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.


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