OUGD503 - Work For Creative Advertising Student - Evaluation

General Comments

Going back to what I said in my first post for this brief, the outcomes for this brief were completely pre-decided by Beth, the Creative Advert student who's project I agreed to do some work on. While this sounds like there wasn't much room for me to work in, I feel like this was a good brief to take on because of how it would test where I am with my Photoshop abilities, and testing how good any on-the-spot ideas I had were, as I'd have to sell them to Beth before I could act on them. I also think that it's good to take on a brief with tight limitations straight from the off after the problems I had with the J2O briefs limitations revealing them slowly.

Successes

There was never a time during the past 2 weeks where Beth had to be pushy with me to see where I was at, my time management and communication was excellent. I was constantly sending her screenshots of the progress I was making with the work, and Beth was quick to reply more often than not, which helped a lot.

The influence I had to make the billboards and posters black and white with colour-dropping rather than them being full colour was important to the overall completion and success of the outcomes. Not only were they more effective than the colour ones individually because of how much clearer the message was, but the continuity between them was greatly improved because of the continuous colour scheme (or lack of one). This made it much easier to design the app because it wasn't necessary to use colour for continuity, which avoided any potential problems I could've had with colour, which tends to be an issue with my work.

Changes

My thoughts on this project initially were that because the outcomes had already been decided, and what they'd look like had already been decided to some extent, that research wasn't going to be overly important in this brief. This was short-sighted of me as I ended up having to do some research into continuity in WWF campaigns after I'd produced the initial designs for the billboards and posters, and change them accordingly, which was much less time-efficient. This was something I rectified for the app, and it made the process noticeably easier.

Given the problems we had initially with the photographs, it would've been better had I been with Beth when she was taking the photos. This would've been logistically difficult though, and making time and arrangements for this would've somewhat defeated the object of this project being one of my smaller responsive briefs. 

Going Forward

Having had to design a website for OUGD504 and re-work it to fit a phone screen was useful experience when designing the app, which goes some way to explain how smoothly that process went. This has taught me the value in re-visiting old work of mine as a way to help me with my current projects. 

Whilst I have stressed that this isn't a collaborative brief as such, it is the first brief I've ever worked on that was important to any grade where someone else's opinion had just as much weight, if not more, than mine did during the development of the outcomes. I wasn't looking forward to this aspect of the brief because of the room for disagreement, but it turned out that Beth and I worked quite well together in terms of communicating and making decisions, which was important given that we are friends outside of university and I wouldn't want work to compromise a personal friendship, especially given the consequences I've seen from people working together in a similar scenario to Beth and I.

Because of this experience I'm now a lot less nervous about the collaborative brief and the PPP Taking Care of Business brief as I feel this positive experience of working with someone else was something I needed as reassurance.