Evaluation (A6 - Revert to type)

I came into this unit not knowing what to expect at all. We were going to be given small assignments that we had to complete there and then, with no preparation in advance at all. We would be given a short time at the beginning of each task to ask questions and then that was it. This wasn’t all the unit was about however because we also had to create a presentation about a given typographer. I was given Claude Garamond a famous typographer from the 15th century. I knew right at the beginning of this assignment that this was going to be a tough.

The first timed assignment was to create a newspaper style sheet about Jonathan Gee. I was happy with the designs I had created and the finished product looked fairly professional. I was very relieved to get the first task completed. I chose to leave this one out of my folder however because I think I could have done more planning focusing on type faces and styles because, after all, this is a typography unit.

The second task was to create a paint tube label. I found this task much harder than the first because the label we were creating was a very small size, but all the text had to be readable. I enjoyed the designing work but it felt like I had done far more planning for this task than the previous one. I did have problems creating the design on PageMaker, but as Steve keeps telling me, it’s all experience and I feel I have benefited a lot from these small design tasks. The main thing I will take from this is drawing whatever is in my head without thinking too much and actually seeing how it looks on paper because this is where my best ideas seem to come from and I think I could do pages and pages of different designs so I think this is going to be one of my strengths.

The third task was to create an advertisement for Vodafone. I personally think this was my best design and used every second of the assignment time being the last person to hand it in. I do know however that my design wasn’t perfect. I received some good feedback from John after the deadline about making the heading only going half way across the page. I think I was trying to fill all the white space because my logic was the company are paying for each little square of space so I really should fill it all or they may feel they are wasting money on space that contains no information. I have realised that filling all the space is not necessary so this is something I have learnt from doing this task.

The next task was to deliver the presentation. I was extremely nervous about this because I knew a poor presentation would lead to a fail and maybe even expulsion from the course. I don’t enjoy presentation and practicing in front of my feedback group did not go well at all. I will admit that I wasn’t overly prepared for the practice session because I had created a presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint and decided to create another in PDF format. I will create all my presentations like this from now on because Pagemaker does give you a lot more options when it comes to typography.

The morning of the presentation I got up early and practiced and practiced trying to memorise the introduction and conclusion in order to start and end well. I also created cue cards that helped me a lot when making eye contact with the audience because I wasn’t turning away to remember the slides. I think the presentation went quite well, I talked about everything I wanted to and the changes I had made resulting from the feedback meetings seemed to go down well. I got stuck on some of the questions and realised I needed to read all my notes over again because I was worried about the presentation which put the final timed task to the back of my mind. So when the questions came about typography I couldn’t remember as much as I should have at this stage of the assignment.

So it was time for the final part of this unit, the exam rules timed task. This was the hardest of all the tasks and the one which made me most nervous. We were given two tasks to create a grid for a fact sheet and then create a fact sheet all about typography terms, with images for each. Only for this assignment we weren’t able to access the internet, look at our sketch books and not talk at all. So we had to remember all the information about newspaper design and typography details and give a definition of these with an image to represent them.

I started the task by designing a grid on paper. I decided on 7 columns, with a 4mm gutter between each and a page margin of 18mm. I did this because it would give me a flexible space to work on. The design work as in the previous tasks went quite well. I spent some time sketching designs and decided on a design I wouldn’t normally pick. This I think was a risk that did not pay off in the end. I was not happy with my final product at the end of the assignment. I think the text was too big and the headline didn’t match anything else in the document. I also didn’t leave myself enough time to actually create the sheet on PageMaker. I chose to describe the newspaper details first which was a mistake because I found myself spending more time on the images that accompanied each one rather than concentrating on the simple terms of typography that would be much easier to illustrate.

I am very nervous about my mark for this assignment because I am not sure I have been doing enough typography development in sketches. This was the hardest assignment of the year so far and I have learnt a lot about how I work under pressure. I have enjoyed creating ideas under these conditions and if I develop ideas at the same rate as in these tasks I will have much more ideas for future assignments, which can only be a positive thing.