Design practice 1 // End of Module Evaluation

1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

There are various things elements throughout this past module that have introduced me to new skills, the opportunity of experimenting with different scales of designs, I have worked with A2 posters, large 3d boxes down to stamps, and this has taught me that the space of your canvas really makes a difference to your layout and design decisions, for example, having to fit information and visuals onto a piece that is the size of the stamp, is quite difficult, but there is always a way to do it. This problem can also happen with larger pieces, just putting visuals on a piece of paper does not make it a poster, layout really makes the difference, and it can be something as simple as moving some text to a different position that can make the difference between a good piece of design and a bad one.

We used video for the first time in communication is a virus brief, to create a video as one of our final products, this involved having to work out video editing software which is a first for me, hopefully this will benefit me in the future.

2. What approaches to/ methods of design production have developed and how have they informed your design development process?

In the group brief, even though we may not have ended up with the greatest piece of design we have ever done, I think the method in which we assigned tasks and individual deadlines throughout, kept us on top of our work load, this helped my time management on this brief which made me feel more relaxed throughout while still remaining to have the same (if not more) amount of work as my other briefs. I think this is an element that I need to take into future briefs as staying relaxed and on top of the work load really does make a difference especially when pressure of deadlines is building

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/ will you capitalise on these?

I think over this module my decision making skills have definitely improved,  making more quick decisions and going with them, starting off with an initial idea and amending it when necessary. In some cases this has been a benefit but in some it did not pay off as well as i would have hoped. In the group brief, our quick decisions were more of a negative but still had positive elements, it was good as we moved quickly and it allowed for greater mistakes to be made, but at the same time, we thought of our concept too quickly and kept pushing through and trying to convince people of our produced while kind of forgetting about the purpose of the brief, and our quick decisions kept taking us further in the wrong direction, until we were to far away to pull it back. 

Some of my conceptual ideas are improving i think, I am finding it easier to think of more options for problems, well maybe not in every brief, but for my rain posters and stamp it brief I think conceptually my ideas are improving.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

When it comes to weaknesses I still am working on the same problems, especially time management, as we have had more free time to get on with work I have found it more difficult to organise myself and organise the work I have so I know what I need to do and when I need to do it by, because at the minute I still sometimes come in and feel panicy about a brief or a problem and not know where or how to start. However I know it is possible to develop ideas and make progress quickly and successfully without getting stressed.  I need to create initial ideas and start briefs as soon as I get them instead of waiting until I feel I have no choice but to do it.

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

- Set myself personal deadlines at the beginning of a brief and stick to them religiously, this will improves my time management as well as allowing me to relax and slowly and steadily develop a brief rather than just panic to finish.

- Screen print more of my designs, i have wimped out of screen printing for the most of this year as it is a new tool for me and I usually end up leaving my printing too late and panicking and resorting back t digital print, which I am rarely happy with to be honest.

- Experiment more with design methods and try to find a way of producing solutions to problems that suits me the best, at the minute I am just following other people and some things work and others dont, I need to keep experimenting until I find a personal way that works best for me.

- Need to produce more initial designs, to give me a broader range of options, instead of just settling for the first design I produce that I like, i think with more effort i can turn my mediocre designs into really good ones.

- Probably grow up a little bit more, instead of getting intimidated by briefs i need to learn to embrace them all and I truly believe that if I go into each brief in a positive way then it doesn't matter the topic, you can always become interested or bring interest to the topic. 

6. how would you grade yourself on the following areas? 

Attendance - 4

Punctuality - 4

Motivation - 2

Commitment - 2

Quantity of work produced - 3

Quality of work produced - 3

Contribution to the group - 4

Design Practice 1 // Your Choice - Expand light and light italic development and final finished font family

As you would expect the light member of the expand font family really is quite similar to the regular, the only difference is the weight of the stoke, it is much thinner than the regular giving it a more delicate frame.

The font family together I am quite happy with, it seems some letters out of context are not quite as legible as I would have hoped, this is probably due to the fact some of the letters only have minimal differences, for example, 'I', 'O' and 'Q'may be hard to distinguish which one is which out of context of the alphabet.

'I'

 'O'

 'Q'

i also think that this font is much more legible at a larger scale, this would not be a font for small body copy, because the expanded stem takes up so much more room that the rest of each letter, from a distance or in a small font size, the shape of the square over powers the remaining elements of the letters so it just looks like a row of squares, but as a heading typeface I think this could work very well in the right situations.

Here is the finished digital version of my Expanded Font family

Expand Light and Expand Light Italic

Expand regular and Expand Regular Italic

Expand Bold and Expand Bold Italic

Design practice 1 // Your Choice - Expand Bold and Bold Italic development

For presentation purposes i have been working on a tiled background which will be the background on all the prints. I wanted to keep it simple and dark, so that the font will stand out and not get confused with the background.

Expand Bold

With this font, it creates a perfect opportunity to ensure that there is a clear difference between each member of the font family, as you can see below, this would clearly pass as the Bold member of the family, with the large amount of block space in each letter, filling them definitely produces bold elements, heavily solid block elements make the font stand out more, which is the intention of a bold font.

As the font revolves around an 'Expanded' right or left Stem of each letter, it means that I can keep the remaining elements of each letter anatomy quite a light weight, by doing this it means i can produce a Bold font without having to increase the weight of the stroke which may make each letter more difficult to read, especially when italicised.

 

Design Practice 1 // Your Choise - Finished Regular Typeface

Here is the final Regular expand font I have produced, this will be the starting point for the font family.

It seems that whenever I design a typeface, i always prefer the first few letter of the alphabet, i think this is because i always start designing a typeface from the start of the alphabet, therefore all decisions I make on the visuals are usually made on A, B, C, D and E. Because of this I usually have difficulties producing certain letters towards the middle and end of the alphabet in the exact same style.

I may be able to avoid this in the future by starting with letters that I usually have most difficulty with, or just start designing on a random letter, instead of always starting with 'A' 'B' and 'C'

Expand Regular

Expand regular Italic

Design Practice 1 // Your Choice - Typeface development

The first job I had once, deciding on the design of the typeface, is to produce the entire alphabet to see which letters I will have problems with, I already knew that I would not be able to maintain a constant block size, as some letters such as 'S', 'Z'. 'T', 'I', 'V', 'Y' and 'X' will have to differ from the rest of the alphabet as this would mean some letters would be larger than others and this is not acceptable.

I played around with colour, weight and effects to see what alternative designs could be produced from the same typeface.

While experimenting, I accidentally live traced a screenshot of the alphabet, which when the threshold was adjusted, it produced a range of interesting 'hand rendered' styled versions of the typeface, but after debating which one i preferred i thought back to the brief and what I actually wanted to produce, and adding effects to the typeface really didn't add anything to the brief and if I am to produce a font family then it would be better to keep the style constant throughout.

I have decided that to make this brief my own, i want to take the typeface i have produced for 'Expand' and produce a Font family for it, which will include 

• light
• light italic
• regular
• regular italic
• bold
• bold italic

 Even though in this typeface I am only going to produce the upper case for the font, as i think in this visual style it would be very tricky to produce the lower case alphabet while still maintaining a clear constant theme of 'Expand'