Monday 15 December 2008

Reflection of First Term

I feel that this term was quite challenging, as it was quite a big step up from last year. I feel that at the start of the year I underestimated the amount the course demanded of me and my marks reflect this however I have improved greatly throughout the term putting in more effort as the course progressed. I felt that the first results I received were a bit of a wake up call although I am reassured that they will only contribute to a small percentage of my final grade.

 

I have started the most resent unit (website) in a very organized manner meeting deadlines the course set as well as my own. I have been putting in more effort and coming in to university more frequently on non-timetabled days, this has allowed me to stay on track. Also I think that I have started develop more tangible ideas and settle on them fast allowing me to spend more time on other areas in the unit.

 

I am looking forward to carrying on with the current unit and hopefully improving on my current mark. Although my first grade was quite disappointing I should improve this with the website unit.

Thursday 11 December 2008

11.12.08


Over the past week I felt that it had important for me to get back on my website work as that has taken the back foot recently. I have explored the type I want to use with my name (I’m just using Blake as it looks better written than my full name) and other designs using my name to create an identity/ logo. I’ve chosen to use a type called Bank Gothic, It’s an all-uppercase font but I think this works well with my name… I doubt I will use that for the rest, as it’s not a very good body type. Also I have incorporated ‘Graphic design’ into it and I think that it works well.

Today I have used my ‘Logo’ to develop a website style which works well with this. One of the idea’s which I quite like - ‘frames’ the main content of my page while being quite neutral to show off my work, Reflects the red in the logo But not to over powering as I shouldn’t be competing with my work. As I want to create a simple easy to navigate site and I feel that the idea I am progressing at the minute could work well with this.

Visual Communication in Context 2 - Results

Today I received my results for Visual Communication in context 2, at first I was quite shocked with my grade as I only received 41. On one of the project I was expecting a low mark as I was disappointed with my final outcomes, but I thought that the other ones would have pulled this mark up. Although after reading the comments and going back over the work I submitted I felt that this mark probably reflected the work. I found the feedback very helpful as the comments explained how I could have improved each submission.

 

As I had expected the comments from my greeting cards were not that positive. I found this project particularly frustrating as I kept jumping between ideas to try please the feedback I received in the crits. In the end I should have just improved on my first idea rather than submitting cards I was not happy with. However my best feedback was from the last project (animal packaging), this was one of my favorite units and I put the most effort into this one and I think that my comments reflected that.

 

I want to massively improve my final grade, as I want to keep my options open for 3rd year. To do this I will tackle this website unit in the same way I approached the animal one. To do this I need to spend more time and put more effort into each area of the Learning objectives. I will also come into university a lot more out of tutor hours as I found that on the last unit

that was helpful. I have quite a short attention span and I’m less likely to get distracted on campus.


Friday 5 December 2008

Tutorial with Michael Ryan 2

Last night we got together and started bouncing ideas off each other while going through passed adverts as inspiration, so that we would have something new to show Michael today. We all agreed that our strongest idea was to use sexual innuendo, which would create a fun, lighthearted approach to our poster campaign, while appealing to our age range.

Michael Ryan was very pleased with our idea and he said that it had the possibility to be a winning entry which very encouraging and massively motivated us to develop this idea further, his advise was to start thinking of possible ideas which demonstrate this and also taglines as they would bean important part of the poster.  

I felt very happy about how the tutorial went.. cant wait to continue with this idea! 

Thursday 4 December 2008

Tutorial with Michael Ryan

 

Today Robert, Ben and I had another tutorial; this was with Michael Ryan about the competition brief that we had chosen and how we plan to develop it.

After going over the brief with him and explaining our approach, we showed him the research we had done and how we had developed from the last tutorial with Neil. We had found that the most successful adverts were fun/ humorous/ lighthearted. We also explained our initial ideas… going with the 99p etc but he agreed that this would the obvious way to tackle this brief.

Although we should include the price on the poster we shouldn’t make the entire poster about it!

For the remainder of the day we familiarized ourselves with current trends aiming at students and started brainstorming ways, which allowed us to tackle this brief in a fun, humorous approach.

Hopefully we will have got some more ideas to discuss with Michael tomorrow.

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Competition brief....Tutorial

Today myself, Robert and Ben had a tutorial with Neil about the live brief that we have chosen. For this we took along some previous work Mainly: Gathered a greater knowledge of PJ smoothies and there main competitors Such as Innocent (a more up market, popular brand).

Our next steps are really to come up with a concept to work from. We have broken the brief down into what we think is their main selling point, which is their price of only 99p. We were pondering this idea of using fruit and having it interacting with the bottle.

The feedback we got was mainly to try stay away from the obvious concepts (interacting fruit), and to further research the target audience. The brief states that their main audience is 16-25, mainly students “who don’t have the time to eat fruit!” (right!). From this we gathered that we should carry out further research into other products being advertised to the same audience and the ways they approach this.

Our aim is to have lots of research to show Michael Ryan when he comes in to help out with this brief.