End of Module Evaluation - OUGD201

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

The main skills that I have learned over this module have been related to designing for print production in terms of software. I have learned a lot to do with setting up documents ready for printing in Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop and how to produce a lot of different effects for printing (For example, overprinting / knockout printing). These skills have helped me a lot in this project as it meant that when I came to print in the end there were less problems, especially in comparison to some of the briefs last year where everything started going wrong when printing came around. 

I have also learned how to manage files properly for print and recognise how to make sure that everything is set up and managed properly when it comes to final prints. This makes everything run a lot more smoothly and it means I had more time to deal with designing instead of worrying about printing and having missing files and links. 

In terms of knowledge I have learned a lot about the different kinds of print processes and how they are relevant in the graphic design industry. I now know quite a lot about which processes would be used in which situations and about how some specific types of products are printed and the procedures that they go through to get to a good quality end result as well as learning about specialist print processes such as spot varnishing and embossing.

On top of that I have learned how to recreate a mock up process for embossing and foil blocking which works quite well to represent how it could be used in industry and has an alright quality.

All in all it has produced a lot more opportunity for design solutions in future and a much better understanding of how to produce print to a higher quality.


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

My approach to research for this brief has been to show everything almost solely in the form of the blog. Last year I would use a sketchbook to show a lot of my research work and then blog it at a later time but in this brief I have stuck to trying to use the blog to show my research in a managed and chronological way so that it can be used as a clear and coherent reference when looking over it and selecting appropriate parts later on.
I think this worked really well because it meant that I could take advantage of the fact that it is digital by using search functions and tags to quickly be able to find bits of research that I want to reference or look at again.
My handwriting is quite messy and sometimes hard to read so using the blog also helps to eradicate any readability issues for me or anyone else looking through it.

In terms of primary and secondary, the majority of my research since the summer brief has been secondary qualitative and quantitative as i found it really hard to find any primary research relevant to the brief. Over the summer I did manage to get some good primary research though and it helped to link over into the start of the year.

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

I think that probably the biggest strength in my work for this module has been my improved use of design software for printing processes which has made my end products come out quite well. I also tried quite a lot harder with finishing quality for this module which I think shows in my packaging. In my past work I have struggled quite a lot with crafting quality, as I always end up cutting wrong or making marks on my work or getting glue everywhere. For this brief I consciously made a lot of effort to keep my work at a high finished quality which I think shows and is considerably better  than previous attempts at finishing.

I think that my use of illustration worked quite well over this module which is positive and is something that I have been meaning to integrate into my work more and more.
I have always been quite good at drawing and illustrations in a few different styles so i have been wanting to take advantage of that as a skill. I think that this module was a good step in the right direction for including illustrations and I think it turned out quite well as an end result.

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


The main weaknesses for this module are probably layout design and product range. A few different things throughout the module have required some layout design to make the designs work and I'm not really that confident in layout as a field. I have only really worked with layout a few times and it is quite integral in most design.
The issue that I have the most is that I keep moving things around on a page and eventually I can't tell what looks good and what doesn't anymore.
I think that I could benefit with researching layout more an developing some kind of practice for working with layout design as a starting point.

By product range I don't necessarily mean quantity of work because I feel like I have done quite a lot of development and research but looking over my resolutions I feel like I should have some more products in the range to support the campaign.


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

- Try to get some more primary research to support my secondary research. This should hopefully back up my design and development solutions a bit more.

- Research basic layout design and come up with a practice to use as a staring point. This should hopefully help me with layout design and stop me getting confused about what does or doesn't look good.

- Create a wider product range. I never usually create a wide range of products as I often focus a lot of one or two products. It would be good to see a large range to see how I can make branding work across more products.

- Use more colour. I think that working with a distinct lack of colour in this module was a good idea but it made me realise that I often don't work with much colour and it would be nice to create some really vibrant designs.

- Be ambitious. I usually spend quite a lot of time justifying my design decisions and making sure that they are viable when I could just be designing and making the end result better. Sometimes things don't have to be realistic to work which is something that I need to understand.


6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas:
5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor

Attendance = 3
Punctuality = 4
Motivation = 3
Commitment = 4
Quantity of work produced = 3
Quality of work produced = 4
Contribution to the group = 4

PDF Artwork - Boards

This is the multiple PDF publication of the final presentation boards for the What is Good brief. They have crop marks included as well as registration and colour marks.

PDF Artwork - DPS

This is the PDF Artwork for the final double page spread. It has crop marks, registration marks and colour bars.

PDF Artwork - A0 Posters

These are the A0 posters that would be seen around airports to target the tourists going abroad. I have included crop marks, registration marks and colour bars to the PDF publication.
This is a 2 colour print job; Key Black and Pantone 2985 M.

PDF Artwork - Final Nets

These are the final nets for printing put into a multiple PDF file and uploaded to Issuu. Each net has registration marks and colour bars but they don't need crop marks because they will be die cut not guillotined.
The pages in this published document show the 5 nets one after each other and the final page shows the outline that would be used to die cut the net and the two blocks that would be cut out of the middle.

Final Boards

These are the altered designs for my final boards for submission. Not too much has been changed as the feedback for the layout was OK. 

One major change was using guides and grids to properly map each page so that everything lined up correctly and stayed consistent. The images on this first slide have been replaced so that they print out better.

I have focussed on the hierarchy of this board as it was unclear which logo was the one picked for the actual logo.

The only change to this board is that higher resolution images have been included for better quality.

This board has been altered to include a contextual understanding of where the packaging will be implemented.

This board has been changed to incorporate a range of products instead of just the magazine spread and it has completely new images.

DPS redesign

This is my attempt at redesigning the DPS for the inflight magazine as there were a few comments in the final crit about how it should be changed. One of the main comments was that there should maybe be some info graphics included in the design somewhere which is something that I have never really tried before. I did a bit of research into some types of information graphics and came up with this design below. 

The fact being stated is that manta rays can grow to a width of 29 feet which is almost exactly equivalent to the length of a double decker bus. 

For a first attempt at info graphics I don't think its bad but it could still do with some work. I think it communicates the fact quite well but the design could do with some modification to make it look better. 

As for the double page spread I attempted to incorporate all of the parts and reduce the amount of text by a bit so that it looks more inviting to read. I think that this spread is quite good for communicating what I want it to but again I think the design could do with some work to make it more visually appealing. 

A0 posters

During the crit it was also suggested that I create some promotion or some kind of advertising for the campaign. I had wanted to do this anyway so it was quite good feedback.

I cam up with this design below for an A0 poster to be seen in airports. After grabbing tourists attentions it gives a bit more information about the campaign as there is no double page spread to read in this example. 

This is another example for an A0 poster but this time it has been designed to be at the airport at the other end of the journey. In this instance the poster takes advantage of the fact that the tourists will have already seen the posters at the other airport and the meal on the flight and the double page spread in the magazine.
The perfect placement for the poster would be on the journey to customs or just before it because everyone on the flight would have to go the same way and everyone would have to see it.
Design-wise I'm not really sure about the look of this poster compared to the others, its something about the composition or the colours of the blue strip overprinted on the black but I can't quite figure it out.

In terms of further design there could be a lot more designs made than these but I think it would be better to have even more different illustrations to work with. 

Retaking photos

One comment from the final crit was that my photographs looked a bit weird on the page because something happened in photoshop and it couldn't be seen until printing so I have had to retake the photos for the final board. Here I took a few photos from different angles and set them up in a contact sheet to see which ones had the best angles and no strange blurs or marks on the photos. 

Then I picked the 2 which I thought were the best to replace the two main photographs on the first board which are shown below. 

After picking the best photos I used Photoshop to get rid of any weird marks and things like the sides of the paper in the bottom picture and I increased the brightness and contrast a bit to make the images pop from the background better. 

Now these images should work a lot better in the final boards and produce a smoother look to the first board. 

Final Crit boards

These are my boards for the final crit. I tried to keep the basic layout quite simple and minimalist and let the images speak for themselves. Each board contains a title and a small sentence or two about what I tried to achieve with the content of the board. Each board also has the logo to brand them all together along with a strip of the Pantone spot colour and my name and module code. 

I chose a topic for each board to follow: Concept, Logo Design, Packaging, Illustration and Magazine Spread. I thought that these topics would make sure that the boards as a whole covered pretty much everything that I have done over the module as best as possible. 

DPS Design

Here is the designing for the double page spread. This idea is for the DPS to go inside the in-flight magazine that they have on flights. When the passenger sees the packaging they will notice that is says "For more information see page 10 of the in-flight magazine" which will hopefully make them turn to page 10 and read the article which will go into more detail about the manta ray situation. 

The image below shows my first set of thumbnails to come up with some ideas about the layout of the DPS.

Some of them would work better than others but they all quite interesting ideas I think. On the right is a little diagram showing the layout of the indesign document with margins and columns etc. 

The document setup is like this:

DPS

2 x A4 pages - 210 x 297 mm

3 columns on each page

Gutter - 4.5mm

Margins:

       Top - 12.7 mm

       Bottom - 12.7 mm

       Inside - 8mm

       Outside - 15 mm

Bleed - 3mm

I remembered that I had one image left over from when I made 6 illustrations instead of 5 and decided that I could use the remaining one for this spread. I looked over at the old image and realised that it wasn't great quality and thats probably why I didn't end up using it for final packaging so I drew out a new one with a bit better quality of lines and detail. 

Then I chose this thumbnail to try and recreate in Indesign.  

I used the guides and columns to lay out the spread appropriately and tried to incorporate the illustration as best as possible to simulate the thumbnail.

This is the final DPS that I have created to use on the boards. I used the spot colour with the overprint fill to try and link it to the packaging but I created these more abstract shapes instead of the straight bars on the packaging. I'm still not entirely sure about this spread. I can't really tell if I like it or not but hopefully the final crit will be able to give me some ideas about changing the design if I have to. 

The image below shoes the spread in context as part of a magazine. This is just to show the kind of thing it would actually look like when printed. 

Photographing first product

These are my first attempts at photographing my printed and constructed packaging. I am not usually very good at photographing my products so in this instance I put in a bit more effort and tried to create really nice crisp high contrast photographs by using a light box to create loads of light for the photos. 

I think these photographs look pretty good in comparison to the kind that I would usually do for my briefs last year so it is definitely a step in the right direction. 

Aside from the better quality photographs I also put a lot more effort in to the crafting of the packaging. Anyone who has ever seen me try to construct something would know that it is a big weak point in the finishing of my work so in this case I put in extra effort to make sure I didn't needlessly mark the card or cut it wrong or get glue everywhere. I used double sided tape as a clean adhesive and made sure the surface that I was working on was always clean and I made sure that the stock didn't split when folded. 

All in all I think it paid off quite well and in terms of finished quality it is very good by my standards. 

Final Nets

Here are all of the final net designs. They are quite self explanatory. In industry they will printed exactly like this, die cut and then shipped to the airlines or to the food manufacturers to be easily assembled and put in to use. 

This shows the back of the nets. I didn't want the inside of the boxes to be plain white so I made them plain blue instead. It is the same Pantone colour as on the front of the nets. 

It also covers the majority of the back of the A2 sheet which means that any miss-alignment in printing both sides won't affect the end result. It is basically using a big bleed. 

Final Final Designs

Here are each of the final designs including type. So these are effectively the lids for each of the meal packaging boxes. I have used the same style and spot colour (Pantone 2985 M) across each design to relate each to one another. I tried to come up with some short taglines that could be a bit clever and relevant at the same time and I think I got some ok examples on these designs. The frist design shows a pretty ordinary phrase, "We checked this meal but we can;t check them all'. This phrase is very literal and the meaning is quite obvious compared to the others below. 

The phrases that I settled on in total are these:

• WE CHECKED THIS MEAL
  BUT WE CAN'T CHECK THEM ALL.
• DON'T BITE OFF
  MORE THAN YOU CAN CHEW. 
• HERE'S SOME FOOD
  FOR THOUGHT. 
• THERE ARE PLENTY MORE FISH
  IN THE SEA. 
• YOU'VE GOT BIGGER FISH
  TO FRY

I think that they all work relatively well and relate quite well to the point in some way. I tried to make each phrase relate to either the sea, fish or eating in some way but also make them work in context when the tourists understand what the product actually is which I think I have achieved quite well. 

Vectorised illustrations

These are all the vectorised illustrations to be used on the nets. I think it is good that each one is quite different in shape and size and I think that each design has quite an interesting angle and composition which makes them stand out. 

Designing on the net

Here is where I have started to design on to the nets. 

I started by vectorising the drawing and giving the lid a background colour. After this I just started experimenting with integrating some type and layout with a spot colour to add some colour. I picked a blue colour to represent the oceans and I have given it an overprint effect so that it doesn't knock out big parts of the illustrations. 

In the examples below the type looks a bit too separate from the rest of the design and the letters kind of fall away into the background so I don;t think it worked very well. 

In the example below the type is a lot clearer but the spot colour has been lost and the black and white becomes a bit ordinary. 

Here I have tried to integrate the spot colour in to the above design and I think it works quite a lot better in this way.

This example again shows the same kind of design as above. I think that this could be used across the range as the kind of style for the packaging and type mix.