn't particularly enjoy this brief at all, and I do think that it shows in my poster. I felt the film given was terrible and didn't give me much enthusiasm for creating a poster for it. As well as this, I don't think I went around the right way of designing for it, giving quite a poor final poster, and definitely the weakest work of the module.

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1. Use more print processes to give a more refined and professional appearance. This will help me take my designs to the next level and work differently in ways of making the designs more simple and giving more of a focus onto these processes instead.
2. I would like to make a more conscious effort to design for web. While I enjoy designing for print, I do think that designing for web confidently will help me become a much more rounded designer and will help my overall design skills.
3. Work with a larger colour palette. While the colours used were in context to the projects, I do feel that I have been working with small colour palettes of only three or four colours. I would like to do a brief where I use a wider range of colours as I think this will create new challenges for me to work on.
4. Experiment a bit more with how I can take binding methods forward. I thoroughly enjoy binding a book and would like to continue to learn this skill. Over summer I want to learn coptic binding so I can apply this in the third year.
5. I would like to spend a bit more time thinking about the audience/context of the briefs before starting with the designing side to it. I'm enthusiastic when it comes to getting a brief and like to get right into it so sometimes I don't think about audience etc, so I would like to start to do this. I did towards the end of my research book, and had to make changes at the last minute, which is something I don't want to be doing again in the future.

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 2: The Top 10 NBA Players Of All Time Design Boards

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 1: An Introduction To Air Jordan Design Boards

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 2: Evaluation

This was by far the most enjoyable brief that I have done in this module and probably in the year. I found that being able to choose the subject, content and delivery methods, it gave me a good amount of freedom in creating something which pushes me as a designer and is something that I want to create instead of creating something to fulfil a set brief. With this, I felt that I took the opportunity and created some work which I can be proud of as it shows my progress for the whole of the second year. I think that it definitely shows how much I have come on as a designer since the beginning of the year, and course, and it has definitely given me motivation to continue with this. I think that working hard at it has given me the motivation to work harder in the future as I am happy with these outcomes and know how much work went into creating everything.

I particularly liked this brief because it brings together everything that I have learnt over the course of the year, from branding guidelines to proper text formatting. I think that a wide variety of my skills have been shown off in this brief and shows the potential that I have as a designer. I was ambitious at the start of this brief in outlining exactly what I wanted to achieve and how much I wanted  to create. I set myself the task of creating a full identity for the exhibition, from the branding right through to the way-finding.

While there are areas that I do wish I spent more time on, I do think that overall I have created a very well rounded response and one that I am happy with. Something that particularly surprised me about this brief was my ability to design around content which I didn't really have any knowledge of before. I had previously known about the NBA and some of the players and teams, but looking at it all as in depth as I did for this exhibition was surprisingly easy and enjoyable. I usually find research to be a bit tedious when it comes to looking for written content and how I can interpret this, however I found it enjoyable for this brief.

In terms of the physical items made, I created a wide range of material, mainly focussed on the editorial and promotional side of the exhibition. I thoroughly enjoyed creating the book and the supporting editorial works, such as the concertina and fold-out. I do wish that I had worked on these elements a bit more, but due to time restraints this wasn't possible. I do think that had I had more time, the supporting media would have been more considered and stronger, but I do think that overall everything worked together well and the branding was consistent. The book was the biggest surprise to me in this brief. As I had found somewhere which would print off a book at a quite cheap price, I decided on just doing as much of it as I wanted instead of worrying about how I would bind it and how feasible it was to me as a designer. This definitely allowed me to be more free in terms of what was included in the book and how this was all going to be viewed.

Something I think I should have done was refer to the brand guidelines a bit more and followed what they said. I did step outside of these a couple of times, which wasn't the right thing to do in terms of keeping the branding consistent, however I do think that some of these changes were good to the development of the brief. One of these was the mixing of the red and blue colours in the posters. While I hadn't specifically said I couldn't do this in the brand guidelines, I didn't necessarily say I could, so this was a bit of a thin line. I did notice a mistake on my letterhead in the fact that I obviously misread the guidelines in the placing of the logo. That is a bit annoying to notice right at the end of the brief when there is no time left to change this.

Another thing that I picked up on through the brief was that while I aimed it all at an American audience, I hadn't taken their spellings into consideration, so all of the spelling throughout is British English. As it is such a small detail it isn't the end of the world, but it is quite annoying to know that this small detail is something that stopped it being a fully executed brief for the audience. That being said, I do think that I did take the audience into consideration a lot more when it came to this brief and think that I designed everything around what they would expect to see and want to see at an exhibition like this.

The biggest disappointment of this brief was when I received my exhibition book from the printers and they had made an error in the printing in the fact that they had printed someone else's work at the back. To find this after spending so much time on the book was a huge disappointment. However, with this happening I think it definitely pushed me to make the rest of the work that bit stronger. Something that I do wish I had done was make use of the custom typeface I created. While I was initially excited to use this and did in the book, when it came to the smaller print collateral I didn't use it and this is a bit disappointing to me as I designed it with a real purpose, so it is a shame that I didn't put it to more use. If I could go back and redo a few things then I would definitely be including this typeface a lot more.

Overall I am very happy with the way this brief turned out as a whole. I think that I kept the branding consistent and kept with the values I started with in this area. I do think that I could take it further and develop everything a bit more, but I do think that as a set it is strong and I produced a lot of work for a lot of different areas to the exhibition. While I would have liked to produce more to make it a full exhibition, I definitely think I pushed myself in the time restraints and delivered a well thought out response with a lot of considered work.

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 1: Evaluation

When initially given the brief I knew that it was going to be one that I enjoyed as it involved creating a publication. This isn't really something I had done this year up to this point, so to be able to do this was something I was looking forward to. I found it very easy to choose a subject and begin to collect research while starting the initial development phases.

The thing that I really liked about doing this publication was that as it was research, the content was already there and I just needed to reword it to fit in with the tone of voice that I wanted. Writing original body copy is something I haven't ever been incredibly confident at, so to have a base to work with made me much more relaxed throughout this brief.

I wanted to use this brief as something to develop my personal practice in the way I create publications. Up to this point my work has been quite structured, with everything in it's own place and not really a large amount of creativity in my opinion. I felt that the work I had done up to this point wasn't my best and wasn't as good as I could have made it, so I really wanted to push myself and my visual skills in this brief. With this in mind, I immediately got started on the brief and found that my eagerness in this really helped the later development of the publication.

I found that when it came to the first crit, where I had the written content and general layouts, it was much more useful to me as the feedback given was constructive and helpful. If I had turned up with any less, I don't think the publication would be what it is today. I think that this crit was a fundamental part to the development of the publication and of my practice. Before this crit, I had done the layouts and put the content in, and had thought that I was pretty much there in terms of finishing the book, with only a few changes that needed to be made. However I found that this crit really opened my eyes to the possibilities of where I could take the design further. It definitely helped me with the idea that you can always develop something more and refine it more.

The main skill I picked up in this brief was perfecting binding a book. I already had knowledge in a couple of simple techniques, such as Japanese binding and pamphlet binding, however I really wanted to make the book look and feel more professional so decided that perfect binding was the way I wanted to go. Learning this was a lot easier than I had initially thought, and I found that because of the nature of how I am with crafting, I found it very easy to improve my skills quickly. When it comes to mock ups I have always tried to get them to the quality that it would be if it were the final piece of design, so this definitely helped in getting the binding as good as I could in the initial trials.

Being confident in this skill really took a weight off my shoulders and meant that I could focus all my efforts on the development of the book as I knew that the binding method of the pages would be strong at the end. Developing the layouts is something that I thoroughly enjoyed throughout this brief. I think that this is the strongest part of this brief by far.

The weakest part of the design, I feel, is the packaging. Packaging is something that I've never really had a huge interest in making. I do like to look at packaging, but I have never really been too great at designing packaging or designing for packaging. I think that this brief did help me overcome this a bit, but I do think that it wasn't as creative or visually good as I could make it. I do think I should have spent more time on this instead of overlooking it initially. I spent so much time on the page layouts, I should have done the same with the packaging so the book would be consistently strong.

Another area of weakness for this book came down to the choice of stock. While I had thought about the stock for the pages, and was very happy with how these turned out, the stock for the cover is something that I did overlook and didn't carry out particularly well in the end. I went through a few different variations and when it got too close to the end, I don't think I created the covers that I wanted. This is definitely something that I have taken away from this brief. Getting the stock right is as important as the design, as I have come to understand.

While I don't think the final outcome was terrible,  I do see the errors and do see where I could have improved the design choices made. The one positive about my book being like it is now is that the pages can all open flat and no information is lost or ruined. This had been a previous concern in the way the book was before this final outcome, however I managed to fix it by fluke, which was good and something I was happy with.

I thoroughly enjoyed this brief and think that it was a good brief for me to do as I really do like making publications over other design work. While there are errors, these are things that I have learnt from and will take this experience forward with me to help my future practice.

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 2: Final Images

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 3: Evaluation

This was definitely my worst response of the module, but as it was only a one week brief, I am quite thankful that it was this brief instead of one of the other two larger briefs. That said, I do wish I had spent a bit more time on the design and worked a bit harder to create something that was a bit more interesting as a poster than what I did.

I think the main problem of this brief was the film that I was given. I found it to be boring and really not my kind of film at all, which did make me less than enthusiastic about creating a poster for it. The poster I created wasn't entirely reflective of the film, just of one element, and while I do think picking out a small element and building on it was a good thing to do, I'm not sure I chose the right element.

I had decided that I wanted to use this brief as a base to work on my Illustrator illustration skills as this is something I have never really been confident in. I am much better and type and manipulating type than I am in creating and using illustrations. I wanted to work on this and try improve these skills through this brief, which at the time I thought would be good for my practice, however I do think that if I worked on creating a typographical poster it would have been much stronger as a piece to submit. I do think that doing the illustrated based poster was good for me as it gave me a bit more confidence in my ability to use Illustrator.

Overall I do think that I could have created a much better response to the brief, but as it was only a one week brief, I don't think I did a terrible job and don't think it was anything to particularly worry about because even though I'm not entirely pleased with the final outcome, I learnt a few more skills and got more confidence in doing the brief and how I responded to it.