End of module Self-Evaluation

What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

• Illustrator skills has helped me to vector my art work which saves a lot of time when rearranging layouts and producing typefaces.
• Book making has helped me on 2 of the briefs in this module, its given me the basic understanding of book binding and hot dog folding.
• Grid and layout has helped me produce layouts in in design and has helped me understand the structure of news papers and magazines better

What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

• Using photography to capture a range of primary research has helped me to jump start my idea process. This is also given me a starting point to work from or draw from.

What strengths can you identify in your work and how have you/will you capitalize on these?

• The use of type, grid and layout i have found especially useful for this project as i have made two hot dog book folds. 
• Photography it has helped me to capture a lot of research and given me a starting point to work from.
• Illustrator, being able to take something from my sketchbook and accurate draw it up to the right scales and getting it printed in a short space of time.

What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you adress these more fully?

• I realised i havent drawn properly in a long time and its been very hard to get back into it, i will practise my drawing more before i go onto illustrator.
• I play around with my layouts in illustrator and dont record them all.

Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

• Draw more often before going onto software, i would expect my drawing skills to slowly return to me once again.
• Do more development instead of just rushing things and getting it done.
• Leave enough time to allow yourself to screen print and save money.
• Make decisions more quickly this will allow me to get things done and just generally work more efficiently, time is money. 
• Experiment with a few more stocks.

Attendance - 5

Punctuality - 5

Motivation - 3

Commitment - 4

Quantity of work - 3

Quality of work - 4

Contribution to group - 5

Colour Theory

These are some interesting and important notes i found in a colour theory book i took out in the library it goes into a lot of detail about subtractive and additive colour. There are also a few paragraphs on what some colours represent emotionally. Looking through this book has helped me to understand how colour works and how it can be mixed a bit better.

What is a line

I decided to make a small photo journal for my journey which would hold some of the most memorable places and photos i took while out in Amsterdam, This booklet of photos will represent a connected series of things i did and places i visited while in amsterdam. I decided to keep the design simple by purely leaving the image and the name of where it was, i didn't want to ruin it by adding too much text which isn't needed. Seeing as i was the Audience for this brief i didnt need to add much more as i personally know what experiences goes which each photos. If i were to create this booklet for another Audience it would of looked much different.

I had the idea of producing a simular booklet about some of the best places to go in amsterdam and where these places were how to get there and so on, but then realised cheap tacky tourist guides do this already and much cheaper...

Front cover

Page 1 and 2

Back poster

On the back poster i was torn between a layout of my own typeface or just a massive collage of all the best photos i took while in amsterdam, if i had more time i would experiment with layering photos on the back.

Back Page

Final layout

Dont like the colours and i dont like the typeface when used like that.

I decided against using this one as I already had the alphabet on the back and it just looked really confusing.

These two are my back page layouts i decided to go for the black and white approach as it fitted in with the rest of my colour scheme. I decided to go with the one which had a white background so i could use off white stock instead of printing gray over a white paper and making a different stock.

This is the final layout i decided on there are a lot of improvements i could of done to this booklet but in the amount of time i set myself this was my best possible outcome. I would of liked to screen print this booklet, i initially designed it to be screen printed but then ran out of time and made a few corrections to it to get it ready for digital print.

Problems i encountered, the typeface i designed worked alright as a sentince but its readability kind of went out the window as soon as i made it too small and tried to produce a paragraph with it, i tried to solve this by adding a second known typeface but because my typeface was so heavily weighted it didnt seem to balance well on the pages together, this was another reason why i didnt add much information on my pages

What is a Line Alphabet

I decided to create a Typeface for this project as a it would be all connected to the trip i took and that i would gain inspiration from the design i saw out there. The typeface is loosely based on the title "What is a line" but more focused and the sentence i choose which stated "A connected series of events, actions or developments", by focusing on this sentence it gave me a bit more freedom to work with.

Here are some of the development stages in creating my typeface:

These were some critical developments for some of the letters i found the most difficulty with, H, E, F gave me the most problems getting them to fit within the sequence mainly because the H's crossbar didnt fit the rules. E and F needed a bit of work to make them fit the series better as well. 

Some early experimentation of putting photographs in letters to see if it would work.

The Typeface i made left me in a dilema as i was designing with the purpose to have very thick letters which allowed me to overlay photographs inside the typeface, i then used a thin line to try and balance out my letters a bit better.

This is a image of the Red light district overlaid with my typeface, I decided to use an image of the red light district as this is usually what people regconise Amsterdam for the most.

This Poster came out well, but the image isnt simple enough so you can properly make out what the image inside the text is. To make this work better i should of used a more simple image. 

These are some of my black and white alternatives i want to potentially use for a screen print process, with the black and white the image and the light kind of blurs the "N, M, O, P" line of the type but this can easily be fixed by making the image slightly darker.

Final posters i printed, i decided to use gloss as stock which paid off in the end as the photographs came out very well.

What is a line

While out in Amsterdam these are some of the photos i took which i wanted to use in my what is a line project, i shot in RAW setting which allowed me a lot of flexibility on photoshop afterwards, this did make me end up with enormous file sizes in future i would only shoot in RAW if i know exactly what kind of photographs i wanted.

These are some of the photos i edited in Black and White, they just seemed to work better with the shadowing then they would in colour.

The photos i took in Amsterdam relate to my project in the sense that while out there i had planned a series of events and places to go see and attend and i captured this with photography.

These are just a few more of the over 400 photos i took while out in amsterdam.