End of Year Evaluation

In the course of a year I have furthered what A-level had taught me, in a way that, even with an open outlook, I could never have anticipated. The course I signed up for was “Broad and exciting”. I have to say I have found it both.

In my life I am generally motivated and it is fair to say I am quite goal driven. A challenge can often motivate me, but over a period of weeks I tend to want to shift directions with a project as I tire of it. The constant stream of new information, and the range of new techniques has meant I have rarely felt boxed into what I am doing, and I feel that I can make my own independent choices in my work, whilst having a guided safety net for the occasions that I wade out of my depth. This ticks the ‘Exciting’ criteria.

As for breadth of practise; it goes without saying that I feel I have applied more new techniques in the last few months than I have in the last few years! My previous A-Level was very much screen based, and it was easy for me to fit entirely different pieces of work into the same slots as a result of the use of the same software. I had developed a style that was able to achieve the marks I desired, and it barely occurred to me to change anything in my core practise, as jumping through the same hoops for every design was getting the grades.

This time around, it’s rather a different ball game. I have enjoyed playing with new software distributions; the Adobe suite had some industry standard gems that were not covered on my previous courses. I had always used a freeware alternative to Adobe Illustrator, and Flash was entirely alien to me. I am pleased to say I am now an Illustrator convert, and I have found Flash to be very rewarding and enjoyable. Surprisingly I have loved every minute of ‘getting my hands dirty’ with more traditional media. From playing with tape, and learning the history behind the modern typefaces I take for granted, to letter-pressing and hand illustrating, I have really found a beaming smile on my face from achieving something stood away from a monitor, and ‘boyishly’ making a mess.

I have learnt some key life skills from the course. Coupled with the fact that this has been my first year away from home, I have had no option but to quickly find my feet. Mornings are faster and work is in to meet deadlines, college is long since over. I have been learning to manage my time and money outside of the course. Thankfully the excellent computing facilities, and fantastic on-site printing and materials have meant that managing my money is not stretched too much towards course extras. Time has been more of a problem outside of Uni, but the balanced deadlines have made sure I have no option but to be pushed to work, but without strangling all my free time; I still have the luxury of panicking over rent and weekly expenditure for a good few hours a week. This ties in with the fact that the course is “reflective of industry practise”… A fact not missed in the course presentation. I have found is very reassuring to use industry standard software, and to meet with genuine people making a living in the trade that I dream to one day.

Next year is set to be a step up in quality of work, as well as the workload itself. I gather that marks are to be overwritten too; just another reason to redefine my existing understanding of ‘productivity’. I have had a tendency to leave tasks, and feel relaxed close to the time deadlines are set. This does not mean that tasks are completed at the last minute, far from it in fact. However I know that to improve next year I have to be on the ball from the moment I am given a task. I have leant the importance of proper research around a topic or a process. The marks are weighted with perfect emphasis on research, and I know that I will have to continue taking pride in the thought processes behind my work next year if I am to achieve a respectable grade.

The next year is a certainty, but after that, who knows. I intend to go into the field of graphic design, so whether a third year in Visual Communication will come into play, or a year on the graphic design course will be in order is something I have not decided upon. All I can surmise is that the next year of my life is set to be very exciting, and that I am looking foreword to the unknown future with the hope of a prosperous career in design thanks to my past and future education from AUCB.

TypeRadio Evaluation

This was a very interesting project for me because personally I am very interested in layout design and how it works to engage with the reader and keeps them interested in the article. In terms of starting a new project, I felt that transcribing was a good way to get into the flow of things because it wasn’t a difficult job but necessary, almost relaxing actually and I was gathering research at the same time so I was very motivated.

I found the talks by Briony Hartley and Luke Lobley very inspiring; they talked about the design industry in a realistic way and shared the problems they had throughout their career, which was comforting. In addition, the trip to Dayfold was also very interesting; we were shown the techniques of printing and binding and given beautiful samples. Though I didn’t I completely understand the process of printing and binding completely because it was a lot to take in and I learn by engaging and doing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find Liam Donnelly’s talk as interesting. It wasn’t as engaging and useful than the previous editorial design talks. I think this was because it wasn’t technically that relevant to our project. Possibly the idea of coming up with a headline is important, though generally we were shown more advertisement pieces rather than magazine layouts.

I did numerous amounts of research on magazine layouts and found that more is less and the designer should arrange the text and image to make it interesting and easy for the viewer to read. Generally the more successful layouts had larger images in comparison to the amount of copy, some even taking over the whole page or part of the whole double-page spread. Using more negative space allows the copy to breath and makes the whole article less taunting for the viewer to read.

Armed with this new knowledge of layout design, I progressed onto coming up with my own layouts. This was not a difficult task, but pin pointing what would visually express my designer’s personality was. I went through numerous techniques and images to try and connote the right character but failed a number of times to get the right layout to suit the designer completely.

When I began creating my own layout, I wanted to get the feel of Anette being an open-minded character, one which looks up to her parents, almost like a child; care-free and at peace from the problems of the world. From this I tried a layout, which used quite a lot of negative space and made it so that the copy was laid freely across the page in almost random positions, still using the grid, but I wanted to portray the idea of being free and flexible in terms of where I placed my text and imagery. I also used big quotes, which were laid over the copy and imagery, but watermarking it so that it became part of the background. This at the time seemed like a good idea, but when I had a crit which made it evident that this layout did not work well because it was to crowded and difficult to read because of the overlaying. I used Monoprint to create 2 illustrations of a girl walking and a girl picking flowers to create an innocent personality for Anette, but the method of illustrating didn’t seem to go down well and the grungy effect just contrasted with the light, relaxed feel I wanted in my final piece.

So, after researching into children’s book illustration, I began using a technique which produced more subtle colours in my imagery and by not fine lining it, it became like a watercolour representation of the story and feel I was looking for. Instead of having harsh edges to my images, which cut into my copy, I subtly blended my illustrations so that they faded into the white negative space around the copy. This worked well to connote a free, relaxed layout. After receiving another crit about my latest layout, I realised that I had yet to develop my typography. Up until that point, I had only used black for my typography. I then began to realise that this made my copy quite daunting and difficult to want to read. So I began playing with colours and how I could juxtapose the titles and copy so that it would be more inviting to the eye. I went through a number of different typographic alternatives for my front page and ended up changing it altogether. I included a colour change in one of the words and used this style consistently through to my article title and quotes, highlighting the important words from the quotes.

If I were to re-do this project, I would definitely experiment with the typography more, possibly hand-rendering children’s type or cutting up and scrunching the type and then re-scanning it to see what results I get much like what Luke Lobley did in Wonderland Magazine. I felt that I needed to use more typography elements in my layout, possibly use type as the image to keep things simple but still get the point across. The expressive Typography activity made me want to hand-render my type in my final layout design, as it is a more hands-on approach to the project, which makes it more personal, and I can really experiment and play with the type.

I may also want to steer away from making my illustrations look so much like they were from a children’s book. Somehow make it more formal and fit for a design magazine, possibly try-out using vectors. Though at one point I did try using vectors in my imagery and it became evident that the style was too bold and harsh and didn’t fit with the personality of Anette Lenz I was trying to get across.

Overall I am very happy with my final layout and I enjoyed every aspect of this project, especially getting to grips with new software I’ve never come across. In addition, the designer talks were very interesting and has inspired me to think twice about having editorial design as a future career.

Luke Lobley Talk

A very interesting talk by a previous art director of Wonderland magazine. He was very down to earth and I found he was talking to the class like an equal rather than talking down to us which was refreshing. A tip that he suggested when working in the design industry was to always have a positive attitude.

He talked passionately about the different processes and techniques he went through when working for Wonderland Magazine. Things like hand-rendering type, spending the time to cut up each and every character and then scanning them and using them in his layouts. He played around with typography a lot: putting together fonts than don’t necessarily go together, making the typography look good but not legible, bleeding the type off the page, using all lowercases or caps, cutting and scrunching up the text and then scanning them in and so on. All very useful if I decide to hand-render my type.

Dayfold Trip

A very interesting day showing us how magazines and books are printed and bound. Gave us a small snippet of the equipment used and the different materials that it can be printed on and bound with.

We learnt about the different types of paper, for example coated and uncoated, the price difference of the two and how the ink sits on both. Size of paper is not usually A4 but unusual sizes to make the magazine or book more memorable. We were also told to, when getting a job done, proof-reading thoroughly is a must because once signed, it is not the printer’s responsibility if the print job has a typo in it.

We were taught a number of other more technical things, but mainly it was about the different techniques used to print and bind books, which I found extremely interesting. On the down side, I found the costs of printing hugely off-putting.

Layout Research

The most vital part of research in this project, thus I found myself collecting a number of layouts from magazines, printing them out and annotating them until it came to a point where I was repeating myself. I looked at the layouts of the introductions to articles, specific layouts which used interesting typography and imagery, favourite layouts which I thought worked well and ones that didn't so much and finally layouts of interview articles. From this, I had a thorough insight as to what makes a successful layout.

More is less and the designer should arrange the text and image to make it interesting and easy for the viewer to read. Generally the more successful layouts had larger images in comparison to the amount of copy, some even taking over the whole page or part of the whole double-page spread. Using more negative space allows the copy to breath and makes the whole article less taunting for the viewer to read.

Expressive Typography

This was an interesting task where we were asked to take a single word from our interview and hand-render it after choosing a particular font that we thought would portray the feel of the interview and character of the designer. We were to illustrate it to express more than the meaning of the word, but show different levels of understanding of the designer's personality.

I decided to use the word 'culture' because Anette Lenz talks a lot about her heritage, family and how she has had opportunities to work in different countries, one of the many reasons why she enjoys being a graphic designer. And as she is german, I simply used Olde English because it has medieval, gothic, german connotations to it and was used for the german language up until the 20th century.

To add the feel Anette being flexible and understanding different cultures I mixed it up and used caps as well as lower case characters in the word and juxtaposed them so that they did not all fit on the baseline. I filled the characters in black and added hints of thin red lines to add interest and relations to the colours in the german flag. If we were allowed to use more than 2 colours, I would opted to include yellow as well to complete the 3 colours of the german flag.

Overall I was very happy with the outcome of my hand-rendered type. It was extremely time-consuming though I feel that having a hands-on approach to typography could be the way to go in my final layout.

Copywriter Talk

A talk by a copywriter Liam Donnelly. Unfortunately, I didn't find this talk as engaging and useful than the previous editorial design talk. I think this was because it wasn't technically that relevant to our project. Possibly the idea of coming up with a headline is important, though generally we were shown more advertisement pieces rather than magazine layouts.

Having said that, I did still take away some useful tips: think about the tone of voice that carries the piece, the target audience, try no to be cliché d and use short and snappy headlines for impact.

Liam was well spoken and informative though I don't think he talked to us on the same level Briony did. I didn't feel like he engaged with us as much, it wasn't as personal and either more about his company or other people's work he liked. Though it was interesting to hear from someone who was working in the design industry.

Editorial Illustration talk

This was an extremely inspiring and relevant talk by Briony Hartley. She was very down to earth and was able to talk to the class without sounding patronising or boring. She talked in a friendly tone and described the design industry in a realistic way. She seemed very dedicated to her career and passionate about layouts. Truly inspirational, and made me consider doing editorial illustration in the future. The route she took of working for a company and then moving onto freelance work after gaining experience from different companies sounds like a viable plan and one I may take on later too.

She provided us with a number of tips when being a freelancer. These included: developing lots of professional experience, getting numerous contacts, being nice, listening to the client, trusting the client, not being afraid of asking questions, getting a second opinion, not taking negative feedback personally and to take risks.

Other design considerations she taught the class were as follows: sticking to 2 or 3 colours and fonts in a layout, using a versatile grid, using a baseline grid to your advantage, using paragraph and character styles for efficiency and varying size of typography and images for impact. All the tips she provided are relevant to this project and I will take them on board and incorporate them into my work when developing my ideas.

Type Radio Brief

Got our final project brief today, sounds very interesting as magazine layout and design may be something I develop into as a future career. I had only heard of a few of the designers from the list we were given which was a slight disappointment, though having said that, this would mean I would have a fresh mind as to how to approach the project and we're not meant to illustrate the style or use the designer's work so I guess it's better that I don't know most of them.

We were told to pick a name out of a hat, I personally had no preference as to who I wanted. I ended up with a designer called Anette Lenz. First thing I did was type her name into the google bar and click 'search'. There was a site dedicated to her, but to my disappointment all that came up was her contact details. I began searching for some of her work as I felt that I should research her posters and style first so I could get that out the way and not be tempted to use it when I came to illustrating my own images later.

The second task to complete was to listen to her interview on TypeRadio and transcribe it, remembering to include stutters and 'umms' and 'er's so that we could get a real feel for her character and personality. This was almost an impossible task because touch-typing at an incredible speed at the same time as listening to and accurately transcribing each and every word was extremely difficult. Luckily I managed to find a solution. By using VLC, you can slow down the rate at which audios come across, this was of much use and provided a number of humorous moments.

In terms of starting a new project, I felt that the transcribing was a good way to get into the flow of things because it wasn't a difficult job but necessary, almost relaxing actually and I was gathering research at the same time so, motivated I was.

Final Crit and Evaluation

This was extremely successful and I had a minor adjustment to my animation I had to do to completely finish it. The reaction I got for my animation was that it was funny and a good animation in terms of the illustrative style I used. It worked well and it portrayed the idea of the newsrooms perfectly. One adjustment I made was that the statistics were actually shown in word form on screen when the presenter talked about them, rather than just having them in the voice-over as they could have easily been missed and overpowered by the illustrations.

Human vs Animal

If I were to do this project again, I would work out my script first before starting the animation or do it at the same time, rather than having to cut my script short due to not having enough time on my animation timeline to fit in everything. I did feel pushed for time towards the end of the project and I wish I had come up with a firm idea earlier on in the unit, but having said that, I think I managed to develop my idea to it's fullest potential and create something that's successful and enjoyable to watch.

I would also look into using more textures and found paper for my backgrounds to give it more of a quirky style like Sara Fanelli, though I'm not sure that is really my style in this moment of time. At the moment, I feel that my style is more of a clean, crisp and illustrative one, I would like to develop this further in the future to make it more attractive and well-known.

I'm so relieved I managed to create such a successful animation and I feel like this is the route I want to take for my future career right now. Tough and time-consuming as it is, the feeling of being proud and happy about my final piece makes up for all that.

Animating and coming up with the Script

Animating took a considerable amount of time and was extremely tedious at parts and Flash gave me a number of problems that I just didn't understand. It was quite a painful experience at times but when it worked, it felt amazing. ActionScript was very persistent in making me angry, it was very difficult to get my head round this new skill. It still baffles me with how it works, but I managed to make it work within my animation.

With the script, I did the animation first and then came up with a script that worked with the animation. This may not have been the best way of doing things as it meant that my script had to be written exactly to fit with the timeline. Therefore, a lot of what I wanted to say had to be limited. I was scared that the humour I wanted would have been lost because of this, but I managed to include my statistics as well as add humour to it using my Illustrations and what was going on within my animation

Interim Crit and rethinking my Animation Storyboard

This was both a useful and frustrating crit for me. Useful because it gave me constructive criticism as to what I was doing wrong; the things I had completely missed or ignored that were very important to my animation. Frustrating because I had overlooked something, meaning I had to take a step back and rethink my storyboard when I wanted to just carry on creating my animation.

The main problem I had with my first animation was that there were too many transitions and random features in there that I had added without thinking how they were contributing to my piece. I completely lost the feel of a news programme theme and needed to take a step back and look at what I needed in my animation instead of what I wanted to make it look pretty. I had to stop thinking about the technicalities of what I was doing, worrying about how I was going to do it and think more of what look I was going for and take things from there.

In addition, I was told to consider the typography I chose as this would give a feel for what style I was going for overall. The idea of using hand-drawn illustrations alongside vector images didn't work well. Even though I had reason for doing this, there was too much contrast between the two styles which made it confusing and not work well as an animation.

One of the tutors suggested that I use live feeds and have a television in the top right hand corner as well as scrolling text along the bottom to make it look more like a newsroom. This was frustrating because it was exactly what I had in my first storyboard I came up with, but because I thought it would be too much work, I gave up that idea. So, I went back to re-editing my storyboard and went back to using my first storyboard.

Starting the Animation

This was quite a confusing process as I wasn't that familiar with how Flash worked. We had tutorials on certain things like motion tween and action script, but we were given all the illustrations and action script wording we needed at those tutorials, so actually coming up with our own work to edit was a different matter. I felt a little limited in what I could do. I had to be persistent with my idea and push my skills in Flash. Motivation was the key to learning Flash and I don't think I could have done this if I hadn't put the time and effort into discovering the software myself.

For my 4 stories, I wanted to use a hand-drawn illustrative style to portray a photograph of the event. This change in style within the animation was meant to clarify the idea of being in the studio and the showing of a photograph. I found with the transitions I included, everything had to be separated into layers and the timing had to be perfect; which was a very difficult task when my knowledge of Flash was minimal.

I did enjoy creating vectors in Illustrator and importing them into Flash for editing because I felt the look and accuracy of my images to portray each of the objects worked well to get the message across clearly. This did take a considerable amount of time. Well worth it though.

Storyboarding Tutorial

This was overall very positive, though it became apparent that I had set myself a huge task. One thing I had missed out in my storyboard was the showing of my statistics; I knew that this would be included in my script, though I failed to show this in my storyboard. I began thinking of ways I could include the statistics within my story without altering my storyboard too much. One idea I thought of was to have the last frame with two buttons, one saying 'Replay' which would take you back to the beginning of the animation if clicked. The other would say 'Review Statistics' which would take you to the another frame with all the statistics together in word form. It was then stated that the statistics should be shown within my actual animation, which was frustrating because that meant I had to add even more frames within my animation where the statistics would fade in and out on.

Another problem I encountered was that my statistics needed to be slightly altered to make them a clear statistic rather than fact. I did this by comparing the animal and human ratios and turned the facts into percentages.

Other than these minor problems I had to deal with, I thought my storyboard was pretty much confirmed. So, I began animating.

Flash Tutorials

Little Man Dancing

ActionScript Practice

Flash Fun

This was fun and I felt like I learnt the basics of how to use Flash, don't know if this will be enough for me to create a whole animation, we shall see...