OUGD505 - Studio Brief 1: Study Task 2: Final Crit

For today's crit we were put into groups and given two hours to go through the crit as we wanted to. Due to a large amount of people being absent today the group I was in only had four of us, meaning we had a lot of time to give feedback, but probably not a diverse amount of feedback that would usually be got with a larger group.

We decided on a brief explanation to our books, stating the subject and a few design choices, before we rotated round and individually looked at each book while giving written feedback.

Content presented:

For this crit I presented the mock up of the finished book and the mock up of the packaging. I also brought along the three other versions I previously designed so there was reference if it was needed in terms of development or design choices.

Feedback sheet:

The general feedback I was given was feedback that I was expecting and nothing that threw me completely by surprise.

The main point of feedback was referring to the two white pages that were slotted around the content pages. There were queries as to why they were needed in the book as they seemed unnecessary. Although I take these comments into consideration, I do have a valid reason for having the sheets there so the bind doesn't ruin the content pages. A comment was made to maybe use red paper instead of white, which is something I have decided I will definitely do.

A good comment for improvement was to give the text a bit more room on the Branding pages. This is something I agree with and will attempt to try find a solution to. Another comment about the text was that the indentations were quite far in, so I will need to address this too.

The strengths of the booklet was in the layout design, content and binding process used. There was a bit of a mix of feedback in terms of the colour scheme used. One person wrote that they preferred it all in red and black throughout because it was very consistent, however another person wrote that they like it split into the three sections as it keeps the book interesting and refreshing with each section instead of just being the same colours throughout. I think these comments are down to personal opinion at the end of the day. Personally I thought all red was a bit boring and the whole booklet works much better when it's got the three different colours to split the booklet into sections.

I also took this opportunity to ask Phil about the amount of pages as this is something I had previously been quite concerned about. I have sixteen pages of content, but between them I had the section dividers, and including the front/back covers it comes to twenty six pages. This is something I just wanted to check with him and make sure was alright to move forward with otherwise I would have to rethink some of the layouts and how the booklet flowed. Thankfully he said that as there are sixteen pages of content, the booklet is fine in the format it is.

At this point I am happy with the way the crit went. There weren't any massive points in need of work in the book, just small tweaks, which is where I was hoping to be. I found that this crit was very useful because it gave some fresh eyes on my booklet and I got some good points of feedback.