Evaluation

This brief was a tricky one for me. I feel a lack of good planning early on stopped me from really getting to grips with it until quite late into it. This caused much unnecessary stress. Long briefs are a mixed blessing and at the start I felt I had a a good concept (since 1991) and lot of time to experiment, but a lot of what I was doing didnt really help me find a resolution. As I have explained in earlier posts, I headed in a direction with a vague idea of using computer console graphics with the hope that everything I was doing would all fall into place. This didnt happen, the idea wasn't working and I had to make a tough decision to not use the majority of graphics I had created and start again. Ultimately I am pleased with the final design decisions I made and the direction of the final pieces but I know that I could have had much more time to resolve these if I hadn't wasted time perfecting graphics that would ultimately be of no use.

My main aim of this brief was to have a finished motion graphics piece that I can use in my portfolio, I feel its not quite perfected yet but I like the concept and its almost there, this is not a problem because I will continue to work on it this week but its a shame its not quite finished to the standard I would like for hand in. The other ranges were spin-offs from this motion piece and are fairly successful I feel. I am pleased with the t-shirt designs as they have just the 'feel' I wanted; retro without being a pastiche and using the logo in a clever way. The colours are much more subdued than ministry usually use in order to try and push the brand upmarket a little and appeal to slightly older customers that grew up with the brand (I would wear them, unlike ministry's current range on their website). The USB idea was quite a late addition; after the final crit so I didn't have time to develop it further, but I liked the concept even if its more product design than graphic design.

On a more personal note, I try to pick briefs that will help me improve my skills in one area or another and this one was no exception. After Effects is a piece of software that I am really into now, I find the possibilities it offers inspires me in the way photoshop did when I first used it years ago. I feel I am developing a specialism in using this now. Illustrator is another piece of software I am steadily improving my skills using. This has become such a vital part of my design work I hardly ever use photoshop now. I cant actually draw very well but I can photograph (or source an image) and vector it by careful tracing to get good results that can easily be adapted to a range of products as I have shown in this brief. This is the first time I have really pushed how I could combine both of the software together into a final piece. Its a good way of working because of the way After Effects can handle Illustrator files so this was very successful and I learnt a lot.