A6 - Revert to Type Evaluation

Another assignment completed and handed in, an assignment that I thoroughly enjoyed as it wasn’t like any I’ve done before. The topic of typography mixed with the ‘as and when’ issue of timed tasks certainly kept me on my toes. Preparing myself for the timed tasks really paid off, having a few hours messing about with Adobe InDesign really familiarised me with the menus and therefore saved me time when building my designs.

When I received this assignment, I must admit I was slightly daunted by the fact that one of the main tasks was a presentation on a chosen typographer. My chosen typographer was Stanley Morison, a 20th century typography consultant who designed Times New Roman. Researching into Stanley and his work was really interesting, the amount of information that I found regarding his work was unbelievable. It made the task of putting information onto presentation slides less painful.

Presentations aren’t something that I like doing – at all – and this really shows when I present, I get all breathless or I ramble so fast through my presentation that I end up finishing before the time limit. To try and overcome this, I constantly practised and practised my presentation to myself and then to family members. Some of the hard work paid off as I wasn’t as breathless as I usually get, but more work could have be done to stop myself from speeding through the presentation.

The rest of the assignment consisted of a handout to accompany the presentation and a series of timed tasks. The timed tasks were really scary to begin with, the thought of working under such strict conditions made me anxious. Getting the first one out of the way helped to ease some of that anxiety and after a couple, I fell into a comfort zone with them.

Hokai (Paint Tube)
The first of the timed tasks and also the one I dropped from my submission. Of all the timed tasks, this one provided me with the biggest challenge. The amount of content you had to fit into such a little space meant that there were only so many ways I could lay the content out. This task was dropped due to a small mistake I had made on the design.

‘Vodafone’ (Newspaper Advertisement)
Vodafone provided me with a challenge from the start, deciding what column structure to go for proved difficult. In the end, I decided to go for a long but thin advertisement and I was really pleased when the design I wanted to achieve fit in the dimensions of the column structure.

‘Jonathan Gee’ (Newspaper Article)
This was by far the one I enjoyed the most, even though I spent most of my time trying to get my columns to align at the bottom, it gave me a great sense of achievement when I finally succeeded. I produced a design that I was really pleased with as it didn’t stray away from my original design.

‘Grid’ (All that Jazz)
Grid was harder that it initially sounded. Designing a newspaper layout when I didn’t have any idea how long the content was going to be made me wary and forced me into playing a safe bet. Due to the previous newspaper task, I felt really comfortable having to do another newspaper layout. Everything was still fresh in my head from the week before and therefore made things a lot easier.

Story (Snake Davies)
The final task of the lot and the one I completed in the quickest time. As already mentioned, I was comfortable with newspaper layouts and due to my mind-numbing experience of aligning columns the previous week; I was in the knowledge of ways to solve the problem.

The ‘design studio’ experience has been a major learning curve, adhering to strict deadlines in a studio atmosphere has given me a feel of what things could be like in the employment world and it provided me with a sense of reality. The fact that I have managed to hand all my timed tasks in at least 25 minutes before the deadline has made me aware of how efficient I can be with my time planning. In future, I could use the spare time I have left to check over my design more and ensure everything is how it should be.

If I was to do this assignment, I think the only major thing I would change is how I presented my presentation. Although it went better than last time, I can still vastly improve the way I present. Of the silly things noted in my blue presentation, I think I managed to cut a good portion of them out. To stop myself from fiddling with my pockets I wore trousers that didn’t have pockets and my handout was left on the table so I wasn’t playing with that all the time.

Goals
From now on, whenever I do a piece of print work, I should take full advantage of being able to use a more diverse font – rather than the box standard web safe ones, e.g. Verdana and Arial. This seemed to be a habit of mine and something I want to break out of. When I search for inspirational pieces of typography, I can now use the definitions I have learnt to annotate my work. Doing this and practising the terms will keep them fresh in my mind and therefore will embed them in my head.

Continue to use the method of time planning that was produced during the timed tasks, due to the short space of time I had to do tasks, I felt that my time planning had to be spot on. Making the duration of tasks as strict as possible will keep me in the pressured design studio experience and will therefore get me used to the environment.

So for next time:

• Use typography definitions more so they stick in my head. Keep revising them.
• Keep the time planning as strict as possible. Plan a day at a time rather than a full week as this seemed to be more effective.
• Use my time to its full potential. Check everything over multiple times before handing something in. It’s too late to change mistakes when the work is submitted!

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Thanks for reading,
Sue