Thursday, 24 May 2012

Evaluation Report


   1. Reflection on my 'self initiated' brief  

Writing your own brief can be a really helpful process should you have a lot to get done with little direction, other than what you have in your head. I find that by creating my own brief, I had a port of call whenever I needed it to remind myself of any things I wanted to do were left over to be completed.  In my case, it kept me focussed on the elements of design I wanted to concentrate on, for example, typographics and advertising techniques.

I felt that I adhered quite well to my brief, and I know I feel confident within myself that I’ve worked to it to create the results I planned in the first place for this project.  The only way in which I may have possibly deviated from the brief I set for myself was to make more posters than I originally planned; however, I feel that they work strongly as part of the advertising and promotion of my fictional documentary.

My brief was a way in which to explore my personal design style and the possibilities that I could explore through urban exploration, which is a big hobby of mine. Through this passion for the subject matter, it was easy to find myself involved with the project and striving to do well and make the best of each opportunity presented. I felt that I achieved the goals I’d set for myself, however, due to time constraints there are certain extras that I haven’t been able to fill. For example, having given myself more time I would have made a functional website for the documentary movie.
Posters have been a large theme of this project, and I feel I’m really getting to grips and enjoying print production a lot more than before. I found myself being able to explore with the freedom of this project to create designs and artwork I’ve always really wanted to.

   2. Subject Research

My main sources of reference was an online design website called Behance. I find that that’s a really good source of information and design work since it maintains a high standard of work due to the member application process, as well as the fact that it has a huge variety of design and artwork available for viewing.

The most difficult aspect of research that I found was through urban exploration itself. Apart from graffiti and photography, there’s not a lot out there that represents urban exploration from a graphic design point of view. I felt that was inspiring in some respects since it meant that I had a lot to play with, however, I felt I would have excelled more with something to go on that related more to my style of graphic design.

   3. Media

My graphical style was allowed to really experiment through this project, which I really enjoyed. I wanted to maintain a clean and simple design with focus on photography and typographics. Within urban exploration, photography is a strong element, which I felt that I needed to involve in my work. When designing my posters, I really enjoyed the process and the challenges that were also involved. I wanted to keep things simple, but to incorporate all the relevant information and keep the design clean and relevant was a little challenging at times. I often felt the need to start again from scratch to make sure that my designs weren’t getting too busy.

When designing for my guerrilla marketing, such as the installation, I found that quite difficult since mock-ups are the only way that I can represent my ideas behind it. Since my skills in using Photoshop to manipulate imagery in that way aren’t the strongest, I felt that this was my weakest point of the project – however, the posters developed for the guerrilla campaign, rather than the advertising campaign, I felt they were strong designs with very clear messages.

As mentioned previously, I struggled the most with the image manipulation of guerrilla installations as advertising for my documentary. If I could do things differently I’d probably attempt to create the installation itself and photograph the experiment for documentation in my project. This would be a challenge in itself and I do regret not thinking of doing that sooner.

   4. The Design Process

I’ve created self-initiated briefs in the past and have experienced a bit of a love/hate relationship with them. On one hand, they can be a great opportunity to experiment and concentrate on subject matters that you really enjoy – thus keeping your attention at it’s peak throughout the design period. On the other hand, it can be a big responsibility to create a schedule, keep yourself disciplined and make sure you’re constantly on top of the workload and organized to the best of your ability. However, these lessons are all very important for the development of yourself as a designer and I do find myself feeling a lot more pleased with myself after a self-initiated project has been finished.

I feel that the final results of my project are strong design pieces. I did find myself struggling at various points, for example, with the guerrilla advertising design and to a certain extent, the original logo itself. I personally struggle with logo design, as an artist and much prefer layout work, such as magazines, posters and websites, so that was definitely a challenge for me.

Despite this, I feel that the final images I’ve created convey the message of my fictional documentary in the way I wanted it to be received.  Throughout the project, I’ve constantly reiterated the design elements I want to concentrate on to make sure that my designs are a correct representation of the project subject.

When it comes to time management, I struggled to keep to my schedule due to a number of things. I often found myself without motivation or the creative inspiration to concentrate on the work, and found myself wanting to make sure that I didn’t just put in minimal effort to keep to the schedule rather than concentrate on the work itself and make sure I did the best I possibly could design wise. I did find it a challenge to maintain the constant work structure, however, despite these issues, I’m pleased with the results of this project and I plan to include all of the work from this project in my portfolio.

Guerilla Advertising: Stickers


One extra idea for guerilla advertising was to use the logo to create stickers. These could then be stuck throughout cities, on walls, signs, street lamps, etc as a way of subconscious advertising. This is one way to get a name in a target audience's head.

Guerilla Advertising


Above is a basic mock up of an idea I have for guerilla marketing. I would 'hack' a man hole cover, by covering it with an image of a ladder going down into the sewers. Along with the manhole cover that's been discarded, I would have the logo for the film, largely printed over the top of it, with a tagline such as 'double dare you' or 'are you an explorer?'. I think this kind of guerilla marketing would be one that would make people look twice and attract some attention.

Guerilla Art




As part of my guerilla aspect of my promotion, I decided to make a series of posters that are based around the idea of urban exploration and how you break rules. I wanted to make these less official than the other posters I created and they were more to create a talking point for people to spread the word about.

I really like these posters and how they are meant to talk to the viewer directly, showing the different obstacles that have to be overcome when urban exploring and infiltrating.

Movie Poster Design




The above posters are all from my poster campaign for Spatial Awareness, my fictional urban exploration documentary. 

I've purposely given them all different 'feelings' to them to experiment with different designs and how that works as an advertising medium and as an effective poster design. To begin with, the first poster is something that I wanted to concentrate on design with, have a play around with type and shape and see how that changed the dynamic of the images and whether it made the poster at all more appealing. This is probably my least favourite poster, however I'm still pleased with my final result.

My second poster is based more on 'blockbuster' movie poster, where there's a logo and a tagline. I however, didn't want to lose the essence of the image I used so integrated my text into the shapes and lines of the image. I'm not massively keen on this poster either, but again, I'm still pleased with the result of my experimentation with it.

The final and third poster is without doubt my favourite. I wanted to keep things ultra simple, but again use the image with the text. I kept everything to basic minimum (with credits from another film poster at the bottom, along with the date) and used the shapes from the image itself to position the title in the most appropriate place. I think this one works the best and would probably be the one that I would use the most in a poster campaign, however, if it was a movie company, I imagine they'd probably go for the second. I think the final poster expresses more about the movie than the others and really shows it for what it is - as a raw, truthful, no gimmicks urban exploration documentary.

Movie Poster Research



What I like about this poster is the simplicity and the subtly of the image. Without even knowing the story for example, you're told a certain amount through the image. When researching and finding a foreign language film, it's even harder to interpret what the movie's about, so image is very important.




These posters caught my eye when I found them, there's something about the bold text, the red stripe and the simple imagery that's really great. I want my images in my posters to be strong and a very key focal point of the design, with text incorporating into that, rather than working around it. The balance in the top image is something that's really well done and definitely an inspiring piece of research.



This poster really caught my eye. Often, nowadays, graphic designers will re-invent an iconic piece of imagery for a film, television series, music artist etc, and some of them can be a bit of a disappointment. I really like this design however, and think the work within the type and the image is subtle, but works as a great focal point for the viewer. I like the idea of minimalism being used in the posters and think that along the lines of guerilla marketing and a bit of mystery, it's something that works fairly well.



I really like this poster, it's such a simple design yet it really captures the eye. The mysterious image and the great placement of the type works well and I think is definitely an inspiring element towards the design of my own posters. I want to keep my design simple and uncluttered to allow the images I use to take centre stage and appeal to my target audience.


Another example where an image is a strong part of the design of the poster and again, the focal point. The type has also been edited to fit in with the feel of the image, which I think is something that could definitely work with my posters. My only worry is that the text itself is a little dark, however, it's still legible. 

All of the above posters have inspired me in some way towards the end product of my own posters. I want to keep my own designs simple, and maintain the theme and feel of the images that I use so to keep the idea of my film prominent. 

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Spatial Awareness Website







Taking inspiration from the various research that I did, I created the above mock up for a website. I wanted to use full background images as a theme, along with movement of the title. I think if I wanted to take this project any further, the website itself would be fairly straight forward to make but with some experiments with CSS code.

I wanted to keep the website simple and a port of call for when people notice the posters and guerilla advertising. I think by having too much 'mystery' behind a project can lead people to give up searching for the answers. The website is a means to an end after so many subtle hints and guerilla advertising that finally they can find the answers to their questions when finally getting to Google.