OUIL406 - Evaluation

How successful do you feel the collaboration worked? Why

I don't think the collaboration worked at all, apart from sharing ideas at the start because not all members of the group put in the sam amount of effort and the majority of the research work ended up being done by me. Not everyone was in the studio at the same time so it was quite hard to get everyone together to discuss ideas and decide on a final solution. Because the group was hardly together I felt like I had to do all the work so that we didn't end up with nothing.

What specific visual skills did you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? How did you use them? How did this benefit the project?
I think I'm quite good with creating background textures, and also creating good looking type. This helped us to create the stickers and make them as bold and simple as possible. I think the way I draw things lends itself quite nicely to looking bold and easy to understand and recognise from a distance.

What specific non-visual skills did you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? How did you use them? How did this benefit the project?
I think that I definitely helped the group to organise things and made sure it got done, because a few of our group members were quite passive and didn't come into the studio very much, if I hadn't taken charge and motivated the group and made decisions for everyone, including doing all the work, then nothing would have got done.

What were your specific roles in the collaboration in relation to your chosen brief? How well do you feel you fulfilled them?
I think that even though we were meant to share all the roles and do equal amounts of work I feel like I took part in all roles. I did all the development work in relation to research and developing visual ideas for the stickers, I also made the template for the final sticker designs for people to place their own work into. I feel like I organised the group through the group chat on facebook and made sure that everyone did the work they were meant to do.

What were your individual responsibilities in relation to your brief? How well do you feel you fulfilled them?
As I said in the above question, we were meant to spread the responsibilities equally but this didn't happen. I feel like the rest of the group didn't have any responsibilities apart from making their own version of the design to go in the sticker.

How do you think you benefitted from collaborating with others?
I don't think I benefitted at all from it, apart from realising that you can't rely on other people to work hard and do what they are supposed to do. the only positive side of working collaboratively is the combination of everyones ideas. I think I would probably refuse to do another collaboration brief.

What would you do differently when collaborating next time?
I would say no, I'm not working with other people. Then if I was threatened with death, which would be the only way I would work collaboratively again, I would probably be more threatening towards other members of the group to make them do research and actual work rather than leave all to me to do. I would refuse to all of the work so that others were forced to actually do something.

OUIL406 - Final Sticker

My final designs:

I really like how my final designs turned out, I think that the ones that worked best were the ones where I used different reference when I was drawing the items of clothing, I think these ones are the easiest to recognise and therefore fulfill the brief best. If I were to do these again I think I may have made the lines a bit thicker so they stood out a bit more after I had scanned them in. I think the contrast between the blue background and the darkness of the black quink works well and helps draw attention to the designs.

The rest of our groups' designs:

I really like the perspective in this design, how it is a POV angle, I think it makes it much more recognisable.

I also really like how a lot of these designs go off the edge of the triangle and break out of the intended format for each design.

My favourite thing about these designs is the thick black outlines, especially round the edge, I think it really helps bring the image together and makes it striking and helps it to stand out.

OUIL406 - Studio Brief 1 - Final Sticker Testing

After we had decided on a font that was both bold and easy to read and also looked 'hipster' enough, like the posters I had researched, I drew up a couple of possible layouts for the text and shape where the image would be placed. I think that spacing the text evenly underneath the triangle follows the look we were trying to achieve. 

When I was experimenting with different ideas for the shit shoes sticker, I thought that it would be more effective in putting the idea of shit shoes across more effectively if I made the design as minimal as possible and got rid of the leg drawing and focussed on just the shoes. I tried drawing the legs and shoes in different perspectives and from different viewpoints in order to see which view was most effective.

I found that once I started looking at real life references to help me draw, my ideas became much more easy to recognise and guess what they were supposed to depict straight away.

Here I was trying different textures to see how I could make the image stand out against the blue background of the triangle. The black shirt on the right made me decide I wanted to use quink because it was dark enough to stand out but also had different tones in it to give it texture.

On the final designs I accented parts with a white pen to create a contrast and simple detail to make the designs more interesting but minimal at the same time.

OUIL406 - The Gif

We had a few ideas for a gif, our first idea involved taking photos of the our stickers in various places and placing them so that only the image changed and the sticker itself stayed in the same place, however we decided it might be more interesting and funny if we tried to show real life examples of the clothes we said were inappropriate. We initially wanted to use men as models in the photos, showing the clothes that they were wearing and then flashing to their faces, but some members of the group thought it might be too much effort, so we decided to do it ourselves. We created a mini storyline, with the gif following us along as it shows the different types of clothing.

Although the gif worked out okay I think it would have turned out better if it was much more simple, for example just flashing from the clothes to someones expression. If we were to do it again I think we would have changed our idea to match the simplistic style of the stickers.

Over all I didn't really enjoy this project, I think the idea itself was good but working in a group really wasn't very fun or productive. Although it was good to get a wide range of ideas together there was too much conflict and it was very hard to decide on a final idea that everyone liked. I feel like I did about 90% of the work, I would say that I did ALL of the preparation work which I wasn't happy about, but I wanted to get it done so that we didn't end up with no work. It was hard to get everyone together at the same time to discuss ideas and to get people to actually do any work.

3/10 would not recommend group projects.