Visual Equations Crit

I was the last to receive a crit in this session so by the time everyone else had had their work looked at, I already knew what I had to improve on mine. Overall I felt this crit was a little harsh and a bit confusing. When we were given our brief, everyone thought that the goal was to primarily produce pieces of work which reflected the title 'Opposites'. Though in this crit, it turned out that the idea of 'creating new meaning' seemed to be the focus of the project. So, a lot of people's work did not completely fulfil the brief and they ended up having to adapt their pieces around creating a new meaning.

At first I found this very hard as I already had a specific idea in mind, but the problem was I wasn't sure what the meaning behind my pieces were, why did I do them and what is the viewer meant to feel or think after looking at them. I sat down and had a long talk with Kit and after several minutes of trying to adapt my ideas, I managed to come up with something which enabled me to use my initial drawings as well as fulfil the brief.

Overall, I feel that my 6 pieces are successful in that they could all be interpreted in different ways by different people. Even though they took a very long time to produce, I do feel that they show the contrast of east and west in a variety of subtle and humorous ways. They also meet the brief because new meanings could be created from them and I used a variety of different media; from found imagery to drawings and vectors.

If I were to go back to this project, I could think about using the same style of showing east and west, for example, do a set of 6 HSBC style adverts. Though in a way, I think the fact that I've done 2 of each style shows flexibility and everything that I've learnt in this Text and Image unit. Typography wise, I could have played around more with typefaces and the positioning of them, this is an area I definitely need to work on to be a more well-rounded graphic designer in the future.