Throughout the summer break, one of my biggest aims was to crack time management, I decided this would be a great opportunity as I only had one brief to focus on rather than two or three. At the beginning of summer I decided to create a timeline format that would help me plan my time and provided I stuck to this where possible, I would have plenty of time to make the brief successful. I was really pleased with the way I went about this and I managed to keep up to date with most tasks I had set out on the timeline, I also planned in free time and holiday's etc around my work and doing it this way allowed me to enjoy my summer.
I hope I can continue to use this method as it appears to help me manage my time better than in first year, I continued to update my timeline from time to time throughout the summer which allowed me to re-evaluate what time I had left, and what tasks still needed to be completed.
I have also further developed my layout skills that we first looked at in a session with Lorenzo last year, I really enjoyed these sessions at the time and as a result of my research I decided to produce a newspaper design which allowed me to expand on these skills, and I feel I have improved massively with layout, and use of space, margins and gutters etc.
I previously did some research into a company called 'Newspaper club', I know a few people who have used these before and I have had really positive feedback about their service, so decided to get the best quality print I would use this company. It was really beneficial to have to work to set requirements that they layout for print, for example the exact size of margins, and transparency issues with print, as well as image quality and dark spaces. Working with a business outside of college allowed me to be professional and make sure everything was completed on time for the print session. I was emailing one of the colleagues of 'Newspaper Club' about my print and I gained really positive feedback and advice, which was beneficial to my designs.
I tried to maintain a strong colour theme throughout remembering to use only CMYK colour palettes as this was required for print, I used the olympic colours, and when featuring GB Athletes I used GB colours, blue and red, although this is subtle throughout it gives the paper a really nice finish. I kept colour to a minimum as this gave a more overall professional finish and kept consistency throughout my designs with Type, Font, Sizings, Margins, Colours and format. This again gave a more overall professional feel to the design, and now in print format I think this works really well.
My use of layout has improved massively and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this aspect of Graphic design, using layout, with exact proportions and measurements, as I am quite a 'maths-minded' person I think I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. I used a 40 page plan for my newspaper, as other newspaper in production like 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mirror' etc, all base themselves on a 40-page layout. This worked really well, as I didn't want my paper to be over-crowded and have 'typical' newspaper qualities / appearances, having my text and images more spaced out allowed me to experiment with design and layout more which I really enjoyed working with.
A key weakness throughout my design was the image quality, if I had planned my tasks slightly better it would have been nice to email olympic photographers for better quality images of the games, rather than low resolutions images taken from the internet, however I don't feel this has ruined my finished design, I do feel that better quality images would have given an even more professional feel.
With this brief many factors that I felt were weak about myself last year have vastly improved, I have already talked about time management and how I have managed to improve this already. Throughout this brief I have also been able to increase my blogging skills, remembering to continuously blog throughout a project and not leave most of it until the end, I was always better than most people at blogging however I feel this has improved further over the summer, and this is a skill I hope to keep up with. I have also evaluated where I am at and my current progress continuously rather than leaving this until this end, by working this way I have managed to stay more focused on the set brief and not stray too far away from the requirements.
If I had more time to do things differently I would certainly gain better quality images, and I would also include more information about the history of design, as I feel I got carried away with the history of London 2012 and forgot to focus on the olympic games as a sport instead. I would also liked to have experimented with foiling however, having no experience of this and no access to a machine I felt this task was too risky to try in the limited time I had left over at the end. Despite this, I still wish to experiment with foiling as I go on into second year of the course.
Overall I am really pleased with the quality of my outcome, the way I have managed my time over the summer break with respects to getting work done and completed tasks my set deadlines, and finally the research I undertook and my dedication to one topic.
