Alphabet Soup Part One Evaluation

In this project I felt that I depicted my given word 'Duplicate' to the best of my ability. My choices of letters were based on they're forms, in terms of which I felt would work best with the design formula that I came up with.

I think the A and the E work best, perhaps because they are more simple letterforms to depict, whilst the G was the lease succesfull, and also the most complicated letter I chose to use.

I think that the colours work well visully, however I chose them simply from experimenting with different colours and seeing which I felt worked best. There was no other considerations in terms of the context. I think that in hindsight it would have made much more sense to try and use colour in a more relevant way. From experimenting on Illustrator, I found that I could in fact have made one letter template and resized it to create the smaller letters. This would have made them identical in shape and form which I think would have worked better to get the concept of the design across more clearly.

10 Things......

....that I want to achieve in the next year

1. Learn to adapt my way of working to any length of brief
2. Become a complete geek at Illustrator/Photoshop
3. Continuously develop my drawing skills
4. Expand my knowledge of Graphic Designers
5. Experiment with a broader range of subject matter within my drawing ability
6. Learn to work in a variety of different styles, as oppose to working in my comfort zone
7. Be more confident in experimenting with different ideas and medias
8. Explore new areas of Graphic design that I haven't yet tried, even if I'm rubbish initially
9. Learn to adapt my illustrative style to suit a more graphics based brief
10. Be prepared to fail sometimes

Evaluation: How to...

I enjoy working with other people but at first I did feel that working as a group of six would be quite difficult. However, I think that we worked extremely well as a group. We were able to make use of our each very different skills, every one of us having an equal and significant contribution to the final products. What I think worked best was the way that we sat together from the start to the very end of the brief, whether crowded round one computer screen gradually manipulating and tweaking our designs, or each cutting/sticking an element of the final products on Thursday night so that we could properly road test them before the presentation! I think had I had to tackle this brief on my own, I would not have been able to technically achieve what we did. I learnt allot from watching those in my group who had stronger photoshop/illustrator skills than I do. I also really enjoyed coming up with something that we all agreed didn't particularly fit to any of our personal independent styles. The area I felt we let ourselves down on was the presentation of our final product. I felt that the slide show of our road testing playing over our explanation came across as a bit of a joke. We were trying to get across the impression of a good night out with friends as the situation for our products, but rather than illustrating our point we felt it actually distracted the audience from the presentation of our idea. Perhaps if we had played the images in a slide show afterwards that would have worked better. Also, we felt the delivery of our presentation became a bit disorganized. I think the problem was that we had been so confident an much more articulate in our crits and discussions that we thought the presentation would come naturally. I am looking forward to working independently on the next brief, but I enjoyed working this group project a lot more than I thought. I think its a very good skill to learn to listen to others and also compromise and reevaluate your own opinions.