At the beginning of the project it dawned on me that soon I would have to find a job somewhere but I had no idea where there was to work other than Gratterpalm. I straight away got to work on my own identity and finding out what other companies there were out there. I think I spent too much time on this at the beginning and neglected the design practice side of the brief. I found lots of good companies most of which were in London and began to design contact pages for each one so I could find them at a glance which would later be useful for my design context.
Alongside finding companies I began to work on Mituyu, a competition brief, which I intended to spend no longer than two weeks on. I think the brief was a bit confusing in terms of the target audience and what kind of feel they wanted the company to be. I started working on the logo which I found quite hard. I couldn't pin down what it was I wanted from the logo so tried lots of different solutions none of which I could make a decision on. I took them to various crits and tutorials for feedback but still couldn't resolve the problem. After a few weeks I had had enough of the brief and decided to just make a decision and stick with it. From doing this it allowed me to accelerate quickly on the rest of the brief and finally felt as if I was getting somewhere. My problem is that I can work on designing logos and narrow it down to a final possible three but from there I get stuck and am unable to make a decision about it. From the final logo I was able to design the t-shirt graphic pretty quickly.
Because I had spent so long on the logo design for Mituyu I had not managed to start the other briefs that I had planned to start already. I had planned my time from the beginning up until Easter to fit all the briefs in. I worked out how long I was going to spend on each one and when they would start and finish. I think I was a bit over ambitious with the amount of briefs I was to do and also the time I had allowed to do them. From having a tutorial with Justin we decided to focus on having fewer good quality briefs to hand in than lots of briefs that were not of good quality or shallow in the research.
I started on the redesign of the RMUK price list which only took me two days as I had all the information already and was simply a layout job. I took both briefs I had completed so far to the halfway crit. The feedback I got was that I could extend the briefs further and design the whole branding and Retail graphics for each of the identities I had created. I was going to visit Gratterpalm the following week and decided to use this as my deadline to get it all finished and in my portfolio ready to show. I managed to succeed as this is the kind of pressure that I need to work, by knowing that I have a real deadline outside of my own plans. I think the reason I didn't stick to initial deadlines i set myself with the little short briefs was because I knew that it wasn't the real deadline and there was more time to do the work. In industry I will be OK because there will always be someone elses deadline that I will have to work to and I feel I will be able to achieve this.
The end results for the Mituyu and RMUK briefs I was pleased with. I would have liked to have got the t-shirt printed for Mituyu and have maybe redesigned the website for RMUK to show I can design for web in my portfolio. I think I maximised the briefs to their full potential and exploited every possibility with the resolutions.
For after easter I wanted to do three briefs each focusing on a different audience and price range to try and pull back some of the briefs I intended to do before easter but didnt get chance to. I took the briefs to our first crit back after easter and it was discussed that it would be far too much work to do in the amount of time we had left. I still wanted to work to different budgets as I felt this would be beneficial to my practice so decided to focus on one area, cosmetics because I wanted something different in my portfolio to clothing, and apply designing to different budgets to this one area. It would also be easier to see the differences if it was one product I was designing towards.
Throughout the Final Major Project I had been collecting information for the Design Context half and it was now time to start putting it together. I designed a book which I felt turned out as I had expected. I think it will be useful to me in the future which is what I intended it to be and the flip idea worked well in print. I decided to include just ten companies that I like as these are my favourite ones and have minimilist information on the other side as I wanted it to be about inspiration not information. The only thing I didnt like about my book was the cover design as I did this at the last minute. I like the idea of it but I could have spent more time designing it to make sure it looked how I wanted it to.
The final brief I did was the Boots rebrand of the skin care designing to three different budgets. I managed to make decisions on this pretty quickly about what I wanted to do and how I wanted it to look. The first step was to design the logo and have a brand name. This is the area that again I wasted alot of time on not being able to make decisions about the final stages of the design. Once I had the logos I was able to design the rest of the packaging quite quickly. I designed the budget range first and managed to do this very quick but then spent about a week thinking about what the other ranges could look like instead of doing it and trying it out to see if it works. If I did this I would have lots more development work to back up my final product but I like to think about it for a while whilst doing other things then just design the final product. In industry this would be how I would have to work most of the time so I am not too worried about the way I work but sometimes I feel I could miss out on a good idea that I could come across accidently if I tried things out first.
Overall I am pleased with the work I have produced for my Final Major Project and the things I have learned but I am disappointed that I didnt stick to my original proposal as I think it would have been beneficial to myself as a designer and given me a good broad portfolio of all areas of Retail Graphics. I would also be more informed about the different areas of Retail design and will have had experience designing for these areas.
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