Being a fresher. Crit.

First thing this morning we had our first crit. Generally the feedback to our booklet was positive, mainly being that we had done some really strong researched and utilised it well, as well as that our booklet directly answered the brief that was set. The group we presented our project to did have some suggestions as to how we could improve it though, they were;

• A lot of the pages had a lack of imagery on them
• We hadn't mentioned calories anywhere throughout the booklet
• We hadn't included any information on alcohol

We also had discussions about wether our title font was appropriate, as someone commented that it looked similar to the titles on Roald Dahl books with made it seem a bit immature. As a group we acknowledged the similarities between the book titles and our font (Brain Flower), but we felt that the laid back feel of the font was appropriate as we didn't want our booklet to be too "in your face" for want of a better phrase.

The Font We Used For Titles

The Roald Dahl Book Style Compared To The Font We Used

Another suggestion that was brought up was the idea of some sort of interactive platform to run alongside the booklet where students could upload their own cheap and healthy recipes or tips for cheap exercises. Whilst this is a good idea, I personally feel that it's not necessary due the amount of websites already existing that serve a similar purpose.

In response to the criticisms of our booklet, Poppy and I immediately started a page on alcohol, with a major focus on the units, alcohol percentage and calorific value in a typical drink. We also showed the recommended amounts for men and women.

While we were doing this, Tom was continuing to adjust the pages to the changes that the master slide had forced, Roz was drawing illustrations for our page, and Jess and Aimee were preparing the presentation for tomorrow.

The group we did the crit with had the problem of how to maintain a positive and creative attitude. The first thing they said was that they immediately dropped the "positive" as they felt it was too generic, whereas the "creative" was far more specifically aimed at LCA students. They had produced postcards with links and adivce on them, and posters that had symbols of helpful things on them. Both the postcards and posters were based around the 4 things that their research suggested would aid a creative mind; Read, View, Explore and Listen. Our feedback to them was that while they looked appealing, they didn't really answer the problem that was given to them, and we suggested that an interactive thing such as an app might be more appropriate. This however didn't solve the problem that I brought up, which was that their outcomes focussed on material things such as computers and iPods to help people stay creative, where as I think the mental attitude towards creativity is just as important, and this didn't seem to be reflected at all in their work. It didn't really solve the problem, it was more of a starting point on the journey to solving the problem.