At the start of this module, I wanted to focus on print and typography based work, but was willing to compromise depending on what type of brief I get, particularly for the collaborative part of the module. While working on the collaborative brief I feel that I demonstrated good time management skills, which helped keep us on track of our progress and to meet the crit and tutorial deadlines. For the practical development of our work, I was involved with the primary stages of our layout development but was responsible mainly for the map designs, which gave me a chance to develop my skills with layout and image based work, which were both areas that I’ve wanted to work on more. Altogether, with the collaborative brief I feel that I was able to work efficiently in a small team, by contributing my ideas and voicing my opinions throughout.
For the self directed brief, I prioritised my design practice on the areas that I wanted to focus on, therefore developed my design direction towards print and editorial design. In terms of my design skills, I feel that I’ve definitely improved on my use of typography and layout skills that I’ve explored during the type module.
I strongly believe that a good design solution is informed by good research and understanding of the design context and subject matter, therefore I've often delegated the first part of my practice on researching, which I feel has become a strength of mine. For the collaborative brief, we focused a lot of our primary research, which included experiencing P&O Ferries first hand to help us identify our design direction. We also utilized our secondary research to determine the content of our design solution. For the self-directed brief, I worked on a similar format; primary research determined my design direction and the way I was thinking, whereas the secondary research influenced or became the content of my design solution.
While working on the collaborative brief, I feel that my strengths in project/time management and action planning came in very handy as it was a relatively short brief for something that we had big hopes for, therefore required good time management to ensure that we stayed on top of things. We started working collaboratively with an opened approach, and believe that we worked really strong as a team of 3 as we all had something to contribute towards the group and we were all very vocal with our opinions and thoughts throughout. Although we all had our own interests and focuses, we worked well together as we managed to delegate specific roles for each member, which turned out to be one of our strengths. From the collaboration, I think i've identified that I work quite well as a team member, I feel confident expressing my ideas and opinions and I am constantly aware of the design progress.
In terms of working on the self directed brief, I've really tried to focus more on making the right decisions, and if they do turn out to be the wrong decision, I feel that I was able to redeem this by responding to crit feedback and my own on going evaluation. The whole design practice of the self directed brief went relatively smooth, although I did struggle to decide on something at the start, I focused my ideas on my strength in researching to help determine my decision. Again, my time management has improved a lot in comparison to my first year, action planning and daily blogging has become part of my design practice rather than something that get's done at the end. I feel that I was able to meet the the deadlines and have work prepared on time for crits and tutorials to make the most out of the feedback that I would receive.
Although I feel that I’ve managed my project quite well and documented my work throughout via the blog, it does seem evident that I didn’t really explore a wider range of design approaches. Eventhough I feel that I justified my reasons for the choice of design approach, I do think that I would have benefited from a more experimental approach, and tested out a range of different design ideas before making a decision.
Five things I would do differently and what would I expect to gain from this.
1. Although I did spend a lot of my time researching and gathering information for the contents of my publication, which is also part of my design practice that I enjoy working on, I would have liked to see how the work would develop if I chose a subject matter that already has the content defined for me. If I did go with this approach, I would definitely be able to work on the design direction in more detail.
2. I think I would have prioritised the logo of the publication more aswell. Although I did work on this, I think I was a bit safe on the design of it and didn’t really spend enough time on it.
3. If I had more time, I would definitely have to explored a range of print finishes and potentially ordered a range of paper stocks to test my design and printing on.
4. Developed my poster designs and possibly worked on a wider array of design range.
5. I would have liked to develop my proposed website into a functioning mini site so that I can see how the site interacts.
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