During this module I have focused alot of attention on layout. Our subject matter was War & Peace, and because of that I wanted to echo conflict and struggle within my designs. Constructivist posters became the inspiration for my work. From this I developed styles of working with angled layouts, text and images, how to make it work and what not to do.
2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?
Looking at work that was contextually similar to ours (such as the ‘Obey Giant’ campaign in relation to street art and it’s viral widespread) and not just looking at work that we wanted ours to look like really helped me in developing ideas and concepts to help spread the message of the dangers of mines. In the end we developed a ‘downloadable project pack’ which I think works really well with the brief, Ctrl+Alt+Shift.s values and own ideas as well as the target audience and giving them something to engage with.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
Type is an area I feel strong in. Since being on an optional typography module I have learnt about clarity and communication, not just aesthetics. This helped when designing the ‘downloadable pack’, as alot of the designs are small stickers and flyers. I was struggling with font choices, using mainly constructivist and stencil fonts, which on evaluation were too small to be read at point sizes we needed. From this point on we shifted to the use of a regular san serif font Univers while still using colour and layout to echo constructivist designs and evoke conflict.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?
Colour is something I need to spend more time working on and with. I am quite confortable designing in black and white, especially just type and layout work but when it comes to choosing colour, I can never seem to get it quite right. For this project we only really used 3 colours, black, white and red. The red was a red I had just ‘chose’ while creating ideas and was using because it ‘did the job’. It was during the development that my parter suggested using a different that he had chosen red, which ended up looking more ‘blood red’, which was appropriate for our project, aswell as allowing the black to sit more comfortably on the red. Another example is I was using alot of black vectors for the mines, mainly due to the green shades used in the mine vectors were hard for me to work with red for the designs, after Nate had considered them together and decided on a red, the coloured mine vectors also worked much better alongside the red.
5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
Organisation and time management is an area I need to be better equipped in as I wasted alot of time just running around in circles over this project. Better partner to partner communication would of enabled us to design more effectively as a team, such as having the same ideas and point to head towards.
6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas (5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor):
Attendance: 3
Punctuality: 3
Motivation: 3
Commitment: 3
Quantity of Work Produced: 3
Quality of Work Produced: 3
Contribution to the Group: 4
