OUGD504 - Design Production [SB3] - Evaluation

I feel that my work was clearly influenced by the brief and every decision I made was informed and effective at sending the correct messages. This has been an important target for me since beginning second year, since I have realised that to make effective design you not only have to create good looking work, but create a solid concept too and without a solid concept, there is no design to be made. I found this brief hard at first to form a concept since the brief was so open and you could have a collection about anything, but once I thought about linking the imagery together via location it became easier to create, harnessing the creative vibe of London to create an original, informed publication. I have described the limitations I encountered making this booklet including the problems with the clips I used for binding and the pictures occasionally looking out of place. I also had problems with printing as the pages came out in the wrong order, and not even the print room staff could help me figure out why this was happening. However, this has taught me to test print before I print a final design as even though your document looks correctly set up, it could still have errors when printed and this did cost me a lot of money to fix. I feel that I experimented visually and conceptually on this project, achieving a level of effectiveness I haven’t achieved before. I feel I could improve on my bookbinding techniques and learn more of the common binds however, as I planned to perfect bind my book but conceptually I found the fastener clips to be closer to the aesthetic of a handcrafted book. In hindsight, even though my binding method was informed by the content of the publication, it ended up being more of a hindrance than an improvement due to the pages not sitting flat and this puts a hindrance on the reader, which gives more chance for them to stop reading the publication altogether. I also think I could’ve tried more techniques for the title, instead of tunneling on the first technique I really liked. I was going to try and screen print the front cover but it proved difficult to screen print the glitch effect with the amount of colours used. However, I could’ve experimented with some other production techniques and perhaps I would've found something I would be excited about. Overall, I feel this was a very fun brief and the way it tied into the summer brief gave it a proper sense of purpose and brought the summer and the first term together. If I could redo this brief, I would try to take pictures of the inside of the shops to show more context into how the signage is informed by the content, because I feel that a single picture of a sign isn't always enough to show the content of the store itself. I hope to do another publication in the future so I can further experiment with bookbinds and hopefully try a more difficult bind such as a coptic bind.