1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
The first thing I have learned is how to manage my time a lot better, enabling me to produce a lot more work in a quicker amount of time. I have also learned how to be a lot quicker with my decision-makings, enabling me to become more inventive with the ideas and creativeness within my work. I feel I worked a lot better this time round collaboratively, being able to spread the work loads equally, using both are strengths to the maximum resulting in a much higher quantity and quality of work being produced, exploring different ideas and concepts.
Advertising and branding is something I really wanted to try and even though it was a massive challenge thinking of unique and eye catching ideas, I felt that my self Jess came up with a really simple and effective concept, that was really eye catching and effective. In result to this, this is an area I really would like to challenge again, getting my self to think out of the box for unique and exciting ideas.
2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?
With this competition brief having such a direct target audience, are first initial response was to produce a questionnaire and see the reasons why men between the ages 0f fifteen to thirty actually don’t buy tissues and why, and if they do purchase tissues what are reasoning’s for this. After we had our questionnaires filled out, and carefully went through them, we found that the main reasons males do not buy tissues is because of the size, hence our campaign ‘size matters’. We both felt this was a perfect campaign as not only is it an innuendo for the obvious thing that is on most males minds, but size is the main issue when it comes to men buying tissues.
Then we went on to think about how can we package these tissues to increase sales of men’s tissues, so we researched in to existing Kleenex and normal tissue packaging, as well as pocket size packaging. This is when it occurred to us, another reason that cropped up from our questionnaires was that men would be ashamed of carrying a packet of tissues around with them, so they just take a bunch of tissues and have them screwed up in the trouser pockets, so we thought what perfect way to disguise the fact that they are tissues, and package them the same size and in the same material packaging as what most guys carry all the time, condoms, but with a bit of a twist.
We then researched in to different styles of advertising, as we wanted ours to be unique and also eye catching.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalize on these?
I feel that my strengths I can identify within my work are now the ability to grasp the concept of a brief and develop my ideas quickly. Throughout all the briefs, Illustrator has been the software I am most confident with, but even so I have always said that there is much more I need to learn, and throughout this YCN brief I have learnt so many more applications and tools within illustrator. Concept design and advertising is something I have always wanted to have a go at, and now I think I can think of concepts a lot quicker to such a higher standard, and this has now made me think of a potential career path. I feel now I can also work collaboratively much better than previous, being able to capitalize both out strengths to the maximum.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?
The weaknesses I can still see are in my development. I still have the habit of just jumping straight on to a computer and start designing, but not showing my idea generations, making it hard for me to put pen to paper and draw. I need to start drawing thumbnail sketches showing the processes I have gone through, not just for the assessment, but also for me as a designer to look back on and understand how I got to my final products and critically analyze my work. In this brief luckily my creative partner drew out some ideas we initially discussed and then I went on to the computer and developed the ideas further.
Blogging is another weakness of mine. Throughout my portfolio of work for this brief it is clear the amount of research my creative partner and I collated, but I am still avoiding posting information and my work on to my blog. I really need to start focusing more on my blog, even if it is not for assessment reasons, I need to start posting my own work up there for other people to see.
5. Identify four things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
1. Even though my time management skills have improved a vast amount since the beginning of the course, I still feel that it is something that can be improved on still. I can already see the benefits of my time management skills getting better, with my work content increasing and to a much higher level, so improving more will only benefit me greater.
2. BLOG….BLOG….BLOG!! I need to focus more on this in the future, it is a MUST, not only for assessment reasons, but will also allow for personal reflection as well as releasing my work for the world to see.
3. An advert for our new ‘size matters’ tissues was something I really wanted to do, but due to the vast amount of other promo material and packaging design etc, we went through, unfortunately we did not have the time to approach this, so this is something I considering to approach in a future assignment.
4. I need to stop over complicating my ideas and worrying about if it is good enough, because of this I do waste sometime and also take the risk of having a really effective simple idea, and then turning it into a total disaster.
6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas?
(Please indicate using the number corresponding to the words below)
5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance 5
Punctuality 5
Motivation 4
Commitment 4
Quantity of work produced 4
Quality of work produced 4
