OUGD502 - Self Evaluation

Overall I am happy with how my PPP work has gone. I really enjoyed doing the creative report, I got some good responses from designers but more so some really good advice. I also talked to one of the designers about the possibility of an intern ship in summer which would be a good opportunity I will chase up. It was good to be able to ask these questions to real designers and to be able to resolve some of these creative concerns. For example, one thing I have been very conscious of is whether as an aspiring designer, I should develop my own personal style, or even whether I should have already developed this. The responses indicated it’s good to have your own style so it distinguishes you, but ultimately you should be constantly experimenting and engaging with all aspects of design - which is something I feel like I am doing sufficiently. Working on my personal presentation has allowed me to reflect on what I have done this year, evaluate myself as a designer and identify my aspirations. Its good to be able to do that because ultimately it has made me feel more sort of organised with where I am and what I need to do. I enjoy doing presentations and public speaking so I am looking forward to doing the presentation. It was good to be able to look at both studio brief 1 and 3 combined as an overview my own development and creative opinions and I think the way I used the same design aspects such as type and layout for all the produced outcomes was a nice way of creating this whole identity for it. 

I think studio brief 2 - ‘life’s a pitch’ was the element of this module which I would have liked to have pushed further and developed more. I found the concept of the Archive 41 exhibition quite exciting and engaging and I really enjoyed considering the curation of the exhibit, thinking about music and lighting and how this all contributes to the atmosphere. Also the cost run down and organisation of the event which I did was very thorough, which made the pitch that bit more realistic and conceivable. As a team, what I wish we had done was picked this idea to start with, giving us the time to really experiment and push the boat out, delivering not only just what was required but even more, which would have made the presentation and exhibition concept that bit more exciting and sophisticated. While I think my performance and engagement with this studio brief could have been better, I would say I was one of the members of my team who contributed the most, so maybe what I will take away from this is to choose who I work with more wisely, but maybe also, as a member of the team who was taking more of a leadership role, I should have taken more charge and been more proactive in regards to delegating tasks and making sure we were on track. Another thing which I think could have benefited from more development would be my personal presentation; I think it does evaluate my personal performance, aspirations and concerns as a designer well, but it could be more engaging and entertaining for the people watching, adding in interactive elements or things such as a video. I do have an idea for bingo score card for the people watching the presentation which I will have to think about, I don’t want it to take too much time away from my presentation but it would be fun and engaging for the audience. 

In conclusion, what I’ve learnt from this module is: to be proactive and seek out advice and opportunities and  to try and engage with group projects and really delegate tasks  to make sure everyone is pulling their weight. The most valuable part of the module for me was being able to assess myself as a designer and engage with my own practise, because looking forwards into third year when I will be looking for jobs and opportunities, these personal and professional insights and ambitions will be valuable to consider. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation

Not all of my designs I did as personal experimentation were a full little brief I set myself, often I just had an idea for a design and just played around with it. This is in line with this idea of ‘Banking Ideas’ and just personally experimenting, seeing things you like in designs and trying to incorporate similar visual aspects. These designs range all the way from the beginning of the year to now, and I like how you can see my progress as a designer and the different things I’ve experimented with, some being purely just that, experimentations, but some being visual devices and design aspects that I really liked and decided to keep using. Some of my favourite designs here include;

• The green and purple record sleeve design 
• The two sun and moon ‘nice to see you too’ record sleeve designs 
• The instant karma record sleeve 
• The ‘racing start’ poster
• ‘troposphere’ packaging

PPP - Personal Experimentation - Game Boy Brief

I found an account on Instagram who posts designs of gameboy cartridges done by various designers. He sends you the cartridge mock-up and then you submit a design, he then posts the best ones on his page. I decided to take part. 

The first thing I did was decide on game to do a design for, it didn’t have to be a gameboy game, it could be a design of anything, but I thought it would be nicer to do an actual gameboy game so it applies contextually. I chose to do the game of ‘Batman Beyond; return of the joker’ mostly because I love batman but also this is a future version of batman so it offered the chance to do some cool futuristic style design. I limited my colour palette to red blue and black and experimented with some type and tried out some very stylised fonts but ultimately went for a more standard sans serif typeface, which is a little bit wider and slightly geometric looking. I created this grid because I wanted to replicate these cartoony futuristic graphics you see on the computers in the show and to further this I created these repeating outlined patterns, the red circles one works really well however I did one of the batman symbols which isn’t as clear, you can only really see the one batman symbol which I made red. I added in an image of the joker which I edited to make red and blue, and I then added in the little rating logo and the Nintendo authenticity badge logo. 

This was a fun little brief to do and my design did end ups getting featured which was good. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation - Desert Boys

I really wanted to do some branding for a band, designing vinyl sleeves, logos, j-cards etc. I’ve asked quite a few people but got no responses as of yet so I decided too just create a fictional band and go for it. This fictional band are called the Desert Boys, and they’re a modern alternative rock & roll band who want a very contemporary and eye catching vinyl sleeve, gig poster and j-card.

I started by editing a few desert based images - a desert scene and an image of a cow skull. I created a colour palette to restrict my designs to in order to create continuity between the designs. I created a modern logotype by stretching blackletter type. I started with the J-Card, laying out images and type and just playing around; in started thinking about visualising music and music production and looked at some of the hardware. On a mixing desk, you get those vertical LCD little screens with bars that go up and down depending on the volume level. I started visualising these with gradients and ultimately this in formed a very gridded layout, thinking about the grid and structure of the mixing desk and the way all the buttons and everything are logically organised. This gridded approach was also taken for the vinyl sleeve, and while this does add this element of structure to the layout, I wanted to add this conflicting element of disarray, representing rock & roll, so this is way I chan ged the orientation of the track names, added in blue images of the cow skull which contrasts the orange and really emphasised the logotype which is very stylised and pushes the boat out in terms of legibility. For the gig posters, I pulled it back a bit, because the function of the poster is to communicate to people on the street so it needs to be more legible. I used the cow skull as a primary image and edited the logotype, stretching it even more and making it just into a white outline which in placed on top of the image, creating almost like a deserty dust or smoke. 

I really like this set of designs, I think the design style is cool and contemporary and they work really well as a set, which was the aim of this perusal project, to exercise my skills in branding, and creating thus brand amongst multiple touchpoint. My J-Card design even got featured on Instagram by an account called modern cassette, who posts J-Card designs. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation - RGB Lyrics

For this experimentation, I gave myself the brief to create a set of 3 posters, each using one of the RGB colours, and each needing a lyric that mentions that specific colour. It’s a bit of a weirdly specific little project to set myself, however I came up with the idea for the red poster, did it, and decided to create a set. The end posters are cool visual experimentations and by doing it, my conceptual and idea making skills were challenged, as well as my ability to create a set of different posters, which all retain the same visual motifs so that they appear as a set. 

PPP - Personal Experimentation - Visit the Moon

As a personal exploration, I set myself a mini day long brief; inspired by the new Arctic Monkeys Album: Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, I decided to create a set of advertisements for holidays on the moon. 

I created a space age travel agents ‘Lunar Spaceways’ and started combining holiday images of pools, palm trees and people playing golf, with scenes of the moon. Theres almost something dystopian and futuristic about this concept so I decided to go for a retro futuristic vibe, taking the taglines from old travel agents ads. To obtain this retro aesthetic, I chose specific typefaces to convey this style: Futura Bold, Sarina and Rocket. 

The end results are quite fun little compositions. This experimentation mainly allowed me to practise my photoshop image editing skills, as well as finding contextual research and applying it visually. The most fun thing was really just creating this fun concept and rolling with it, expanding this retro futuristic universe through design. 

PPP - One Minute Pitch - Workshop

As an exercise in presentation skills today, we were assigned the task to create a one minute presentation; the presentation could be on anything we want, however the aim was that it was presented confidently, fluently, clearly but also that it was entertaining to watch. 

I decided to do my pitch on “who would win in a fight between a gorilla and a lion” - its a bit of a silly topic so instantly from there, there was an element of humour. I decided to do this as a presentation because as opposed to a presentation which is informative, it has that added element of suspense because people are actually wondering which animal would win. I found an article about it which had various facts about each animal, and I memorised the facts, meaning I didn’t have a script - something which increased my presentation skills and my ability to engage the audience. For the visual part of my presentation, I created an image of a gorilla and a lion in the jungle and out this in a gif - this image was static for 55 seconds until an animation played of the gorilla punching the lion and then sitting back in victory. This gif was good because it made people think ‘oh no the gif isn’t working’ but it was actually at the end - demonstrating my ability to time the presentation so that i’ve come to my conclusion that the gorilla wins, right on time for the animation to play. 

Feedback from this was very good and I will try and consider how I can incorporate fun entertaining aspects like this into my actual personal presentation. 

Personal Presentation & Manifesto - Design

For the aesthetic of my personal presentation, I kept it simple, simply using a black background with white type and all the images arranged centred on individual pages. I didn’t put any text on just for the sake of having purely visual slides which I can then talk over, with a script I will plan out closer to the time. I picked BD Retrocentric as the typeface for my presentation because I used it in my creative report and I thought it would be nice to have that visual consistency throughout my project, hence why I also used it on my manifesto. I used big numbers for each manifesto point on the presentation as its quite bold visually, grabs people attention  so they’re are listening to the next point, and also the numbers of BD Retrocentric are very geometric and I liked the way they looked blown up really big. 

Personal Presentation - Planning

I want to make sure that the points of my manifesto are in the correct order so that it goes from talking about my development throughout the year, to talking about who I am as a designer, to then talking about my aspirations. I want to make sure all of the points are different enough and don’t sound too similar. 

New Order:

1. Keep it Simple, Stupid
2. Pick topics that interest you
3. Collaboration 
4. Immerse yourself in graphic design
5. Become an expert
6. Target audience
7. Don’t pigeon hole yourself - Experiment
8. Bank Ideas
9. Go above and beyond
10. Put yourself out there

Personal Presentation - Developing my Manifesto Points

With these initial ideas for manifesto points/rules, I started to think about what I can talk about for each point and what applies. While I want to cover all the work I have done this year, I still need to answer some of the fundamental questions:

• Who are you as a learner and designer?
• What are your creative concerns?
• What are your personal aims?
• What are your professional ambitions?

Keep it simple stupid

This applies well to my first work of the year for OUGD504 design production - I picked quite a complicated idea, and because of that my production quality suffered. It also applies well to the way I go about a lot of my design in general now, instead of doing these crazy complicated designs, I try and take a step back and keep it simple.

Pick topics that interest you

This applies well to OUGD403 SB1 - I picked the beatles as a topic for my D&AD brief and because of this I really engaged with the brief because I really enjoyed researching the beatles. Similarly for COP, I am talking about the anatomy of a film poster, and I am engaging with the module a lot because im enjoying the topic. 

Collaboration: Put the work in to have your say

I have done a couple of collaborative briefs this year, SB2 for 503 and SB2 lifes a pitch for COP. I have learnt a lot about the collaboration process; everyone has their own opinions on what they want to do for a brief, and when you start collaborating, these opinions can conflict. What i’ve found is that if you personally put in the work, engage with the brief, you’ll be in a position to have your say. 

Experiment 

Applies to feedback ive got from modules saying I need to experiment with initial ideas more, its not hard to reign an idea in if you experiment a lot. Also applies to advice I got from my creative report; in regards to developing your own style; experiment with different things in design, if you see something you like, try it out. Don’t be afraid to deviate from what you consider to be your style because by engaging with different methods you can really personally develop. 

Go above and beyond

Refers to a range of personal work i have carried out this year. Ties in with the previous point off experimenting and really just personally developing. This is good because you have a range of work, maybe even something to put in your portfolio. If you want to do a music branding campaign but can’t find a band to do it for - make up a band and do some designs. 

Bank Ideas

Don’t ignore these random ideas for designs you have when your out and about in your everyday life, remember them, note them down and ‘bank them’. Then when your carrying out a brief and think something might apply, try it out, its all about this trial and error process.

Immerse yourself in graphic design 

One of the best things to develop your graphic design style is just to be looking at graphic design all the time, and develop this eye for design. Composition, layout and type etc. This is good because then when you need to do research for a project, you can remember an article you saw two months ago which applies really well. 

Put yourself out there 

This is about doing doing stuff beyond what you need to. Running for editorial officer, asking for work experience etc. You want to put yourself in the best position possible by the time uni has ended. Also these things are good to actually learn things you don’t at uni. 

Become an expert

This is often said by tutors, and is really good to do - OUGD505 - research on robots. Means in things like presentations, you can just say all the facts etc. without having to read them out because you know them Also because you know all these facts, you are mentally able to make these connections and come up with ideas. 

Don’t cut corners 

Applies well to design production module again, generally means just put the time in and for these little things your doing say for production, makes sure they’re done tom the best of your ability. 

Personal Presentation - Ideas

I started thinking about ideas for my personal presentation and how I could make it engaging for those watching. I also started to think about how it could apply to my manifesto, and it was from here that I got a good idea for both of them. At the beginning of the year, I read Milton Glaser’s manifesto ‘Ten Things I Have Learnt” - in. Which he had 10 rules and ideas he has learnt in his career, I thought it might be entertaining to do my own take on it ‘Dan Jackson’s Ten Things I Have Learnt (in second year)’. With this approach, I can tie in my manifesto really well. By going through these 10 things in the presentation I will actually be giving an overview of the year, what I have done well, what needed improvement and what my ambitions are. 

I reflected on my work from the past year and started brainstorming some ideas for my 10 manifesto points:

• keep it simple, stupid.
• Experiment 
• Develop you style (maybe part of experiment)
• Push yourself beyond whats required
• Do something which interests/engages you
• Bank ideas and try them out
• Collaboration - put in the work to have your say
• immerse yourself in graphic design 
• Put yourself out there
• Become an expert
• Production - don’t cut corners

Archive 41 Presentation

I put together the presentation for my teams pitch. The idea was to keep it fairly simple, just using images. People watching a presentation don’t want to have to read loads of text on each slide so I thought it was important to just have images and visual aids on the presentation, with all the necessary information being read out from the script. The layout of the slides used a square grid centred to the bottom  right corner as a visual link to the NASA graphics standards manual. 

I think all in all the presentation is good and fairly simple; certain elements such as the exhibition floorpan could have been designed to a higher standard to increase the aesthetic value however it still communicates the idea well. 

Our actual execution of the pitch went quite well in my opinion; the script was written well, meaning we covered all the bases and talked bait everything and also our cost analysis was very thorough and realistic which showed we’d put the time in and thought about it. Watching other peoples presentations, this really showed to be effective as theres no point giving a really good presentation with no idea of what it will actually cost. We didn’t have too many questions at the end so hopefully that meant the pitch was clear to everyone to everyone. 

All in all, I think this project was quite successful; the concept of the exhibition is interesting, the designed aspects all worked with continuity as aspects of the branding and were all evocative of the theme of the exhibition, the location and curation were all well thought out with simple yet effective ideas and the cost analysis was thorough. If I had to develop the pitch further, I think it would have been a case of just experimenting a bit more with ideas and really throwing out some ideas for the design and concept, before developing final ideas. It also would have been interesting to be a little more ambitious, and maybe this experimentation would have contributed towards that. We covered all the touch points we needed to, however looking at some of the other presentations, some people went above and beyond in terms of adding extra things in such as extra designed aspects, animations and videos. 

I am often wary that adding too much into a project can convolute the concept and idea, however I think its about treading the line between that, and just doing everything necessary simply and effectively but adding in those little touches to make the presentation look a bit more developed and sophisticated. Maybe these extra developments could have been present if we hadn’t changed our idea halfway through the project, but also I think if everyone in the team had really engaged with the brief early on and we had more of this experimentation of ideas, it would have helped.

Archive 41 - Exhibition Curation

After doing a bit of research on exhibitions, we put down some solid ideas for the curation. There were a lot of very out there ideas about making it look very space age, like its on a spaceship, but ultimately it think hit was more important to get the music and lighting down to create that atmosphere, and just keep it simple. 

We emailed the Brunswick about their exhibition space, which they told us was free as long as people are buying drinks downstairs. This would have been good and would cot down costs a lot however we were concerned maybe the space was a. Bit too small, so we went down to Hyde Park Book Club and chatted with them there, they told us on a specific day (wednesday) for an art event such as ours, the exhibition space would be free, again as long as people are buying drinks upstairs. We decided to definably go with this because again it’s free and cuts down on costs, however the space is a lot bigger and suits there style and vibe that we would want to go for because its a basement room so we would be able to make it darker and more atmospheric. 

We wanted to give the exhibition a bit of a space feel, lowering the main lights and using spotlights to shine on the work - my dads company sells wireless portable floodlights which we could borrow and set up 3 or 4 to point at the work. Hyde Park book club also has a selection of lighting for their gigs, so we would incorporate some blue lighting as well. A projector will be set up on one side displaying an animation of all the images originally sent on the golden record and we would have a speaker in the corner playing some of the songs from the original golden record, a lot of which are classical music slightly avant garde tracks, which will give the space an eery feel. As a wayfinding tool, vinyl lines will circle the room which could even be in glow in the dark vinyl. 

I created a floorpan of what the exibtion would look like.

Exhibition and Curation Research

I picked both of these pieces as research points because I have seen both of them, and they both utilise music, sounds, lighting and imagery to create an ambience/atmosphere. I saw Kentrdidge’s ‘The Refusal of Time’ earlier on in the year at the Whitworth in Manchester, and I saw Wallinger’s ‘Threshold to the Kingdom’ a few months ago in Leeds Art Gallery.

The Refusal of Time - William Kentridge

This large installation piece by South African artist William Kentridge utilises multiple projections on different walls and music but most notably, a large wooden piston based device/machine in the centre of the room which seems to just perpetually move back and forth. The room is filled with wooden chairs which circle the room and the audience come in and sit around thus big wooden device at some point during the installations 30 min loop. The piece perfectly creates an atmosphere, and depending on the music and projections, this can range from being uplifted to being a bit unnerved and freaked out.

Threshold to the Kingdom - Mark Wallinger

This video and sound piece by Mark Wallinger perfectly demonstrates how adding music to a video can give it so much more atmosphere and drama. A slow motion video of passengers leaving a terminal at London airport is played in an 11 min loop, with Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere Me Deus playing simultaneously. The music gives the seemingly mundane video a religious and dramatic tone, the viewer feels as if the simple actions of these people are heightened in importance just because they’re in slow motion and choral music is playing.

So how do these pieces relate to the archive 41 exhibition curation? Well I think it would be really cool to create this kind of immersive experience. Have dim or blue lights, music playing and just little spotlights on the work. I think this sort of atmosphere would heighten the experience of the exhibition and give more context to the work. As we look more at finalising the curation now, I want to avoid sort of gimmicky space themed ideas and focus more on creating that atmosphere in the space.