Evaluations - Visual Communication in Context 2

Well nearly a week after handing in the Visual Communication in Context 2 brief, it’s about time I evaluated my work (processes, ideas and concepts, and final hand in work).

Look Again/Think Again
This first brief took me a while to get into and that would have been fine apart from there wasn’t a while to waste. I think my development and final design was relatively good considering that I did not really get into the brief straight away as my ideas and concepts changed multiple times before I arrived at my final idea which I decided to pursue.

I felt my final design worked really well actually, but that is purely my opinion, however I felt it fit the brief well and I also feel that my final poster design did what it was intended to do which was raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease. I think the image and the message work well with each other, in the critique I received some feedback which I didn’t really agree with so I didn’t change my poster a huge amount although I did make the type more legible. I also experimented with different images but decided what I had was what I would stick with due to the other parts of the brief pending.

I also think that I was lucky to get a reasonable design as I failed to use my time particularly well. I’m hoping I can put that down to the first brief back and not really being back in the swing of things.

Greetings Cards
At the beginning of this brief I was a bit puzzled as to what was expected but after discussing ideas with Neil and Claire it became clear that the brief was extremely open and was pretty much anything goes. I was pleased to have focused my idea a lot quicker in comparison to the first section of the brief. I feel that all my research and development is relevant but I also think I may have got too bogged down in one aspect of the target audience and lifestyle I was trying to appear to.

That said I think I managed to develop a good looking and working set of greetings cards for the final critique complete with envelopes. After the critique I concentrated a lot of effort into finalising my final greetings cards as I had a lot of necessary elements which I was required to add to them such as space for a note inside the cards and an address on the envelopes. After completing this and altering the colour of the materials used for my cards I was extremely pleased with my final designs. I also feel that the six greetings cards are probably the best piece of work I completed while working through this first brief.

Animal Watch Packaging
Similarly to the first part of the brief I failed to get started on this brief immediately as I was still pursuing perfection with my greetings cards (something im still to aquire). I also got bogged down on a lot of the research we should have done within our groups.

Once I got an idea and direction I really enjoyed this part of the brief as it was more of a life brief and we had logos and an existing company style to work with. I feel my research into existing packaging helped me to direct my ideas towards something a lot more appropriate to appeal to the target audience. I think I managed to create a decent piece of packaging design which with some slight refinements to fixing of the package could be an extremely cheap, sustainable peice of packaging to put into production.

I think the piece of this brief that lets me down somewhat is the design that features upon the package. The reason I say this is not because I dislike the design, I actually really like it, however I wish I had looked into more ways of capturing the portrayed lifetstyle which Animal sells with their products eg. illustration, surf graphics, pattern.

That said I still feel the designs I came up with are quite strong, I plan to develop the project abit further to bring it to a more final state so as to have a piece of work which presents idea through to final design for my portfolio.