OUGD102 - Self Evaluation

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


I think that the main skill that  have developed is to look through research and identify the research that is appropriate and understand how to take that forward. I think that I did a lot of research during this module and have realised that although it might be interesting or informative it might just not be useful or appropriate to the brief or the direction that I am taking the brief in. 
I have also learned to understand that the link between the research, development and resolution is important and each part has to have a strong link to the next for the resolution to work effectively. 
When we started the final part of the collection 100 brief I was thinking about producing skateboard deck designs as a solution. Looking over my research and development so far I eventually realised that a series of 100 skateboard decks was not an appropriate resolution. There was no research to suggest that designing 100 skateboard deck graphics would solve any problem and actually there were no problems that I could even relate skateboard decks to. Trying to go in a direction that I wanted to instead of needed to was a waste of time because I spent too long thinking about an unnecessary resolution and then had to rethink the whole thing anyway. 


In terms of physical skills I have developed my crafting skill a lot since the beginning of the module. The book binding workshop was really helpful in showing how crafting detail and the quality of the finished product is really important in making the product as good as it can be. I usually have issues with making marks on final prints and when gluing is involved I almost always make the work look messy and leave marks. This showed a lot in the prototype resolution of the collection 100 brief and this was mainly an issue with the stock. I only tested the colours on the stock and not the thickness of the stock itself, so when it came to folding and gluing then a lot of the measurements were out by a few millimeters and caused the whole product to be thicker and not fit together as well. When it came to gluing parts together it was really difficult to make things line up and the end result was a total mess.
When I remade the product I used a much thinner stock and was really careful in the crafting of it. I think it really shows that the final resolution is much better quality than the prototype. 





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

In the What If... brief it was made really obvious that research is one of the most important parts of solving a brief. If you can get as much research as possible covering all different types and kinds of research then you can analyze the whole thing and find patterns and issues within the bulk of research which you can take forward and specify more and more towards a solution.
Primary research is probably the most important and useful kind of research. Primary research is always correct and there can be no doubt of the source. Primary research can be totally controlled exactly the way you want it so the results that you get will always be useful.
I used Quantitative research to make statistics. Examples of this are things like during the Collection 100 brief when I got percentages of peoples opinions by asking a yes/no question. Quantitative is kind of like a broad method of research used to gather an overall understanding of something. Qualitative is the exact opposite and is useful for being specific and understanding  exactly why the statistics show what they do. I used this again in the Collection 100 brief by asking open ended questions which gave a much longer answer and showed people's personal opinions and experience on the topic of skateboarding.
We also used qualitative research in the What If... brief by asking open ended questions in the online survey and by calling the Crypt homeless shelter and asking questions directly over the phone.

Secondary research has definitely had it's uses in this module as well. Using qualitative and quantitative secondary research is almost like a basis for conducting your own research. By finding existing research you can see patterns and issues that other people have researched and then conduct your own research along those lines to make it reliable.


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

The strengths in my work during this module were mostly around the use of design software. I used Photoshop and Illustrator quite a lot over the briefs and I think I am becoming really good at using different aspects of the programs properly and appropriately.

Another strength in my work during this module was my time management and the quantity of work produced. I could tell myself just by the amount of work that I was producing each day that I was working a lot better and getting a lot more done in a specific time. Looking over my sketchbook and the regularity and detail of my blog posts I can see that I have produced a lot of work which I am actually really surprised and pleased about. I have always been more into quality than quantity but I think I'm really balancing both and keeping them at a high standard.

Other strengths would be decision making and crafting skill which I can see have improved over a short space of time. I have learned to make decisions quickly and not spend too long in wondering where to go next and just keep on working to get the best result. My crafting skill has definitely got better with the help of book binding and taking care in cutting precisely and making sure that any gluing doesn't leave dirty marks or patches.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?

My most obvious weakness that I can see is that I need to spend more time thinking about the production of the resolution. I have managed to make sure that I have a lot of development and given myself enough time to design an appropriate resolution but I keep making mistakes when it comes to printing and refining the final resolution. In the instance of the collection 100 resolution it was the printing and the stock that I had not thought about enough. Because the poster needed to be folded four times it had to be a thin stock. I focussed too much on the quality of the print that I didn't think about the stock thickness and it spoilt ever layer of the resolution from that point because it affected all of my measurements.

Another weakness that I notice is working with colour, but I think that I am getting better at this. Sometimes I find it really difficult to choose appropriate colours and make them work together but through trial and error I am learning to work with colour a lot more effectively.

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

- Give myself more time to deal with issues in the production of my resolutions to make sure that they are the highest quality possible.

- Make sure that I have thought about each part of the resolution including the stock that I use to make sure there are no problems with the resolution.

- Think about how the resolution would have a place in the outside world (e.g. product branding, distribution etc). This module made me realise that it is important to put the resolution into context within the world outside of the course.

- Do more research into similar design as well as just the topics. I focussed a lot more on the subject than design based on the subject. Existing design could really help to influence my design decisions.

- Make a time plan to help show me what has to be done by a specific day or date. This should help me keep on top of my work and give me enough time to deal with every aspect of it as best as I can.

6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas:(please indicate using an ‘x’)    5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance = 5
Punctuality = 5
Motivation = 4
Commitment = 4
Quantity of work produced = 4
Quality of work produced = 3
Contribution to the group = 4

Photoshop Postcards

For this brief we had to make 10 double sided postcards using Adobe Photoshop and saving them as PDF files. The photographs had to be based on our photographs from photography induction and the colour that we were given in Visual Language. We the had to make the back of the postcard and reference the pantone colour (Or one of the more prominent colours) of the photograph on the front.
My colour was red and I chose to focus in on one part of the photographs in large like an extreme close up macro picture. The camera quality wasn'y good enough to zoom in massively on the colours but I think I managed to capture some really intersting textures and overall a visually appealing set of postcards.

Printing:

I had these postcards booked in to print at the same time as my final resolution for Collection 100, so the exact same problem happened here as well. I printed these postcards in one of the Mac suites using PDF to make them double sided. The stock used is just normal thin weighted paper which is the only problem with the final postcards but this was a result of the digital print going wrong.
In future I would have had a plan B in case the print room incident happened again.

Below is each post card and then directly underneath is the back of it.

Collection 100. Product

To start this part of the brief we were told to make 100 categories which our objects, facts and opinions could be placed into.

Categories:

1. Metal
2. Weight
3. Size
4. White
5. Chrome
6. Black
7. Blue
8. Red
9. Orange
10. Multiple colours
11. Round
12. Straight
13. Right angled
14. Screw
15. Brand
16. Price
17. Design colour
18. Multiple design colours
19. Design Content
20. Imagery
21. Damaged
22. Snapped
23. Material
24. Hand Made
25. Type of Wood
26. Manufacturer
27. Alphabetical
28. Alphabetical by text
29. Most to least damaged
30. Parts heirarchy 
31. Type serif/ sans
32. Reliability
33. Multiple Materials
34. Parts that spin
35. Flexibility
36. Solidity
37. Circular
38. Hexagonal
39. Pentagonal
40. Parts turning others
41. Rubber
42. Number of holes
43. Amount of type
44. Features people
45. Has symbols
46. Number of symbols
47. Multiple identicals
48. Actual age
49. Appeared age
50. Plastic
51. Wood
52. Layers
53. Length
54. Width
55.  Thickness
56. Concave
57. Clothing
58. for feet
59. Density
60. Number
61. Importance
62. Simplicity
63. Strength
64. Integrity
65. Symmetry
66. Detail
67. Visibility
68. Number of components
69. Lightness
70. Darkness
71. Texture
72. Gold
73. Rectangular
74. Cone shaped
75. Cleanest
76. Dirtiest
77. Ambiguity
78. Safety
79. Performance
80. Necessary
81. Most Expenisve
82. Cheapest
83. Conrasting colours
84. Still function
85. Curved
86. Number of corners
87. Number of edges
88. Number of faces
89. Multiple shapes
90. Most used
91. Least used
92. Shiny
93. Matt
94. Size of type
95. Negativity
96. Positivity
97. Statistical
98. Features pro skaters
99. Uses the word 'Skateboard'
100. Deck related

After coming up with the 100 categories, I used them to categorise my objects, facts and opinions visually to help get a starting point for the brief.

Development:

I didn't find this very helpful at first, and I actually just started beginning development with an idea I had from the briefing. I wanted to look at how the same object can change over 100 recordings.
I started by drawing out 50 pictures of a skateboard wheel.
I wanted to use drawing in this brief because up until now i've only used digital illustration and photography to make the final resolutions. 
I really liked the visual effect of the same image over and over again but with subtle differences so I continued this idea.
I photographed the same view of the skateboard wheel 100 times to see how the photographs changed.

I like the patten of the similar image 100 times in row, but each image is so similar to the next that the overall look isn't as impressive as the drawings. After this, I went back to the drawings and chose to do 100 of a view of skateboard trucks with wheels attatched.

I think this worked really well again. During a crit at this point I showed the work and everyone agreed that it worked well and was reminiscent of wallpaper or wrapping paper because of the repeated pattern. This was an interesting possibility of a direction for the brief to go in, but I wanted to try out a few more things as well so I carried on developing more ideas.

I already had this design for 100 trucks so I thought I would use it for another idea. Since the beginning of the brief I had thought about skateboard decks which all have different graphics on the underside.
I managed to get a book from the library all about different skateboard graphics and their designers which showed how varied the graphics can be.

 

 

I thought it could be really cool to produce 100 different skateboarding decks possibly based on my research so I made a design using the 100 trucks for a skateboard deck.

 

It has the same appealing look to it but is quite plain as far as skateboard graphics go. Obviously the colours would need work done with them but stil the idea seems a bit plain for a skateboard deck. Often boards are bought because of the graphics on the underside (Especially in younger skateboarders) so the look is really important. 

I tried the same idea but with 100 skateboard helmets:

 

This product would have its place in the market by being focussed on wearing safety equiptment or something in that area but again it doesn't really suit a deck graphic. I think the patterned look might be the reason that the designs dont look well suited to the deck. A lot of skateboard graphics vary loads and it is a bit too precise to have the same image over and over 100 times.

I thought about the safety issue and eventually realised that it wasn't at all an easy problem to tackle. People have tried to make skateboarders wear safety equiptment over and over again hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways and I know that it doesn't work. I think that the overall reason for this is that safety equiptment isn't cool. People have tried countless times to redesign safety equiptment to make it smaller and beter designed and less bulky but it doesn't work.
If two people land the same trick and the only difference is that one is wearing safety equiptment and that the other isn't, the person who is not wearing the safety equiptment looks cooler. It is an unfortunate fact.
A big part of the excitment of skateboarding is the thrill of possible danger which is taken away when safety equiptment is introduced.

At this point I looked to the other issue which showed up in my research which was hostility towards skateboarders. I wanted to produce something which could reduce hostility and make people realise that skateboarders are just totally normal people and nothing else.

I came up with the idea of having a book which contained 100 pages. Each page of the book would have a photo of a skateboarder and then the reverse side would have some information about them.
The idea would be that a person reading the book would judge the character in the photograph and then their judgement would be broken by some positive information on the back which is probably completely different to what they thought.

During a short tutorial with Amber I realised that I hadn't thought about the audience at all and that the ideas in my head probably wouldn't appeal to the people that would need to read the book. We decided that I should go away and look at pullouts from broadsheet newspapers like the Guardian or the Observer and see what the design and content of them are like.

I looked into the pullouts and thought that this was a far better idea to go with and would tackle product promotion and distribution (Promoted by featuring in the newspaper and some front page mention of the product and also distributed inside or along with the newspaper).
I realised that a 100 page pullout would be thicker than the newspaper it was in so I decided to change the layout altogether and came up with a better suited applictaion of the product.

I chose instead to create a 10 x 10 poster which featured 100 skateboaders on one side and then the corresponding information about them on the reverse. The poster would then fold up and sit inside a kind of cover which would make up the pullout.
I also wanted to add another level on to the product so I came up with the idea of a false cover.
The idea was to have a false cover which had a negative statement towards skateboarders on the front. There would then be a pull tab that you would pull which would rip a line straight through the negative statement and show a positive one underneath. The false cover would then be in two pieces and could slide off to show the real pullout inside.

After coming up with all of these ideas I started creating the final resolution.

Poster:

I first started on the poster which took a really long time to complete. I wanted to get a mix of ages, genders, races and a mix of professional and non-professional skateboarders. I tried to get skateboarders around the Leeds area but the poor weather meant that there were no skateboarders at the skateparks (Where there would usually be up to about 40 at the Hyde Park skatepark).
Top try and get around this problem I posted some threads on skateboarding forums to try and get a photo and a bit of information from a few different skateboarders. Understandably, a lot of people were unhappy in sending photos and information over the internet to a complete stranger so I only mananged to get 2 useful responses.
I used friends from St. Albans and a couple of people that I knew from different areas to make up the numbers, but the majority of skateboarders shown are either professional or well known skateboarders from the US. If I could figure out another way to address this issue then I would definitely want to include more local skateboarders to even the numbers out.

Because all of the photos came from different sources I knew that they would be a mix of varied quality, size and colour so I needed a way to make them all follow the same format. I chose to ditch using the photographs and instead illustrate the people in each photo. I chose to go with using Adobe Illustrator over hand drawing the images because a mistake when doing them by hand could ruin the entire poster and with 100 different faces to draw it could happen a lot. Here is the final poster front.

 

'False' Cover:

I wanted to use a phrase that was anti-skateboarding so I came up with the title "Skateboarders: Thugs and Vandals". This is the phrase that would be ripped through with the pull tab. I also wanted to use an anti-skateboarding picture on the front. I was worried that this might take away from the overall effect of the pullout and just be confusing but I did it anyway in the hope that it supported the idea of ripping through the negative statement and throwing away the previous judgement of skateboarders. I used an image of a skateboarder holding a skateboard with his hood up and acting as though he was going to swing it. 

I used a blue theme for the colours to give a relaxed feeling to the pullout. I was considering using a red 'false' cover and a blue inside cover but the red against blue would look really unappealing overall. It has tabs around the outside for gluing the whole pullout shut.

Here is the 'false' pull out cover as a net. 

Real cover:

When designing the real cover I kept the same style as the false one. The colours are a little lighter to account for the change of stock. I used fireproof for the false cover so that it would rip better than other stock and used normal matt for the real cover to make sure that the paper didn't split when folded and creased. I used a normal picture of a skateboarder doing a trick (360 Flip/ Tre Flip) in a typically dynamic pose. The writing underneath now just says "Skateboarders: People". 

Inside cover:

The inside cover was kept simple with the same colour scheme and a small amount of text that says 

"100 Skateboarders.

 100 reasons to rethink the way your judge."

The poster folds up and sits on the right hand side of the inside. 

Printing: 

I tested the colours before printing everything and gave myself enough time to make sure that everything was printed in time. The printing went well although the double sided print on the real cover was really difficult. The printers in digital print aren't made for double sided printing so it has to be fed back in to the printer. This wouldn't be a problem but the margins on the side of paper where the printer holds on to it change from top to bottom meaning that if both iimages were perfectly lined up on the screen there is about a 6mm difference when printed double sided in this way. To fix it we had to keep adjusting the poisitioning of the images on screen until it worked. On the 4th attempt we got it about 1mm off which was probably the best we could do. 

Everything else printed well and I was happy leaving the print room and going to craft the actual final resolution. Everything worked well until it came to the poster. I hadn't thought about the thickness of the paper used to print the poster and hadn't realised that I was intending to fold it 4 times. 

The final folded poster was way too thick and didn't even stay folded flat. It warped the paper and ruined the poster.

On top of this the thickness meant that all of the measurements for the covers were wrong and didn't fit around the unexpected bulge of the poster. I salvaged the covers to a degree by cutting parts off and managed to close up the whole thing but the product was messy and buldged out. 

I was really not happy with the result at all because I didn't think it reflected the amount of work that I put in or my skill as a designer.

The final crit for this brief picked up on a lot of the flaws in crafting the resolution and the stock used which I was not surprised about. One issue that I didn't think about was the branding of the product. 

I said throughout the development of the pullout that it was to be put in the guardian newspaper yet there was no evidence of it on the product itself. I was also told to think about the further scope of the product as thought it was more of a campaign than a single product and think about what other products could be created.

With this and some other issues about handwriting, general quality and neatness and a numbering system to make it easy to identify which picture went with which information on the back, I went away from the crit and worked on changing a lot of the product to make it better.

Branding:

I wanted to make some branding for the product to link it back to being associated with the Guardian. 

I started by looking at the branding that the guardian already uses for some of it's pullouts, most notably the G2 magazine. 

I liked the use of the lower case G to link to original guadian logo and took the idea forward with my branding. I added a few different versions of the skateboarder from the real cover and a few different colour examples.

 

The logo that I chose was the first one (Blue g and black skateboarder). I thought this worked best because it is easily readable as a G and recognisable as a skateboarder and the simple block colours work really well in a logo.

After choosing the logo, I re made the cover designs using the logo and adding and tweaking some other parts to make it better.

 

  

 

Printing:

This time when printing came around I had a lot more difficulty.

When I went to my booked in session in digital print I had to sit for an hour and half before being told that there wasn't enough time for me to print and so I had to leave with nothing. I booked 4 days in advance and was really annoyed that the admins in the print room had overbooked because it ruined the final stage of my resolution. By this time there were no more space available to book before submission of the work so I had to deal with it and print on the lower quality laser printers in the library and Mac suites. 

I was really annoyed at this because so much of it was out of my control and I took so many precautions to make sure that I had enough time and that I was definitely booked in. The real fact of the matter is that this could easily happen in the real world at any time because human error can't be helped. 

As a firther precaution in future I will need to come up with a plan B incase this event happens again (Leave time to go elsewhere and research other places that could print what I need). 

To be honest the printers in the library and Mac suites only took away from a small part of the quality and the stock was far more suitable that the stock used in the last attempt at crafting the resolution. 

I am much happier with this final resolution than the last one. The colours work better together and the overall branding and imagery of the pullout looks much more professional.