What I
Found Hard
For brief 1 I
was given the word ‘vernation’, and this scared me quite a lot as I had no idea
how I could possibly produce 10 different outcomes from this. Because of this
panicky stage, I wasted a lot of time just thinking rather than researching,
something that I’ve always done, and the first brief has made me realise and
change this.
I also
struggled with the image poster in brief 5 because the message I was trying to
communicate was quite a complex one, as there are no obvious signifiers of
discrimination and incompetence. Also, I’ve never worked on a brief before
where I have been restricted to just image or just text, and so I would
consider this brief, which I found very difficult in all honesty, to be a steep
learning curve for me.
Where
I Feel I’ve Improved
My
understanding of type has come on massively due to a combination of the first 3
briefs and the sessions run in OUGD404, and when I look back on some of the
work I did at AS and A2 level I can really appreciate this new-found knowledge
and understanding. I even think it’s obvious that I’ve realised the importance
of type just from looking at my blog posts, where recently I have been changing
the font from automatic to Helvetica.
What I
Think I’ve Done Well
I think that
the main thing I’ve done well on across all the briefs has been the research
and the time management. Having one and two week briefs is something completely
new to me and I’m really pleased with how I’ve handled it. In interim crits
I’ve often been complemented on the depth and relativeness of my research, and
whilst I know that this isn’t what a crit is for, I think that the fact that
other people can see I’ve researched well backs up my point.
Out of all
the briefs, I would say I was most pleased with the outcome from brief 3. I
think this because of how mixed Sophie’s personality was when derived from the
answers to my questions compared to how clear her personality was in person. It
would have been easy for me to make a font based on what her personality in
person (if that makes sense), but then I would have effectively just discarded
all the questions I asked her, which defeats the whole point of the brief. I
was particularly pleased with the feedback I got in the final crit, as the
general consensus was that the personality traits my font communicated were
positivity and progression, which were the two main things I wanted to get
across about Sophie.
What
I’ve Not Done So Well
Starting from
brief 1 I wasn’t so pleased with the visual variation of my outcomes, but then
again I was trying to avoid the obvious connotations of vernation and stick to the
more informed outcomes I got to via my research.
I was fairly
happy with brief 2 at the time, but in hindsight it bugs me that the straight
strokes were thicker than the curved strokes due to me altering the ratio of
the inner and outer radii of the curves. What I should have done was change the
thickness of the stems to match the thickness of the curves, but at the time it
didn’t occur to me because I was too excited about editing all the letters with
all the ideas I had. I could definitely improved the manner in which I
approached this brief by making it more calm and logical.
I have mixed
feelings about brief 5. I think I set out to do too much. I wanted a set of
posters that worked individually but that would only truly make sense when seen
together. I do feel I achieved this to a decent extent, but I think this came
at the cost of the ‘high impact’ part of the brief in places. I think this is
particularly relevant on the image posted because of how refined and specific
the message was. That said, in the final crit I noticed that a lot of other
people seemed to have (in my opinion at least) confused ‘high impact’ with
minimalist, and I think finding the balance between these two was something
that most people struggled with, myself included.
Summary
All in all I
am happy with how the first module went, if not slightly underwhelmed with some
of my outcomes. I am pleased with the way in which I’ve approached everything
though, because I was worried that the workload would potentially be too much
for me at the module briefing, and this has turned out to be far from the case,
and all things considered, I quite enjoyed completing the module.