This project has been quite a revelation for me. By the end of the collaboratve brief and image, I felt I'd exhausted myself as a very hand crafted illustrator. Not only that, but I'd realised my need to rigidly stick to that formula was actually hindering my progress as a designer. I would become too precious about my illustrations and not be willing to mess around with what I was doing.
With this bit of context in mind, I decided that I wanted to look at type and layout a little bit. The choice of book covers as my subject was perfect, it allowed me to consolidate my need for typography with my understanding of image and colour that I'd already built up. In terms of design development, I feel that I've tried a lot more out in terms the actual image that could go on the cover, as well as a whole host of different layouts. I found it all very liberating and freeing. What's brilliant, to me, I could have still explored many different things, and though I limited myself stylistically, I know now where I truly have room to grow.I think I realised after the show and tell crit, that my knowledge of typography is limited, but I got advice from several peers who did the type module and managed to vastly improve the quality of the type. I don't know why I enjoyed being so isolated before, but I feel like I've engaged with the peers around me, more so than ever before, and I truly tried to embrace the criticisms my work got, and worked positively from them. Sometimes it didn't work, like the feedback about more experimental layout (which came to not much) but the feedback on my type was really helpful. I guess I didn't really consider my audience, 12 pt would be insulting to a reader of classic literature, where 10 pt is still highly legible and seems a lot less kiddish.
As is usual, in terms of the research and context, I think I explored what I needed to reasonably well, looking at how Penguin functioned past and present in terms of their cover design, but also looking at what makes cover design great in general. I did some early primary research looking at people who don't read a lot of books, but I don't think this was useful on reflection, I got my audience wrong... they're more likely to be seasoned readers and collectors in general. Once I realised this, I went about trying to package them in a desirable fashion and found strength in my work drawing from that. And in terms of what could be done to improve: it really is the smaller, finer details that I have issue with, sometimes things aren't aligned quite right, colour modes aren't double checked etc. and this reduces what could be great to merely good, and it's something I must start getting properly right if I ever want to be at a professional standard.
The usual 'could of managed my time better' probably doesn't apply as much as it used to, I really tried to focus my efforts, but I think I did take a while to start actually generating visuals, which was a little bit of a hinderence if I'm honest. Also, I have a tendency to zone out and not do much of anything for a few hours every so often, and it seems quite obvious, but I've got to find coping strategies to deal with it, because it's time I could have devoted to the areas such as digital and physical advertising, that were a little neglected.
In conclusion, I'm really glad I threw out my own little rulebook and just tried to blitz out so many variations, it really helped, but theres still room to put out an even greater qauntity of them so I have that to improve on as well as a little bit of tweaking in terms of time management strategy. Also, I have to cut out the silly little mistakes.
