This module has helped strengthen my knowledge of competition briefs and made them a lot more accessible for my own personal practice as I now feel a lot more confident approaching them. I think the YCN brief benefitted me greatly as it has opened me up to packaging design which I had very little knowledge on before. I have enjoyed really reading in to the brief and trying to depict what the competition really want from you and interpreting this in different ways. My research prior to the production of the packaging informed a majority of the design, for example, as even though you can’t directly see clear links between Grafica Fidalga and my finished design, seeing how they designed in that part of the world made an impact on the overall aesthetic of the design, influencing it to be a lot more hand made looking and organic, just like Grafica Fidalga work very manually and let imperfections of their work shape it.
My strengths in this brief was the making part, screen printing the labels, making the bag and sewing it all together, I say this is a strength because I thoroughly enjoyed doing it and put a lot of time in to this part. A weakness in this brief was creating something for the brand that no one else had done before, I wanted to think of something innovative using sustainable products however I got hung up on this for a long time and had to move on, I think this brief would have been really successful to do with a product designer or creative advertiser, as I felt I needed something a little different in terms of a product or campaign to stand out. However I am happy with my submission for this brief and feel I worked as hard as I could with the time I had.
I think that the Poster For Tomorrow - Make Extremism History brief also benefitted me in my professional practice, as it’s very different to what I am used to designing it encouraged me to think about message I wanted to communicate in different ways, making me think of visual metaphors to help me convey what I wanted. I generated a lot of different concepts and metaphors for this brief but found the one of the poor holding up the rich most effective as it related back to the brief best as it shows an example of extremism in terms of class and money. The research I undertook for the brief in particular helped me a lot on my creative process, informing design decisions such as the rays, as seen in communist propaganda posters. My research also involved looking at past winners for similar competitions and trying to see a correlation between them; what works successfully, and what makes entries stand out. I did this for the competition briefs I entered, but for this brief in particularly I could see that visual, conceptual designs were the most successful, which is why I approached it from that angle.
Juggling the other briefs such as Secret 7 and Blank Poster at the same time tested my time management skills which I have struggled with in the past, however with this module I have felt that I have improved with my organisation, as it was very much needed with individual practice as it was very self initiated.
I have found the collaborative work a big learning curve, as not only did we all learn how to use Premier Pro, which should come in handy in future briefs, but we succeeded at working effectively as a team, utilising our own skills to make the best response we could. The research for this brief was very varied as at the start we had a lot of different possible routes. We read many articles on different cultures, sending anything we liked the look of to each other. Gathering feedback from peers allowed us to narrow down our ideas and be more specific, this helped a lot as choosing an idea and sticking to it was the most time consuming part of the brief.
In terms of this module as a whole, I have enjoyed trying to interpret briefs in different ways, thinking about what other people entering may be thinking and avoiding it. Something which I feel may be a downfall for me is the analytical written aspect of this module, this has been an issue in the past however I have made sure I have spent more time on the writing for this module, ensuring that I have someone to proof what I have written as this is something I didn’t do that last time.
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