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 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.

OUGD505 - Studio Brief 3: As Good As It Gets

To start with I had a look for the promotional posters/material used for the film when it was first out.

There wasn't much, as most of it was the same image used and just cropped and the text changed. The main focus was solely on Melvin, Jack Nicholson's character.

I then watched the film. While doing the initial research into the film and seeing the awards it won, I thought it would have been quite a decent film to watch. However I found it really quite boring and not my type of film at all. This made it quite easy for me to pick out important features on the first watch though.

After I watched it I did a quick spider diagram of everything important throughout the film.

There are a fair few features that I could focus on, the main one being the dog 'Verdell'. While he plays a small part in the film, in the storyline he is quite an instrumental character and is the driving force behind the unlikely friendships between the three characters.

I did some research into movie posters and found that the type I liked were the really simple designs with one main feature.

Research Link

I then drew out a few thumbnails for initial ideas quickly. I wanted the poster to be simple, maybe with only one or two individual elements which I could then work on giving detail and work with different tones to create a more realistic image.

Initial thumbnails

From these thumbnails I decided that there were two ideas which I thought were strong enough and that I liked enough to move forward with.

As this is a quick brief I wanted to do something I enjoyed because it means I'll work on it harder and get it done faster. I also wanted to use this brief as an opportunity to practice my Illustrator vector skills as I haven't done much work with image in this program. I also wanted the poster to be quite quirky and stand out with the use of bright colours.

As Verdell is such a big part of the film, I decided that I would start by using him as the basis for my poster. Although this goes against the initials thumbnails I had, I thought it would be a challenge for me to try work with the dog. I wanted to just use the silhouette of the dog, but that still required quite a bit of work because of the fur.

I took a film still of him and started creating the vector of him.

At this point I was unsure whether I wanted to continue with this idea as I wasn't sure it looked as good as it could as I am not confident enough in my skills in this area. I also am not sure if this image would fairly represent the film.

I did a quick mock up of a potential poster using the silhouette.

I have decided that even though this is quite quirky, I don't want to move forward with it.

I reviewed my initial ideas.I noticed a lot of the things in the film which were important were objects, so I wanted these to be the focus. I decided on two designs which I liked the idea of; the dog bowl, and bacon.

Both of these elements are related to the dog and are parts of the film which are underlying to the plot.

Something I also want to use in the design of the poster is the OCD that Nicholson's character, Melvin suffers. In the film he suffers from this and does things throughout the film that illustrates this such as using soap only once before throwing it out, putting on plastic gloves before picking up the dog, doing his door locks five times every time he gets into his house.

I thought the best way to illustrate the perfections that he creates would be for the layout of the contents to be perfectly aligned and for distances to be the same.

I tried out a quick design with the dogs bowl.

While I thought this initial idea was the best one I had because of the simplicity, I don't really find it anything exiting to work with.

With this in mind I decided on moving onto the ideas that I had for using bacon. This is definitely the design in which I had the most ideas and could do the most with.

I started by finding a picture of a piece of streaky bacon, like used in the film, and drew around it, drawing around all the lighter and darker shapes too for tones to be used.

I then chose my first colour. I decided on the colour I had previously used on the dog bowl as this was similar to bacon colour and had a very good range in terms of how this would fit in with bacon tones.

I then worked on colouring in the piece of bacon.

My initial thoughts are that it is quite a good design, especially considering I don't usually spend this much time on creating images on illustrator.

As I wanted to make the poster simple and contemporary, I chose two typefaces which worked well with this idea.

I then went through some initial layout ideas I had for the poster. I have not decided on the second colour yet at this point and will hopefully be able to choose through choosing a layout.

At this point I have decided that I do think some of the layouts are successful but I don't like the typeface I am using for the film title, so have decided to use the same I have been using for the actors names. I also started to try choose another colour. I wanted it to be a contrast to the brown used for the bacon.

At this point I reviewed all the layouts. I have decided that the bacon image needs a bit more dark brown in it to make it more obviously bacon. In the image it was like I originally drew it, however because it is a vector, manipulating it is necessary to make it a bit clearer as to what it is.

Revised bacon:

From the layouts the following is the one that I liked the most.

When looking back at it after a while I found that the orange is a lot more orange than originally thought. When I had it as just the film title in this colour it didn't look that orange at all against the white, however in a large amount it is very orange. It also didn't contrast against the bacon as much as I wanted it to, so I decided on going back to the yellow I had used previously as this does stand out against the brown.

 With this layout I had two slight differences in it, one with the bacon at the top/bottom and one with the names at the top/bottom.

 I decided on the second as it balances out the content in the middle.

Final poster:

Overall I am happy with the final outcome I had designed. It kept in with the simple approach that I was going for, but allowed me to test my skills in drawing in Illustrator. For what the film is, this poster is quite bold and reflects the quirky side to the film. I also like the fact that I have created the poster without the use of a character from this film.

I have enjoyed this brief, and while I didn't really enjoy the film and didn't really know what I wanted to do at first, I think my final design is simple but effective and is a good, simple layout, using bold and contrasting colours to make it eye-catching and not a typical film poster. While I may not have designed a poster for a hugely prominent feature of the film, I do think the bacon was featured quite a lot throughout the film and makes for an interesting and different poster to those typically seen.

OUGD505: Studio Brief 3: Film Poster

Today we were given Studio Brief 3, which is to design a poster for a movie by Jack Nicholson.

Rules for the poster:

For poster submission the scale must be A4.

Submission Deadline: April 22nd.

For final submission we can blow this up if we want to.

It must be a two colour print + stock.

These will be submitted to AMP - Link.


Film I have been given: As Good as It Gets (1997)

Run Time:

139 minutes

Rating:

PG13 (America)

Staring:

Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Awards:

33 Wins & 30 Nominations including: 2 Oscars & 3 Golden Globes

Budget:

$50,000,000

Gross:

$147,000,000

Synopsis: 

New York City. Melvin Udall, a cranky, bigoted, obsessive-compulsive writer, finds his life turned upside down when neighboring gay artist Simon is hospitalized and his dog is entrusted to Melvin. In addition, Carol, the only waitress who will tolerate him, must leave work to care for her sick son, making it impossible for Melvin to eat breakfast.