EVALUATION OF 'LOOK AGAIN/THINK AGAIN'.

I found this project really difficult to get in to and really struggled to get ideas, however through talking to my peers I was soon able to focus and begin working. 

I think the idea about having nothing sentimental and convincing people that you don't need objects to remember things, is a strong argument and can relate to everyone. I didn't know how to portray this statement through imagery so chose to go down the route of typography. I think the way in which I presented my background made good use of the white space and also gave another element to draw the attention in, as you look closer, the small print reads all the memories that relate to most people.

I used century gothic for my text because of its shape, style and simplicity. Although I experimented with other typefaces, I still believe this works the best. Although I was happy with my final poster, I found the critique very useful. I received a lot of positive feedback which gave me great confidence in my work. I took on board everything that was said and made the necessary changes in order to improve my poster. I think the strap line sounds a lot stronger now despite it's simplicity. As I had to make the final decision on the overall look of the poster, I believe that the white and grey background works and looks a lot more professional and crisp than the black, although I know people will disagree with this, I found most people agreed with me.

Overall I am very happy with my final design and if I were to change anything I would possibly experiment with colour to make it more appealing to people of all ages. 

CRITIQUE DAY.

Today has been a really good positive day :)

I actually surprisingly enjoyed the critique today and felt that I was able to give my opinions and ideas towards other people's work constructively. I was also happy to hear I got positive feedback for my poster and some suggestions on how to improve it.

Since the critique I have taken note of everything that was suggested by both my peers and Neil and made the changes to my work to see for myself whether I would be happier with the final outcome.

Changes that were suggested were as follows:

• Work more on the strap line. Simple and straight to the point.
• Try reversing in to black to see if it stands out more.
• Play with the size of the text - make it bigger?

Overall I had really good feedback and I was told by everyone that it was a good strong idea, put across well. :)

This is my poster after the changes:

Here I have just changed the strap line to something a little more to the point, and made the text slightly larger. 'You can't replace your memory, but you can replace your objects'. I think it is a lot simpler and better to read than 'You can't have an object of your memory, but you can have a memory of your object'.

Following this I reversed the white to black to experiment with how well the text stood out and if it still gave the same message. I did a quick survey with a handful of my peers and it was a split vote between the black and white backgrounds.

In my opinion I prefer the white, as it's more crisp and has a softer feel to it. To me, the black background portrays a sense of 'memories after death' and doesn't seem quite as appealing.

However, my peers who voted on the latter of the two feel that it looks more classy and eye-catching.

All in all I feel that the white background works best with the new strap line. This will be my final piece for this project.

Roll on greeting cards! :)

FINALISING IDEAS.

Woke up this morning feeling a little more confident about my ideas after working on my laptop with various layouts last night. Continued to work throughout the day alongside my peers bouncing ideas off one another. I spent the majority of the day experimenting with different layouts, and ideas, each time collecting opinions until I produced an idea I was willing to settle with. Once we all had an idea we were relatively happy with and ready to put forward, a few of us lead our own mini critique amongst ourselves by pinning our work up on the wall and expressing our opinions and ideas to help push the designs that little bit further.

It was really good to see what other people had done and how everyone had approached the brief. Having positive feedback about my work boosted my confidence especially after I had been stressing out so much about this brief!

I found today really useful, and hope that tomorrow will be a useful and constructive day too. I still need to print my final design out and get on with some sketchbook work but other than that I think I have finally relaxed and am satisfied with my work! :)

WHAT A RUBBISH DAY!

I kind of feel as though I'm stressing out about this project a little too much, but I really want to do my best. I have spent most of the day talking to my peers, friends and family asking for opinions and ideas to help progress what I have already produced. As you can see below, my visual so far, consists of the word memory being made up of actual memories. This still needs a lot of work done to it though.

I am still in the process of working out a suitable strap line to support it, as well as experimenting with various type and positioning.

My day has been full of ups and downs, unfortunately more downs than ups but I'm hoping as time goes on I will get more and more settled in to this way of working.

I managed to have a bit of a breather from all this at work tonight however am back thinking and planning to push my idea further ready in time for Thursday's deadline. 

I DON'T KNOW WHERE TO GO FROM HERE.

Ok, so it seems as though my good day on Friday wasn't going to last as long as I hoped..

I have a basic idea, but it's not enough to produce something amazingly good right now. I'm completely aware that we only have 2 and a bit more days to go before the critique and I still have no visuals planned out or even remotely in my head! I went from having nothing sentimental to trying to persuade people that you don't need objects in order to remember things as your memory can't be replaced.

In order to present this, I need a 'clever' caption, or image or something to kick start me! Any ideas? I'm finding this section of the project really difficult to approach and extremely challenging. I went in to the Institute today to do some research and found a few adverts but have still yet to come across anything that will really help me settle with a solid idea.

I found it helpful talking with a number of my peers as they gave me their input on my ideas but also suggested some of their own which I much appreciated!

I'm starting my sketchbook today so I'm hoping my ideas will begin to flow and I'll be on a roll soon to produce my poster.

TODAY IS A BETTER DAY :)

After a pretty unsuccessful day yesterday I am feeling a lot better about things today. We started off the day with a group tutorial/ideas generation critique which I found quite useful as it helped push me in the right direction for an idea. I was quite surprised at myself really as I have never had much input into group discussions and found myself putting forward questions and my ideas to other people. Hopefully I can keep this up!

The rest of the day was spent researching and talking to my peers about how I can push my idea to achieve a high standard. So far my idea is about how I don't have a particular 'thing' that is sentimental to me. I personally have never really had anything like that as pretty much everything I own can be replaced nowadays, even photographs which are usually on facebook or backed up on the computer. I'm basing it on the fact that you can't replace you're memory. You may not remember things all the time, but it's always triggered by reminders such as smells, de ja vu, feelings, things you see, things you hear, and so on. You don't need objects for reminders. So far I have a baseline which is 'The only things you can't replace is your memory'. However, there is still plenty more work to be done for my poster to reach it's full potential! I still need to consider the graphics and possibly a back-up sentence in small print, so the ideas generation must continue for now!

I feel like I have come quite a long way since yesterday where I was panicking about having no ideas and having no clue in which direction I wanted to go.. especially as I was pretty sure I was going down the social issue route. Hopefully I will have a solid idea by the end of the weekend to work on next week before the critique.

INTRODUCTION TO OUR FIRST BRIEF

Well, today was a very unsuccessful day. We had our introduction to the first brief and it took me a while to break down and work out what it was we had to do. I just couldn't concentrate. Eventually I relaxed a little and knew what it was we need to produce by Thursday next week for our first critique of the year.

The first section, titled 'Look Again/Think Again' proved quite a challenging brief when it came to ideas generation. I feel like I have wasted the day away although I've been thinking and trying to come up with various ideas all day. I even went to the library and took out two books, something I did very little of last year. The books; Communicate:Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties and Creative advertising; were full of really clever ideas but didn't really give me ideas I wanted to pursue in. 

We have to produce an A3 poster either:

Choosing a social issue that in your opinion has been overlooked and needs addressing...

OR

An object that will often carry values that go beyond its intended purpose or everyday use; it may evoke certain memories or feelings that give the object a sentimental significance.

 I found both sides of it difficult to approach and am going to spend part of my day tomorrow in a group tutorial where I hope to get involved in some ideas generation to help give me a kick start.

Tonight will be a case of more mind-mapping to bring something to the table in our tutorial and continuing to organise myself. I'm hoping tomorrow will be a far more successful day!