EVALUATION

My final major project has been a real stepping-stone for me. It has helped me realize what I would like to specialize in. Throughout this module I chose briefs that focused on hand-drawn type and image-based solutions which enabled me to refine my specialist subject area. This has given me more confidence in my design style and has allowed me to find out where my work lies best in the real world. I feel as if my work lies best in the context of book cover design, retail graphics, promotion and packaging. I only recently found that I enjoy stationary design, but only for specific companies where they would prefer a more illustrative/quirky logo design style.

I have still shied away from layout design, which has been my downfall in some of the briefs, since some of them could have benefitted from a more structured layout style, such as the packaging designs. It has become apparent that my attention to detail in this area is lacking. Another area, which I still haven’t explored to its full potential is printing processes and stock, this has been a weakness of mine throughout several modules, and I still have not fixed it to the best of my abilities. A lot of my briefs could have benefitted from a more experimental approach to stock and printing options, rather than me always falling into my comfort zone. For my portfolio I will need to reprint some of my work due to this. Although I still feel like my professionalism and standard of work has improved a great deal, and can only improve further once I sort out the issues I have with print, I pushed my briefs a lot further than I have done previously and therefore think these have been my best designs by far. I would have preferred to work more with book cover design since this is what I enjoy the most and think my strengths lie in. After researching the design context I feel like my knowledge of this area has grown considerable, and this is something I would definitely be interested in doing in the future. The interviews I sent out have been the most helpful, and I will take the advice that I got which was to create a bunch of fake covers, redesigning previous book covers to add to my portfolio and have to show to publishing houses.

This module for me has been a real eye opener, I felt like my time management had been steadily improving throughout the time I have been at college. Although in this module I feel like there was quite a big set back in my time management and therefore I didn’t manage to finish my stamp brief. I think my organizational skills still need quite a bit of improvement. I need to set myself more deadlines and force myself to meet them. I also feel like my documenting skills need improving, I haven’t documented the lengthy process that I did for the fleurons brief, similarly with the calendar design for tiger beer (and several more.) I got a little caught up in thinking I was running out of time and therefore my documentation was put to the side, which only worsened my time management since I couldn’t look back properly on what I had done.

I am quite pleased with the improvement in my product photography, this is one area which I definitely wanted to improve. I still think there is a large room for improvement in this area but I am glad I managed to squeeze in the time to reshoot some of my briefs, since this helped me work more with the lighting and camera settings. I didn’t have the time to reshoot all the projects such as the sweets brief and fleuron brief, which I would have liked to do. This is something I could consider doing before the end of year show.

Overall this module has helped me see what areas I still need to improve and where my strengths lie. It has helped me become more confident in my design skills, which I am really happy with since my lack of confidence has been putting me off becoming a designer.