OUGD502 - Self Evaluation

Overall I am happy with how my PPP work has gone. I really enjoyed doing the creative report, I got some good responses from designers but more so some really good advice. I also talked to one of the designers about the possibility of an intern ship in summer which would be a good opportunity I will chase up. It was good to be able to ask these questions to real designers and to be able to resolve some of these creative concerns. For example, one thing I have been very conscious of is whether as an aspiring designer, I should develop my own personal style, or even whether I should have already developed this. The responses indicated it’s good to have your own style so it distinguishes you, but ultimately you should be constantly experimenting and engaging with all aspects of design - which is something I feel like I am doing sufficiently. Working on my personal presentation has allowed me to reflect on what I have done this year, evaluate myself as a designer and identify my aspirations. Its good to be able to do that because ultimately it has made me feel more sort of organised with where I am and what I need to do. I enjoy doing presentations and public speaking so I am looking forward to doing the presentation. It was good to be able to look at both studio brief 1 and 3 combined as an overview my own development and creative opinions and I think the way I used the same design aspects such as type and layout for all the produced outcomes was a nice way of creating this whole identity for it. 

I think studio brief 2 - ‘life’s a pitch’ was the element of this module which I would have liked to have pushed further and developed more. I found the concept of the Archive 41 exhibition quite exciting and engaging and I really enjoyed considering the curation of the exhibit, thinking about music and lighting and how this all contributes to the atmosphere. Also the cost run down and organisation of the event which I did was very thorough, which made the pitch that bit more realistic and conceivable. As a team, what I wish we had done was picked this idea to start with, giving us the time to really experiment and push the boat out, delivering not only just what was required but even more, which would have made the presentation and exhibition concept that bit more exciting and sophisticated. While I think my performance and engagement with this studio brief could have been better, I would say I was one of the members of my team who contributed the most, so maybe what I will take away from this is to choose who I work with more wisely, but maybe also, as a member of the team who was taking more of a leadership role, I should have taken more charge and been more proactive in regards to delegating tasks and making sure we were on track. Another thing which I think could have benefited from more development would be my personal presentation; I think it does evaluate my personal performance, aspirations and concerns as a designer well, but it could be more engaging and entertaining for the people watching, adding in interactive elements or things such as a video. I do have an idea for bingo score card for the people watching the presentation which I will have to think about, I don’t want it to take too much time away from my presentation but it would be fun and engaging for the audience. 

In conclusion, what I’ve learnt from this module is: to be proactive and seek out advice and opportunities and  to try and engage with group projects and really delegate tasks  to make sure everyone is pulling their weight. The most valuable part of the module for me was being able to assess myself as a designer and engage with my own practise, because looking forwards into third year when I will be looking for jobs and opportunities, these personal and professional insights and ambitions will be valuable to consider. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation

Not all of my designs I did as personal experimentation were a full little brief I set myself, often I just had an idea for a design and just played around with it. This is in line with this idea of ‘Banking Ideas’ and just personally experimenting, seeing things you like in designs and trying to incorporate similar visual aspects. These designs range all the way from the beginning of the year to now, and I like how you can see my progress as a designer and the different things I’ve experimented with, some being purely just that, experimentations, but some being visual devices and design aspects that I really liked and decided to keep using. Some of my favourite designs here include;

• The green and purple record sleeve design 
• The two sun and moon ‘nice to see you too’ record sleeve designs 
• The instant karma record sleeve 
• The ‘racing start’ poster
• ‘troposphere’ packaging

PPP - Personal Experimentation - Game Boy Brief

I found an account on Instagram who posts designs of gameboy cartridges done by various designers. He sends you the cartridge mock-up and then you submit a design, he then posts the best ones on his page. I decided to take part. 

The first thing I did was decide on game to do a design for, it didn’t have to be a gameboy game, it could be a design of anything, but I thought it would be nicer to do an actual gameboy game so it applies contextually. I chose to do the game of ‘Batman Beyond; return of the joker’ mostly because I love batman but also this is a future version of batman so it offered the chance to do some cool futuristic style design. I limited my colour palette to red blue and black and experimented with some type and tried out some very stylised fonts but ultimately went for a more standard sans serif typeface, which is a little bit wider and slightly geometric looking. I created this grid because I wanted to replicate these cartoony futuristic graphics you see on the computers in the show and to further this I created these repeating outlined patterns, the red circles one works really well however I did one of the batman symbols which isn’t as clear, you can only really see the one batman symbol which I made red. I added in an image of the joker which I edited to make red and blue, and I then added in the little rating logo and the Nintendo authenticity badge logo. 

This was a fun little brief to do and my design did end ups getting featured which was good. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation - Desert Boys

I really wanted to do some branding for a band, designing vinyl sleeves, logos, j-cards etc. I’ve asked quite a few people but got no responses as of yet so I decided too just create a fictional band and go for it. This fictional band are called the Desert Boys, and they’re a modern alternative rock & roll band who want a very contemporary and eye catching vinyl sleeve, gig poster and j-card.

I started by editing a few desert based images - a desert scene and an image of a cow skull. I created a colour palette to restrict my designs to in order to create continuity between the designs. I created a modern logotype by stretching blackletter type. I started with the J-Card, laying out images and type and just playing around; in started thinking about visualising music and music production and looked at some of the hardware. On a mixing desk, you get those vertical LCD little screens with bars that go up and down depending on the volume level. I started visualising these with gradients and ultimately this in formed a very gridded layout, thinking about the grid and structure of the mixing desk and the way all the buttons and everything are logically organised. This gridded approach was also taken for the vinyl sleeve, and while this does add this element of structure to the layout, I wanted to add this conflicting element of disarray, representing rock & roll, so this is way I chan ged the orientation of the track names, added in blue images of the cow skull which contrasts the orange and really emphasised the logotype which is very stylised and pushes the boat out in terms of legibility. For the gig posters, I pulled it back a bit, because the function of the poster is to communicate to people on the street so it needs to be more legible. I used the cow skull as a primary image and edited the logotype, stretching it even more and making it just into a white outline which in placed on top of the image, creating almost like a deserty dust or smoke. 

I really like this set of designs, I think the design style is cool and contemporary and they work really well as a set, which was the aim of this perusal project, to exercise my skills in branding, and creating thus brand amongst multiple touchpoint. My J-Card design even got featured on Instagram by an account called modern cassette, who posts J-Card designs. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation - RGB Lyrics

For this experimentation, I gave myself the brief to create a set of 3 posters, each using one of the RGB colours, and each needing a lyric that mentions that specific colour. It’s a bit of a weirdly specific little project to set myself, however I came up with the idea for the red poster, did it, and decided to create a set. The end posters are cool visual experimentations and by doing it, my conceptual and idea making skills were challenged, as well as my ability to create a set of different posters, which all retain the same visual motifs so that they appear as a set. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation - Visit the Moon

As a personal exploration, I set myself a mini day long brief; inspired by the new Arctic Monkeys Album: Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, I decided to create a set of advertisements for holidays on the moon. 

I created a space age travel agents ‘Lunar Spaceways’ and started combining holiday images of pools, palm trees and people playing golf, with scenes of the moon. Theres almost something dystopian and futuristic about this concept so I decided to go for a retro futuristic vibe, taking the taglines from old travel agents ads. To obtain this retro aesthetic, I chose specific typefaces to convey this style: Futura Bold, Sarina and Rocket. 

The end results are quite fun little compositions. This experimentation mainly allowed me to practise my photoshop image editing skills, as well as finding contextual research and applying it visually. The most fun thing was really just creating this fun concept and rolling with it, expanding this retro futuristic universe through design. 

PPP - One Minute Pitch - Workshop

As an exercise in presentation skills today, we were assigned the task to create a one minute presentation; the presentation could be on anything we want, however the aim was that it was presented confidently, fluently, clearly but also that it was entertaining to watch. 

I decided to do my pitch on “who would win in a fight between a gorilla and a lion” - its a bit of a silly topic so instantly from there, there was an element of humour. I decided to do this as a presentation because as opposed to a presentation which is informative, it has that added element of suspense because people are actually wondering which animal would win. I found an article about it which had various facts about each animal, and I memorised the facts, meaning I didn’t have a script - something which increased my presentation skills and my ability to engage the audience. For the visual part of my presentation, I created an image of a gorilla and a lion in the jungle and out this in a gif - this image was static for 55 seconds until an animation played of the gorilla punching the lion and then sitting back in victory. This gif was good because it made people think ‘oh no the gif isn’t working’ but it was actually at the end - demonstrating my ability to time the presentation so that i’ve come to my conclusion that the gorilla wins, right on time for the animation to play. 

Feedback from this was very good and I will try and consider how I can incorporate fun entertaining aspects like this into my actual personal presentation.