Who are you//Printed Final Spread

From working on this spread quite a while ago, i came back to finish it off today by adding in the relevant images, these were of some of kathryns work, which i think adds to the spread. The work i chose is in keeping with the design and feel of the spread.

I am happy with this spread. I think that it puts kathryn over well, because the article is about the interview i did with her, i have asked some further questions to add into the content of the spread, but the majority was from the interview. I included some of her work, which was the work that i got the whole idea of the spread from; 60's. 

I like the illustration the most, i think this sets off the spread and attracts your eye to it straight away, with the use of the line going through the middle this then draws you to the article to find out more. 

OUGD406 End of Module Evaluation

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

Throughout this module I have carried on developing the skills that I have previously learnt.

In this module the main thing that I have learnt was within the D&AD brief, this brief for me was a big learning curve. As the products for the brief were to produce a series of posters, which I decided to do them in a illustrative style. This sort of work I haven’t really done before and was something new to me, so I didn’t know how well it was going to turn out. In the end I was really pleased with the outcome and thought that I had done a good job of it. The posters worked well as a series and I thought they tied in well with the brief.

The other brief which I learnt skills on was the stamp brief, this was an interesting brief, one of my favourite, but the format of the stamps was the challenge, I haven’t really worked at this small a format before and it was good to design around such constraints. The concept which I had for the brief went down really well and the end products of the brief were good in my opinion and I received good feedback from them.

In the other briefs, I have carried on the skills which I have been learning throughout the year, for its your choice, I produced a publication, again something which I feel comfortable with doing and what I find interesting. For this I wanted to produce a publication on a different format to normal, so I decided to do a a5 landscape publication, I also wanted to push the layout of the inside of the publication, which I feel that I have experimented with this and got the best result for it.

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

For this module I wanted to focus on developing the design sheets that I do for each brief. I wanted to make sure that I was coming up with the ideas and developing them before I started to design them digitally, this would help my process in which I work and show more thought process throughout my brief. Doing this also develops the ideas and makes it better in the end. For the majority of these briefs within this project I feel as though I have achieved this, especially on the rain brief and even more on the postage stamps brief. For these two briefs I thought out my initial ideas, then further developed them on paper in rough, first before I took them digitally. This did help me within making the products for the briefs and I feel as though I did have a better final outcome because of this.

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

I feel as though the strengths within this module were on the briefs that I pushed myself more on. The postage stamp brief I believe was my best brief and this is because I chose a subject on which I found interesting and which I could relate to. This brief worked out the best because I went through the design process thorough, doing research, initial ideas, developing these ideas both hand drawn and digital and then producing the final products. I feel as though because of this this was my strongest brief. So I would say that my strengths has been the design process within this module, this is what I have been trying to work on the most.

I would say that its your choice brief was quite strong aswell, I think this is because I love to create publications and find editorial work really interesting, so this came into my element, but also because I had to revisit the work on colour theory and get a better understanding in order to produce a publication that made sense and was helpful to people. From doing this I understood the idea of colour theory more myself and will be able to take that into future projects with me.

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

I think this defiantly was the communication is a virus brief; the group brief. I don’t believe that this was a weakness because the group didn’t work together because we did, everyone worked well and we all came together well throughout the process of the brief. Everyone within the group contributed to the work and we all worked along the same lines.

The weakness within this was our idea and concept. We came up with one idea and wanted to stick with it, we got caught up on one aspect of the brief and couldn’t work around this. It was the concept that we came up with to answer the brief that wasn’t strong enough, it wasn’t well thought out enough and just didn’t work. As a group we understood the whole idea of the brief and how it worked in relation to the brief, but when it came to the public/ rest of the course to see it and understand it, they didn’t understand it.

I think from this I have learnt that you cant always believe that one concept is going to work and that just because you understand it, it doesn’t mean that the audience you are doing it for will. I have learnt that when trying to explain the concept, if I cant do it/know one understands it from the explanation then the concept is no good and shouldn’t be carried through.

This has shown me that I need to develop the idea of the concept and should thoroughly think it through and try to develop this to the maximum I can to get the best out of it.

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

- Think through the concept of every brief to the best ability – in doing this I will make sure that the concept and idea of the brief will be easily understood.

- Push myself throughout a brief – pushing my design work and my abilities within a brief will make my work better in the long run and I will produce higher quality work.

- Finish a brief off all together before moving onto the next – Finishing a brief all at once and making sure all the work is done will make sure that it is all together and I wont have to go back and keep doing little bits whilst on another brief, this just wastes time and means I have less time on other briefs.

- Time management – Making sure I manage my time to best of my ability and get the most out of a day to get more work done for a brief. Planning my days out should help me achieve this.

- Feedback – Getting feedback from peers within the course group throughout the brief will get opinions on my work as I am producing it, this can give me positive and negative feedback which will inform me if I am on the right lines on producing the final outcomes.



Attendance = 5

Punctuality = 5

Motivation = 4

Commitment = 4

Quantity of work produced = 4

Quality of work produced = 5

Contribution to the group = 5

Postage Stamps//Final Designs

From revising the work i had originally done, taking the feedback from the final crit into consideration here are the final designs for my postage stamps.

In the crit the main feedback was that i should have the stamps different colours because with them all being the same you just see a blur, so i have taken that on board and did some experimenting. I didn't really like any of the further experiments with the colour when i was doing it digitally, but once i printed them it all changed. The ones with the different shades of red are my favourite. This is also more in keeping with the project because a red road sign, is telling you something; a demand. Which is what these stamps are doing, they are telling you that if you do this when driving you will save however much fuel. 

The different shades do work really well, because when you look it, you can see the 6 different colours because they stand out at you in different hierarchies. This means you do actually read them all, so the user would read each one and see what they are on about, hopefully taking it on board and saving some fuel.

The rest of the design is the same as before, i have just moved the text from the covers in more, so its away from the edges of the page and made the type on the back of the booklet bigger, so you can read it.

Overall these stamps are my favourite, i think they work the best for the outcome of brief and has been one of my favourite/enjoyable briefs. I would love to take this further and make into a campaign or something.

Its your Choice//Final Print

Today i printed the final publication and bound it together. I used the same method to bind it together as i do for my last project; Japanese Stitching. This time round i scored the front and back cover near the edge of string, to fold back the front and back cover, this meant that the pages on the inside could be bent back further to see the whole page. This worked a lot better and made the publication better to read.

I am really happy with this publication, the print of it isn't the best, but i can't really do anything about the quality of the print! But i like the overall design of it and i think it works really well. I was bait worried about the pattern designs because they are really simple, but with the colour they look excellent. The idea of keeping them simple and portraying the colour experimentation has worked good and i think is shown throughout this. 

I like the layout of the informative pages at the beginning of the publication too, i think that the layout works well for information, it gives it that sort of report/corporal look, which tends to go well with lots of information, i think in contrast with the colourful pattern design section brings the publication to life and adds something when you turn onto these pages because you don't really expect it.

Getting the binding right and adapting the front and back covers to work better within the publication has made it come together well and added that finishing touch to the publication. All in all i am happy with the final product and hopefully it will teach some people about colour experimentation and colour theory!

Postage Stamps//First Day Cover

After creating the stamps and the booklet for them, we had to produce a first day cover, this is something that is made when a set of stamps are being released. It includes all the stamps within the set, with an explanation of them and then stamped on the day they are released.

To start with i put my stamps onto a blank envelope

I was originally going to scan this in and then add the rest of the details digitally onto the envelope and then print it out again. But then i found out that the envelope has to have the original stamps stuck onto it. I did the digital version anyway, after i had done this i realised that the digital stamp i had made wasn't really that visible over the top of the stamps, so i think doing it the other way will prove best.

So after doing this i realised that the stamps had to be physically stuck onto the envelope, so i decided to print the digital part off and then add the stamps on top, to then stamp them with the date it was released; 24.03.2012.

This is the final first day cover which includes all the relevant information needed for it.

Its your Choice//Presentation boards

As part of the deliverable we had to produce presentation boards for this brief, these were to illustrate our concept, research and development of the brief.

OUGD406 Final Crit

We had a final crit which took place over all our OUGD406 work. There was elements of it being just on the final brief of its your choice.
The main part of this crit was to look at each other blogs and see how they are working. As the tutors say that they look on them the most, they need to be easily accessible so they can find the right information for each brief.

Feedback:
- blog is kept up to date, well labelled on the side, easy to access everything and find all the relevant information for each module/brief.
- All work on there is to a high standard, clearly illustrates the design process going through each brief from start to finish.
- Everything is labelled.
- Good amount of work for each brief, blogged well.
- Consistent throughout all briefs.
- Each blog post is evaluated within, and the whole briefs are evaluated throughout.
- Research is present and labelled to each brief, can see what have been looking at for each one.

Improvements
- Make sure all briefs have same amount of work on blog than others (its your choice)
- Dont blog too much, some may have too many posts - merge posts together to make bigger posts
- Photos on blog to be better quality - can't always see what they are of.
- Make sure everything is on the right blog - research on context blog, work on practice
- Hand drawn design sheets and development not all on

Overall blog is very well kept, always easy to follow, shows all the work have done for the briefs, illustrates start to finish. Very good.

Its your choice
- Really good idea
- Easy to understand
- Professional standard within publication
- Good colour experimentation throughout the design section.
- Maybe more hand drawn design sheets
- Useful for most people, as found it hard to understand at first, this explains each contrast well and then illustrates within the pattern designs.

Improvements
- Printed black and white, but that obviously because don't have a print slot
- Print to high standard to get the best quality out of the book.
- Nothing really bad to say about it!

Its your choice//Rough Print

As we had a crit on tuesday and i couldn't print the publication off in time, i decided i would print a rough copy off, of the publication, this didn't really do the publication any justice because it was printed in black and white, but it gave me and the people looking at it an idea of what the finished product will be like.

As you can see, the black and white doesn't really help the look of the publication, but you get an idea of what the finished publication will be like. I really like the look of the contrast explanation pages, i think they have worked really well. The pattern designs look good too, just not to the best quality as in black and white, but i am happy with what the overall publication is going to look like. This was a good tester to see what it will be like.

Its your choice//Final publication

This is the final publication, which i am really pleased with. I think that the whole books works well within in each other, the beginning looks really clean and well structured which is then contrasted with the designs in the second half. Even though there is difference within these two page layouts i think they work well together. 

I want to print this on nice matte paper to give it a nice professional look, because of the style of the book i think this will work best. 

Image Sequencing workshop

We had a workshop on image sequencing, basically using images to create a movie, a stop motion style movie.

We first started by recapping the actions tool in photoshop as we needed to prepare our images to all the same size for it to work in the video.

After this it was really easy, we went into quicktime player, opened the folder with the re-sized images and then quicktime puts all the images in together. You have to select the frame per second, apart from that quicktime does everything for you, so it is really easy.

Here are some i created from the images we were given. With these i have experimented with the frame per second on each one.

6fps

15fps

24fps

6fps

15fps

24fps

I was surprised at how easy this was using quicktime to create the image sequence, the longest part is preparing the files for the sequence. 

I think this could be really useful for using on my blog, maybe to show work from a certain brief, cycling through the final products or something. 

It was interesting to use and learn and im sure i will use it in the future