OUGD502 / Overall evaluation

I’ve found this module really beneficial to my own practice as it’s helped me develop my own style and encouraged me to do more things outside of graphics. It’s given me a better understanding of the industry which I initially found quite daunting, whereas now I feel a lot more comfortable approaching studios and emailing them.

The Taking Care of Business task opened up the possibility of starting our own studio, which I wouldn’t know where to start with beforehand. With the knowledge I now have from this task by researching studios and emailing work spaces for prices, it has made the whole idea a lot more real if we were to carry it out. Instead of the standard types of presentation slides we normally present to we decided to approach the presentation with a video. This enabled us to be more creative in a practical sense, which is something we wanted our studio (Aloe) to offer. We all contributed the the video in different ways, working in a group strengthened the concept and style of the studio as together we utilised our best skills and interests into one. The feedback we received for our presentation was really helpful, one thing we didn’t know about was the rate at which to price our work at, in result we set it far too low. Something else that we should have thought of is offering video, filmmaking and stop motion as a service, which we would all be keen on doing. If we were to do it again we would have included this as well as putting in more examples of our own work which Aloe would produce, as well as stating a clearer manifesto and defining our target market / competition.

The Design Strategy presentation allowed me to clearly see areas in which I have improved from in comparison to first year. The main thing which I think has improved my overall outlook to graphic design is practicing and developing other skills outside of graphics. This has helped me spread out my creativity a lot more and explore things I really enjoy, doing these other things has given me motivation towards graphic design as because of these other things going on, I’m not getting bored of graphics or finding it repetitive. It has also inspired me to approach briefs in different and more original ways. An aim I have is to incorporate these other interests in to graphic design and the briefs we get set. The Design Strategy presentation has also encouraged me to think about my future, which I have always found a struggle to pin point exactly what I want to do. Studio brief 1 (creative report) helped me a lot with this. Contacting Nous Vous opened my eyes up to multidisciplinary studios, which is something I’d like to be a part of as I enjoy working across a range of different mediums, and think this is how I work best - especially using methods off the computer.

I have stripped back my personal branding a lot this year because when I look back to my branding from last year it looks too busy and unprofessional, therefore by having it very minimal this year hopefully it will be more timeless and I wont have to change too much in years to come.