Monday, 30 January 2012
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
End of Module Evaluation - OUGD301
I have tried to evaluate this as genuinely honestly as
possible.
This module has proved the most trying module I have
done on this course and the most eye opening in terms of a future professional
graphic design practice. This is the most briefs that I have ever had running
at the same time and probably the most freedom within those briefs to produce
whatever proves appropriate. There were a lot of aspects of the module
that I struggled with and I can clearly see how the module has helped me
develop as a professional and as a designer.
At the beginning of the module I created
this rationale for myself and my work ethos: “An image driven investigation of
branding and identity with a focus on print and promotion”. This basically says
that I am more interested in image and image based resolutions and design than
pure typography and that my practice tends to produce some kind of identity or
branding for a business/ event. I also focus on producing promotion with a
concentration on print design where possible. I think that this was a fairly
straight forward rationale and it isn’t hard to see how any of my past and
recent work fits into this specification.
After clarifying what I wanted from graphic
design, my briefs were chosen to link to the rationale and were informed by
what I wanted to achieve as a designer this year in total. Looking through my
briefs and my proposed briefs I think it is clear to see how they fit into my
rationale and why they were chosen in the first place. For example, the Sandman
brief was chosen because it innately has a basis in image over type by being
about comic books which suggests that the resolution will probably be most
appropriately designed as an image focused resolution. Similarly, the animation
brief is quite specifically about image and illustration because animation is
illusion of movement through images in succession.
There were a fair amount of times that I
found the module really challenging. My biggest weakness in the module has to
be my time management without question. There were several times that I got
behind in my planned schedule and never really managed to recover. I struggle
quite a lot with keeping track of time and in seeing time on a longer scale so
it was easy to misjudge how long things would take and how long I had left on
them. As a result, the middle of the module saw me with very little physical
work as I hadn’t planned thoroughly enough to have produced physical work at
that stage. Over the last few weeks I have had to try and make up for this lack
of planning with much more solid work and shorter deadlines on decision making
and producing work. I had to put in a lot more hours than I my time had been
managed properly and do everything a lot quicker which may have stunted my
design work.
Another poor aspect of my time management
has been actually balancing each brief. All of the briefs are main briefs and
need a lot of work individually, but each brief should be balanced with roughly
the same amount of work. Looking at my blog it is clear that the Sandman brief
took up the most of my time. This is the brief that I started with and worked
on for the longest out of all of them, but if my time was managed properly then
decisions should have been made quicker and the brief should have been resolved
a long time ago. What this really meant
on a bigger scale was that I had to run all 4 briefs simultaneously and not get
the chance to really focus on any. Had my time management been better I would
have been able to overlap the briefs but let them run smoothly with only 2 at
the same time, giving me the opportunity to attempt more briefs and have more
content for the module submission and for my portfolio.
The last major stumbling point of my work
over this module must also be the initial design development. I came into the
module quite confidently and wanted to get straight into designing which means
that my context blog took a hit early on and my initial design ideas were
sparse and undetailed. I thought that by getting straight into it the briefs
would sort of resolve themselves through design, but with no research or rage
of ideas to fall back on I often found myself stuck with the briefs at certain
points, making me fall further behind on my schedule and work load.
The main positives for the module have come
over the last few final weeks of the module. When it came to it, I realized
that I had a lot more to ideally do than was possible in the time remaining so
I had to make some decisions on what aspects of what briefs I could drop or
change to be more realistically resolved. My work rate increased dramatically
as well as the actual amount of time I spent solely on graphic design. I think
these are all positives toward my practice and show a much more professional
level of work and commitment. The biggest realization here was how much work I
could have produced if I had worked this hard and spent this much time on each
brief since the beginning of the module.
I think the quality of my work has also
improved quite a lot since last year. The brief resolutions show a range of
different approaches and styles of graphic design appropriate to each brief and
each brief outcome which is a much more professional approach than sticking to
illustration just because I like illustration. This module has definitely given
me some work that I want to use in portfolio that I would like to show off as
my own work and as a representation of what I can do.
Each brief has been resolved to a fairly
definite point and I think that each of the briefs does have an appropriate
outcome. I am more pleased with some than others and it is clear that some of
the module has a considerable amount more work than other parts. I think the
most important thing is that all 4 briefs were completed and resolved, which is
the most I have ever done in such a small space of time and running
simultaneously. This was a really important module when it comes to developing
myself as a professional designer. I have realized what can be achieved in
certain time spaces and the level of commitment that is needed to produce the
best and most appropriate work. Above all, I have realized how much I need to
get a hold of my time management in the future to get the most out of each
brief, the most for myself, and to avoid falling down like I did in a lot of
this module. I have said this about time management in the past, but this
module has made it painfully obvious how important it really is.
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Monday, 12 December 2011
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