evaluation

What have I done?
I have worked on five briefs through this module, three short and two long. These briefs were;
• Long brief – Hercules, produce a series of illustrations. This brief expanded vastly as my illustration style and quality advanced. I designed layouts and books before finally resolving the presentation of the illustrations in a poster format.
• Short brief – lazy oaf, a competition brief to produce a t-shirt design, it included colour restrictions for print and stock. I spent some time over two weeks on this brief, I drew hippos, had fun with it.
• Short brief – don’t panic, a second competition brief, design a poster, I did this as a set of four one day briefs. I produced a series of A2 poster sized illustrations. This brief gave me a break from the main brief at the time (Hercules) and allowed me to produce work for a different audience with a more mature/trendy style.
• Short brief – Paul’s 50th invite, very short brief, produce a cheesy picture, resolved within a week over Easter.
• Long brief – mythology, this brief was the culmination of my design context research and design practice work. I produced spreads with content, activities and pop-up cards. In this brief I intended to produce work for five different myths from different geographical and historic societies, about halfway food the project I reduced the myths to four to better handle the workload in the time I had.

Design context
My design context was mythology in primary school education. My research involved a number of trips to exhibitions around the UK, interviewing teachers as well as a work placement over Easter. I also collected a large number of children’s illustrated books and websites.
The product I produced was a small book, from lulu self publishing, the book was produced to be a simple and clear means from which a someone could quickly understand where my fmp work has come from, it uses a simple ‘mr men’ style layout, to both avoid any mistakes at lulu and because type and layout isn’t really my thing and I didn’t want something so boring and menial eating into my drawing time.

Design practice
My practice is illustration primarily. I also have fairly good 3-d design skills with regard to paper craft and engineering. I have worked with character and narrative techniques with consideration to page layouts, palette and type content.
I have developed my illustration skills and gave my self a “style” to use through the final major project, this style was based on paper craft and utilised a large collection of hand made and interesting papers that I have gathered. The style was defined for use in context to the briefs I worked on and can be applied to illustration for various subjects and age groups.

Project management and evaluation
The majority of my project management was conducted through daily and weekly plans wrote on action plan sheets and as lists in my sketch and layout pads, these allowed me to successfully handle my workload over the course of the project. I posted evaluations to my blog alongside the progression of my work.