Module Summary - OUGD403

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.