OUGD602 - Art Fund Collaboration - Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation

This brief was done in collaboration with Megan Dobbyn from BA Illustration at Leeds Arts University and was produced over a few months running alongside other projects we were doing. Meg is a friend so we already knew each other which made collaborating easier and I knew I could trust her. We worked well as a team with both of us having similar work ethics and we could rely on one another to work independently. We regularly met up with at least one timetabled meeting a week and informal chats in-between.

The subject matter of the campaign which related to museums, galleries and historic houses was what drew me to the collaboration as I have an interest in Arts and Heritage.

Initially I found it difficult coming up with ideas for the project as I had to consider ways in which both our work would come together to create something effective. This made me have to approach ideas in a way that I wouldn't necessarily within my own work, for example purely Graphic Design ideas had to be adapted or disregarded.

Although I had lots of ideas at the beginning of the project sometimes, they did not always make sense to Meg and I felt I wasn't doing my ideas justice. I found it especially useful to develop initial ideas into mock ups so that she could visually see how things would look and how her work would fit within the ideas, with this approach helping me overcome this problem.

When choosing a concept to go with we both had favourites. I was conscious I didn't want to just be in charge of layout and type and that I wanted to produce a physical element within the design. Combining the two ideas that we liked allowed both of our interests to come together so that we would both get something out of the project.

Although the deliverables were digital, we managed to bring a physical element into the production of the designs.  In terms of designing within the project I particularly enjoyed making the papercut designs for the backgrounds. The use of one material layered up created an interesting 3D effect which I hadn't worked with before and one which we managed to capture within the images. 

At the start of the project Meg had said that she had wanted to develop her animating skills, so we directed the outcomes towards this. We severely underestimated how difficult, what seemed to be such a simple concept, would be to animate.

I organised for a photography student to take pictures of the papercut designs, however they had to cancel on the day that we were due to take the photographs because of other projects. This meant I had to take photographs of all designs myself. I found it difficult to capture the colours of the papers used within the designs even with studio lighting, which wasn't ideal. If we had the photographer potentially, we would have been able to get the right colour quality within camera rather than having to do so much post editing in Photoshop.

Potentially the project went on for longer than we both expected. Meg set a deadline at the end of the project so that we could intensively work on it to get it finished. I found this quite difficult as there was still quite a lot still to do and I didn't want to rush the final thing, however it was a good thing because it forced us to get the project done and we were both happy with the outcomes. It also highlighted the fact that not everything needs to be perfect and that little details are often overlooked by people who are looking at a design for the first time.

Although I was happy with the final outcomes and I thought we produced some strong work I found that I don't really have an interest in creating purely digital outcomes / campaigns but did enjoy the craft element of the paper design backgrounds